Robert Inhuman interview with Ithaca Undergound zine, 16 March 2009

 

Ithaca Underground: How have things been since we last saw you back in August?

 

Robert Inhuman: All over the place, for me at least, but for the most part my life has been really great. This is not something I say lightly because I have many vivid memories of times that life hasn’t felt nearly as fulfilling or stable. In comparison to those times I’ve been extremely fortunate the past few months.

IU: The last tour you went for 3 months straight. Was it worth it? How was the experience?

 

I’ve actually been touring the past couple months as well, through the midwest, south, and west coast. As far as the summer 2008 tour, it was actually May through August; I think it ended up at around 63 gigs in the end. This was an extremely turbulent experience, but it was ultimately worth the strain because it essentially gave way to most of what is the “Resisting The Viral Self” album, minus a few pieces prior to that summer that me and Swill did when I still lived in Cincinnati at the end of 2007.

 

The negative effects of the last longer tour were primarily related to my realizations about the nature of being a full-time nomadic artist, and how it can turn into something you didn’t initially hope for. This is part of a piece included in the extensive zine that supplements our new album…

 

“Realicide is intended to be generally against indulging in escapism. Ironically, being in a different city every day can quickly escalate from sampling the social climate of various regions to being just another way of running from reality and what it means to commit to a collective effort; to just know what it means to work through differences within a group of people day by day. This escape, like most escapist outlets, can be very addictive. It is hard to not be on tour after you've been out for months, sustaining yourself financially and riding the high of new people and experiences constantly. But there is something crucial about really KNOWING a place; not just catching a blurry glimpse. Also of course the issue of only being able to meet people directly related to the show we're in town for in some way. I have a feeling that there are a lot of really awesome, high caliber people in these cities that probably wouldn't come out to a Realicide show, you know? That's important to remember when your opinion of a place depends on how your band is received. The world is fortunately a lot bigger than any subcultural niche...”

IU: Where, geographically, are you located these days? (How do you like it; what drew you to settling there?)

 

This month I live at a house called Women, in Los Angeles, after I got back from tour and then a visit to New Orleans. After tour begins in a couple weeks I will be homeless until further notice. Swill has adopted this predicament with me as well, until options inevitably unfold throughout the coming months. LA is very strange to me, because I grew up in the midwest. Life is somewhat centered around fun out here, and I am not an especially fun-loving kind of person, not compared to many of my friends at least. It does not have the very sincere element of urgency and desperate anxiety within the scenes descending from punk, very unlike most other regions I’ve become familiar with. It is why I usually still feel like a visitor, but also I am unable to actually settle anywhere because I do not have a normal job, so I have to be on tour just as a means of perpetuating my experiment with alternative means of employment. It will be a 3 year mark in this experiment next month!

IU: Let's talk about the new album. Are the tracks completely new or will fans recognize some of them from some of your previous live recordings? (If some are from previous recordings, were any re-worked?)

 

We don’t want fans – we want friends.

 

The material is entirely studio mixes, created from around November 2007 until earlier this year. A couple tracks might’ve been leaked to compilations, but nothing in particular comes to mind offhand. People might recognize a few tracks, or especially just certain elements in them like words or sample loops, from our shows the past year. But this album is material post-Mavis Concave, after he stepped out of the mix at the end of summer last year. The studio album we recorded for his music was never mixed and released, and is the collection of songs most commonly heard on any live or rougher releases the past several years. There are certain tracks that are adapted versions of songs from Mavis’ body of work, or contain references to it, but he was not involved in the production of the album.

 

Even songs that may have been heard live or in rougher versions before, will sound very different because in this case everything is mixed carefully and not nearly as overblown or incoherent as any of our live shows; it’s just a different way to hear the songs altogether.

IU: Where did you record and who did you record with? How did recording go?

 

The primary thing that is recorded, with microphones and whatnot, is just me and Swill’s voices. The music is created in a variety of ways by people who live in many parts of the US. First vocal recording sessions were done in Cincinnati, when we lived together in a house by the river. I engineered the whole thing through Mavis’ home studio – his mic setup into the Firepod into Cubase on a PC. I have no training in audio engineering, but what we’re doing is not incredibly complicated, so I learned the basic controls from Mavis and recorded myself and Swill. Then through that winter and spring of 2008 I collected more beat tracks and samples from everyone who agreed to be involved, along with some of my own tracks. The next intensive record sessions happened immediately after the long tour, in Cincinnati again at the house I grew up in actually, throughout September. Anything that has happened for “Resisting” since then has basically been editing (which is kind of a huge stage in the production for this) and slight alterations of the mixing, and then Mavis ended up mastering it all.

 

Recording our voices is really weird, because we’ve gone many years in favor of just playing live and feeling the true anxiety of being among people in strange places, and the vocal tone that carries into that. We want to avoid sounding uninspired or bored on our studio mixes, to imply (if even just an implication) that the energy is inherent in the music, not just when we have the adrenaline of live performances. I can only speak for myself, but I usually focus on the goal of having many people hear the recordings, like thousands of people. When I realize that that is the music’s destination I am able to feel something similar to the urgency of a live performance, while still in a controlled studio setting where I can be careful to shape each line exactly how I think it should be delivered, which I take a lot of time with and am gradually getting a better handle on. I think Swill has very different strengths than me as a lyricist and vocalist. Recording him goes really smoothly. He’s a hardcore machine, and his double-ups always line up perfect, whereas mine as almost always sloppy no matter what I try.

 
IU: Where did the title "Resisting The Viral Self" come from?

 

This is another excerpt from the zine that accompanies our album…

 

“I decided upon the title ‘Resisting The Viral Self’ because it conveys a consistent theme in the material in some ways, especially the tracks on the LP which are meant to be the primary focus. The theme is that of a human nature to destroy - be it in our actions and also what we fail to take action towards. (Like the old idea that not raising your voice or taking action in the face of war is an act of violence in and of itself.) This situation is found continuously in the social world, but also very importantly acknowledged within ourselves and our own private ethical struggles that sort of act as atoms making up a ‘society’. I guess the idea here boils down to living with at least a valid attempt to resist the aspects of humanity that tempt us to be destructively judgmental, self-serving, delusions of inane (and of course insane) grandeur, and so forth. The ‘SELF’ in this regard being possibly the root of suffering and abuse, or at least clearly a gateway to injustice in the ‘civilized’ world.

 

“Even in the more poetic side of hardcore it is tempting to articulate the stuff we are against and let the more constructive phrases slip through the cracks or never be fully developed. But I chose not to have the title and cover of our record be something like ‘GUNS. BOMBS. HOLOCAUST. WE'RE FUCKED!’ - instead attempting a more constructive path, and surprisingly through my own intense misanthropy a somewhat optimistic tone, allowing images and words meant to be affirming and positive, while still acknowledging the problems that are on our minds and hearts.

 

“Through advice from Swill, I chose the word ‘Resisting’ rather than ‘Resist’ because, as he pointed out, if our music appeals to young people of a rebellious nature, they will rebel against anything - even other rebels. So a command in the title could be counter-productive, and we found our title to be more of an invitation to join our chosen path. This is also fortunately in league with our very crucial stance on what it is to actually "change" a person or the world. We believe that it is somewhat impossible to force another person to change directly. The way it is possible is by changing yourself into the sort of person you'd like the people around you to be - ethically, habitually, anything. People have does things nothing sort of miraculous by setting a positive example - I'm have an intense admiration for people like Gandhi of course...

 

“This record is not really meant to be a how-to-fix-everything kind of thing, as no record really ought to be ultimately (maybe?) but it can at least stand for the affirmation of attitudes and methods we would want to endorse or influence others with. That is a good realistic and worthwhile goal in a band I hope.”

IU: What medium(s) did you use for the artwork?

 

Some pens that people have given me, a sketchbook I think I stole through a self-check-out line at a big grocery store, photos I’ve taken and many photos people have given me throughout the entire time we were creating this record, then just Photoshop on the only computer I’ve ever paid for – an HP tower from 2001 that has a 30gb hard drive.

IU: On the Realicide blog, you mentioned the new release was a highly collaborative effort between yourself, Jim Swill, Vankmen, Evolve, Ryan Faris, Steven Cano, and Simon Severe. How did you end up getting involved with all of these folks in the first place and what did they contribute to "Resisting"?

 

That statement is actually from the basic bio for the record at www.realicide.com – the Myspace blog is honestly just for people who will refuse to read things on our real site. They also ask why we aren’t coming to their cities, but if they’d check out our site they’d see that we have days planned for it, the gigs might just not be confirmed yet and therefore not listed on the lowest common denominators for digital networking.

 

I met Swill when he was about 15, in the suburbs of Cincinnati in late 2002. He was a very violently frustrated kid who was starving for a creative outlet besides shit like Slipknot or whatever else kids his age had easy access to. We got into gabber together and never looked back. He wrote some of the lyrics and essays for our current album, gathered some of the sound bytes, and is the other primary vocalist in the group besides myself. He will be the only other member committing to the extent of this spring and summer’s North American tour.

 

I met Vankmen (or Victor rather, half of their gemini brutality) during my first tour ever, total kamikaze style the summer of 2004, at 5lowershop in San Francisco. Victor lived in Sacramento at that time but would come to the bay area for any events related to gabber and breakcore, something we immediately bonded through, long distance until years later we began meeting up more regularly. Victor created several of the beat tracks for this album on hardware drum machines and samplers.

 

Evolve is Colin Murray, one of my oldest friends from Cincinnati. I think we were 15 when we met, and he is one of the only people from high school I have any contact with today. Evolve is an abstracted hiphop project coming from strong influences of punk, industrial, and psychedelic. Although its aesthetic choices are often very different than the hardcore methods of Realicide, Evolve is one of the projects most akin to what we are doing in every other way, almost like the “hiphop” parallel and equal to Realicide being a “punk” band. Colin offered the music on our song “Autonomy”, as well as many other raw sounds from his tape collages. His final contribution was the 9 minute finale track to “Resisting”, an intensive cut-up composition featuring some of Swill’s recordings and input.

 

I met Ryan later in that summer of 2004 when I got back to Ohio. He was at that time in the earlier stages of one of Ohio’s strongest harsh noise bands of this decade, Ultra//Vires. The other member of U//V was Jon Prunty, who has toured with Realicide and developed several songs that we still need to record. Ryan is someone I’m worked with on many occasions these past few years, such as in our fucked up slime-themed hardcore band Hentai Lacerator. He went on with Jon to form the noise/improv D.I.Y. label Outfall Channel, turned U//V into a heavy noiserock band called Capital Hemorrhage, and later moved from Dayton Ohio down to Jacksonville Florida, where he now works with Pamela Mogollon in their band Often. Ryan’s contributions consist of creating several abrasive electronic beat tracks with various hardware he’d been experimenting with. This is a very interesting element in the new album, to me, because Ryan had very little background in electronic hardcore. He created his beat tracks entirely from sequenced samples of Realicide and Capital Hemorrhage, drawing influence from some of the music he has been more experienced with: harsh noise, powerelectronics, grindcore, and obscure international strains of hiphop. His tracks are very raw and remind me of me and Swill’s earlier efforts to teach ourselves how to fabricate electronic hardcore – immediate and direct techniques only; pretty appropriate here.

 

Steven is a friend from the LA area who plays solo as tik///tik. We met around the start of 2007, following some contact from afar the months prior. After traveling with us on a couple segments of the long tour last summer, he offered several dark damaged soundscapes for the new album. We used these as backdrops and accents for some of the spoken recordings included in the CD version of “Resisting”.

 

Simon is someone who lives in New Orleans, but I actually met her during 2004 the first time I visited Portland. We’d ran into eachother in other places arbitrarily, until I decided to started visiting NOLA more often. She was really excited about a long documentary called “Century of The Self”, dealing with the origins of most of what we know as marketing, public relations, and focus groups – largely at the hands of the American nephew of Sigmund Freud. Simon dissected the 4 hour documentary, and offered us dozens of sampled statements that our new album is riddled with. There are samples of people like Arthur Miller, Martin Luther King, and Bernadine Dorne of the Weather Underground.

 

We’ve had many other contributors come and go over the years, and are always interested to meet new people who show a sincere interest with motivations than are not purely self-serving, which seems to weed out many people who contact us unfortunately. But I remember talking to Swill in the earlier days of this project, telling him loosely, “Yeah, basically if you are actually into what we’re trying to do you can probably be in the band.” This has been sort of the unwritten policy since the beginning. But you know, there are not really very many people who are both down with what Realicide is trying to do AND not already involved in efforts of their own elsewhere, so…

 
IU: Also regarding the info on the new album... 40 bonus tracks on the CD version of the release??? Where did all of these bonuses come from?

 

It’s actually more like 18 tracks on the LP, then the CD is those plus the extra material, totaling 48 tracks on the CD. Some of these are segway tracks of sound collages and whatnot, but basically we have just had a LOT of unfinished business for a long time, to say the least. Once our last album, “The Shit Punx Hate”, never got completed, I was furiously driven to not let “Resisting” meet a similar fate. I even planned on giving it to another, much more established, indie label towards the end of 2008, but they retracted the offer because of how long they’d been waiting for our previous album. Lesson learned: YOU DON’T HAVE FOREVER. IT’S NOW OR NEVER… Even in things like art.

 

When that happened I had no choice but to finance it myself under Realicide Youth. But in a way, even though it risks everything in my life that sustains me financially, I am glad to have complete control over the record. I know it will look and sound as good as we knew how to make it at this particular point in things.

IU: Were there any bands, artists, authors, social figures, or events that were particularly inspiring (positively or negatively) to you during the creation of the album?

 

Crass / Penny Rimbaud. I read their basic biography during our tour last year and it really renewed my love for what they stand for and the decisions they made as a group every step of the way.

 

Any bands that could be compared to Crass, such as CRESS, Rudimentary Peni, Dystopia, Schwarzeneggar, The Mob, Drop Dead… punk bands that are trying (TRYING) to say something and have a positive effect. We’ve also of course always been fans of Atari Teenage Riot and the old DHR scene, but have been continuously frustrated by the vagueness of their content. That’s why it says in one of our songs “I’d rather be an electronic Crass” – because that is what I think we hoped to find in a powerful punk-edged electronic hardcore band, but we have always felt sold-short with ATR, even though we still adore their aesthetic and general pioneering.

 

Simon actually got me hooked on VNV Nation later in 2008. People can think whenever they want, and I do not usually go for prissier and more overly melodic music, but the ideas and endorsements of VNV Nation are completely in league with what most Realicide crew seems to follow. So what if it’s said through different means? He is reaching so many people and saying something that really matters, “Victory Not Vengeance”.

 

Laibach, especially “WAT” and “NATO”.

 

From The Gut in Detroit, Dirt Palace in Providence, Lost Compound in Toronto, Women in Los Angeles, Autonomous Mutant Festival, the city of New Orleans…

 

These are all very positive things that I’m remembering from the past year. Unfortunately there are many negative memories as well, and they are largely tied to people in music scenes – promoters, bands, fans, etc. They shake my faith that music can be more than slapstick time-killing. I don’t think it would be of much use to name any of these negative influences specifically. My advice is just to develop as good a judge of character as you can, and follow it up by trying to keep good company whenever possible. That can be the thing that pushes you to succeed or holds you back from success, depending how you maneuver things.

 

IU: When you last came through Ithaca, I was surprised to see most of the beats played out live by tik///tik and Mavis Concave. Are live beats the usual for tour? What can we look forward to for this performance?

 

Whenever we have the means to do it, yes we try to have the music be executed as “live” as possible. There is a long piece in our new zine that explains in detail the decisions of our preferences for live setups, in every way. During this spring and summer, I’ll actually be operating the electronics, and though I’ll also be on a mic as well, Swill will not be bound to the equipment on the table like me, so he’ll maintain a more interactive element, which is very important to us. This tour I will most likely be using hardware and software, interchanging from song to song, with tape loops mixed in during and between songs. The setup is most likely going to be a Korg ES-1 sampling drum machine, a laptop computer with some kind of simple software that we can have some live control over, and a 4-track with many different tapes of prepared looped samples. Swill and I will both have microphones.

 

One regret I have for the tour is not being able to bring Vim Crony out east with us. Vim is a video artist who lives in Long Beach, and has been developing a set of live video collage and manipulations that he has been playing as a member of Realicide during many of our LA area shows the past few months. This is a really great new element that amps things up, adds to what we’ve been doing and not replacing anything at all. Vim would be positioned right there alongside us, controlling all the projections live. Maybe we’ll get him on tour later on…

IU: What's involved in a usual pre-tour process for Realicide (sample and tape readying, finding collaborators, etc.) and has this tour set up differed at all?

 

Always some kind of last-minute / every-minute-counts sort of stress, be it in finishing a record, nailing down the shows and travel logistics, realizing there is no equipment available… Basically the last month, and especially last days, before a longer tour are always really hectic and an attempt to be as prepared as circumstances allow. After that it’s the game of trying to find satisfaction in far-from-perfect resources and strings of scenarios.

 

This time it’s been mainly about forcing our album to be released on time. I say “forcing” because of the complete lack of money to do this, but it’s happening anyway… Otherwise, we already know it’ll be me and Swill for the lineup in most instances, and the dates are coming together steadily – looking at up to 70 shows for spring and summer basically. I could talk about any aspects of how this all comes together, but unless you are specifically trying to learn how to do the same operation yourself I think it might not be too interesting. Just working hard and as smart as possible, even with a defective brain like mine…

IU: Any new cities you'll be hitting on this tour?

 

We’re trying to tour through these places so far, for spots we have never been to before… Huntsville TX, Monroe LA, Saint Augustine FL, Spartanburg SC, Greenville NC, Rochester NY, Wallingford CT, Halifax NS, London ON, Muskegon MI, Wapakoneta OH, Fargo ND, Iowa City IA, East Moline IL…

 

We really like coming to places we haven’t seen yet, so people are encouraged to make suggestions! But keep in mind, a suggestion doesn’t equate the gig happening, we need someone’s help in getting it arranged, especially if we’ve never been to the city before.

IU: What do you hope the audience takes home from their experience of a live Realicide performance?

 

A sense that it mattered that they were there to be part of it. Without that fundamental element I don’t even want to do a show at all. Whatever variations this can take, just as long as they decide that it matters they are there and not just viewing themselves as dispensable or invisible. I see you just as much as you see me.

 

Oh yeah, we are also going to try and extend  the experience to screenprinting clothing at houses we play at. If we can get the supplies together, it would mean you can bring a shirt to the show and we’ll screen it for you there for free. We have a new image that goes along with the current album…

IU: Any new Realicide Youth output? Where did you come across these bands/artists?

 

Although I’ve had to focus exclusively on the Realicide album the past couple months as a means of my survival this year, I did release several things at the very end of 2008. These included Evolve, Split Horizon, Capital Hemorrhage, and a zine I periodically organize called Sacrifice, which features interviews with people such as Xrin Arms, Justice Yeldham, Nuclear Dawn, Jason Zeh, Z’EV, OvO, Bryan Saunders vs. Lydia Lunch, etc.

 

After this next long tour I have a lot of plans for the Realicide label, provided I do not remain in massive debt because of the new Realicide album. Some of these plans include the Vankmen “Vankthology” CD, the Xtra Vomit / Victory! split 12”, hopefully a debut album by BIRTH, etc. But I am very eager to meet new people who would like to work with this label. One aspect of the new Realicide record’s propaganda is that I hope it served as an example of the sort of ideas I’d like associated with the label. So people out there who can really relate to its content should feel encouraged to get in touch!

IU: Realicide has been around for some time now, how do you feel the project’s accomplishments compare to the reasons it was started in the first place?

 

Well, since we were all teenagers when it first began, the goals were not extraordinarily complex. I think we wanted a music outlet that carried the approach of punk and roots industrial music, but through our own devices, lyrically and technically. In that regard, the reclamation or guardianship over terms like “punk” or “hardcore” has remained pure. We have always been a punk band that average “punk rockers” despise because of aesthetic differences. That’s an important consistency within this group. But as we’ve all grown older, gathered more life experiences, the goals have shifted, transformed, whatever you want to call it. Even the name of our band has changed it’s general understood meaning several times among us over the years.

 

I think we’ve reached a point in which it stands for autonomy, expressed through vehement punk ethos and a hunger for more stable dialogue among our peers regardless of their chosen labels or “rebel” uniforms. It has also settled to stand for the idea that nothing should be accepted by default – not your name, your home, your identity, nothing unless you’ve decided it suits you well. This is tied also to the very important idea that no one is really able to change another person – instead all we are really able to do it change our own lives, so it’s a serious responsibility to do that without delay. The idea is that you can destroy your default realities, in favor of something more alive or humane or true to who you would like to be, and in doing this for your own life you stand the possibility of influencing the world around you.

 

So things have shifted over the years, but I feel like it is very much a process of blossoming rather than being a different sort of project. We’re the same type of group we always have been, just like I’m the same person as when I was a child, you know?

 

(CIDE index)