Robert Inhuman, I'M NOT A FUCKING DJ.

The night after I finished most of the final edits for this LP, I went and saw Rotterdam Terror Corps at a rave in L.A. - Now before I talk about this experience and any thoughts associated with it, I want to say that GABBER, despite the painful jockish lack of critical social implications in most cases, has been one of my very favorite sorts of music for years. It is the type of electronic music I am most instinctively drawn to, at a bizarre primal level. I love the sound and power inherent in gabber, and I know of course that Rotterdam Terror Corps is one of the pioneering names in classic Dutch hardcore. But I just saw the shit, and remembering the Gwar concerts I went to back in high school, I think Gwar is a lot better at the same game... (key word "game")

RTC consisted of one DJ in back, the show centered around an aryan jock MC dressed like a Roman soldier, flanked by two women dressed exclusively in RTC apparel, which they gradually stripped out of down to the nude, throwing shirts into an expectedly braindead audience who would love to own "hardcore" merchandise that had only moments earlier clung wets to fake tits. (Not like Gwar though, I mean the tits were surgically fake in this case.) The MC basically just re-iterated the word "hardcore", the name of the group, and slogans involving killing, like what you're hear in the trailer for a shitty horror or action movie. This was supplemented by groping the strippers' fake tits and posing with "evil" faces for people to take digital photos of. I noticed pretty quickly that I'd stopped dancing (and I don't really dance, but in this country I can't go to a straight up gabber rave too often, so if not there then where, huh?) - I realized I wasn't dancing cos I was caught up thinking - analyzing what was being offered to me, the audience... If I was gonna keep dancing through this RTC climax at the party, it would require consciously shutting off my natural impulse to analyze and evaluate what was entering my senses and feelings... I guess I've never been ready to operate that way.

Strangely in place like the Autonomous Mutant Festival, I had a short but memorable conversation with someone established in the breakcore scene, which got the gears turning in my head for several months, leading eventually to this piece. The main quote I remember the person saying to me was: "The hardest part about touring is always waiting around at the airport." - I don't know if the implications translate to you all from that simple statement, but it's what made me realize how important it is to write a piece specifically detailing why Realicide is a round peg within the square hole that is the lucrative electronic music world - why that is and why we want it that way.

DEFINITIONS OF TOURING

"The hardest part about touring is always waiting around at the airport." In the world of electronic music, often even in the case of completely D.I.Y.-affiliated acts, artists are flown to major cities primarily just for weekend dates, at the expense of the local promoters. The money involved in this procedure is usually separate from the money that is guaranteed to be paid to the artist for performing at the event. It is also not uncommon for hotel arrangements to be made, among other things to keep the artist comfortable before and after their obligations to the event.

Realicide tours in a car, almost always packed to absolute physical capacity with equipment, distro materials, sleeping bags, and last but not least however many actual people we can fit into the vehicle. We are directly tied to our means of transportation. (Although not as much as a growing number friends who tour in converted vegetable oil fueled vans!) We avoid situations involving guaranteed amounts of payment unless absolutely necessary in sustaining our ability to survive and / or maintain our vehicle. Our payment is not divided between travel costs and fees for performing. Usually it is a situation in which donations are collected and this is meant to cover primarily just the basic costs of traveling, with anything extra being in hospitality for if our next gig is not as successful somehow. Speaking of the next gig: it's usually the day after the last one. In the tradition of Black Flag (one of the most popular examples anyhow), we try as best we can to play a gig every day we are on tour; not just fucking weekends. And we don't just show up with a laptop.. or a fucking sampling pitchable CD player... To the best of our financial and logistical abilities, we travel with our own amps and speaker cabs. This way if we show up to a house that has little or no PA gear, we can still do the show. The need for PA gear is probably the #1 technical dilemma in touring with electronic music, at least when you play some of the places we play. Even in cases at huge venues with seemingly really nice sound, we've made a policy to use our own gear as well, cos things always end up going wrong. (See the piece accompanying our track "Kill The Soundman".) When you try to play more nights of the week, you don't have to demand being paid as much each show, unless of course you feel like you need more money by default at all times, but I'm not going to go there with this piece... Lastly, we almost always eat and sleep at the home of, or at least with, the local promoters (who are usually one of the bands we are playing with). Wasting money on a hotel room where we'd miss out on getting to know the people who were down with helping us visit them is absolutely asinine and not an option in almost any case. Everything I am listing here is supposed to point to one thing: being more connected to the people you're visiting on tour, and the means by which you get to their towns. Oh yeah, and we really like playing in small towns we've never heard of before, not just LA and NYC.

$$$ DEEJAY $$$

This essay is not about hating on the art of spinning records or mixing tracks. I hope it is readily clear that the arguments being made, the beef we've got, are with DJ and electronic music CULTURE, not the technical or artistic choices so much. With that said...

DJ's are usually paid a lot more than bands, even though their gig is showing up with a laptop or a box of records to tables / mixer provided by the promoter - whereas a band arrives with the burden of often very physically strenuous gear load-in, more costly transportation, multiple members, and often a seriously frustrating soundcheck. Bands aren't as traditionally tied to drug culture; I think this is a big factor in how this situation came to be what it is. I'm fucking straight edge so that doesn't mean shit to me. All I know is that live music on tour is about scraping by and aching the next day every day, and a motherfucker playing other peoples' records is laughing all the way to the fucking bank. (Again, this is NOT against the act of DJ'ing, it's about the imbalance in the general treatment of performers.)

A lot of people, really cool people even, have tried to steer us towards this world. You don't know how many people told me, months and months up until this record was sent to be pressed, that our "album" should be 10 minutes each side with 2 songs on each side, that no one would want to listen to it and it was not gonna be worthwhile because it wasn't designed for DJ's to spin... Okay look at this record; look at this fucking book that it came with! Would a Realicide "album" ever be 4 songs inside a blank black jacket? But in electronic music that is the norm in many cases. It's gotta be so fucking weird to them that we even have lyrics!

It came down to this though - obviously we take a lot of influence from bands like Atari Teenage Riot and the old 90's DHR scene. As I was editing down the tracks for this LP at the house in Los Angeles, my friend Brian had a copy of ATR's "Delete Yourself" - classic digital hardcore album. I listened to both sides while watching the time and the shit was well over 20 minutes each side. Did the length of their LP stop ATR from being accepted and saying what they wanted to say to a whole lotta people? I had trimmed our record down to 17 minutes each side and knew that was as much compromise as I oughta offer. If this record sounds awful I guess we should just make CD's instead, but I was kind of hoping the ideas and social implications could be the main focus, with the music's technical qualities in the backseat. What do you think?!

Note: We're not actually against trying to press shorter vinyl with higher sound quality, and are actually planning to allow other labels to use certain tracks in this way, but this record here is our ALBUM, and the punk albums I like hearing are not usually just 4 songs.

IS PHYSICAL STRAIN A NOVELTY?

I've also noticed, more and more, differences between a majority in the electronic music world and what we do when it comes to defining live performance. Of course this is a topic of much controversy in an age where it's becoming increasingly acceptable to perform pre-sequenced, and even pre-arranged and mixed, electronic beats. The extreme of this is a steadily growing decision by artists to set up a computer and simply "perform" by playing WAV files while attempting to trick the audience (who cannot usually see the computer screen) that some kind of advanced live manipulation is going on. Although this issue of very clear faux-performance is an important topic for debate, this piece is not really about the politics of pre-sequenced live music as much as the more physical aspects of a performance.

The idea of a live band performing physically strenuously is commonly seen as somewhat of a novelty in electronic music. This is because of the fact that to generate the sounds in the correct order equating a set of electronic songs does not inherently require almost any kind of physical force or inertia; the energy used is largely cerebral. So I have seen on many occasions scenes of a man behind a laptop headbanging while delicately clicking start and stop buttons, or a man playing electronic drum pads almost mockingly as if they require the same physical force of loud acoustic drums (the pads trigger samples and can be adjusted to be very sensitive) - I have seen people play guitars that are very low in the mix while sliced samples of bands that usually sound like Slayer (archetypal "evil" metal references that musicians seem to be desperate for like a fix) are playing in the foreground of the mix, sometimes the real guitar does not even seem to be plugged in, and so forth...

The argument I am trying to articulate here is not against these peoples' symbolic tributes to live bands and all the physical aspects involved in them. It is rather against their seemingly ignorant and disregardive attitudes towards what it really means to put forth a physical strain, to the point of exhaustion, transcending certain levels of calm reasoning, into an experience not unlike the attempt to escape the cages that are our bodies. In this act of release there is nothing casual or novel, and although music can be generated by false means (just in the sense of acoustic sound which synthetic and sample-based music is a representation of) there is nothing false about its spiritual implications. This is not a sarcasm and not a pose.

Realicide is meant to be a very honest attempt to seek out, or execute rather, the experience described above. The idea at our shows, for ourselves and what we would like to radiate into a receptive audience, is definitely that of transcendence - for a few moments to be somewhere else besides trapped in the total hell of our wants and continuous strife. It may seem strange that a band so abrasive and overtly combative would have this kind of goal, and I can't really say it's not an abstract idea, but this is the most accurate way I can explain what we are attempting as a live band. If this won't sound too disruptive, it is not unlike a communal prayer - publicly praying for a way OUT of the world we as a species (and all the private individual lives that make up this species) have let come into being. So in this way, the aims of Realicide in a live setting are a very focused example, although abstract, of my lifelong thirst for a "Spiritual Misanthropy". This is not meant to function as an escape though, or even as catharsis ultimately, but more as a way to access aspects of ourselves not available in a calmer, more reserved state of mind. This could be at least a small part of why we perform very jarring and abrasive music. (Did you think we wanted to sound "evil" like Slayer? Sorry guys.) From this momentary access it is the goal to bring back previously hidden, repressed, or dormant aspects of things like conscience, ambitions, and affirmation against social or cultural odds - bring things like these back into our waking life / primary consciousness.

Some of the decisions we've made regarding our set up and procedures for live shows have had the above goals specifically in mind I think. The ideas I've described are somewhat dependent on (within the context of hardcore at least) exerting a lot of anxiety and manic physical distress. When Mavis toured with Realicide 2005-08 he used exclusively hardware (ask him about it, he'll talk all day and night about gear) because it created the constant mental tension of having to string the drum patterns and samples together to form songs live, while me and Swill were following along on top of it - the anxiety of not knowing for sure what was coming next, if it would go the same as the last time in certain ways, put us on edge and with an initial basis of desperation, even if just musically. A sidenote, as I mentioned the computers concealing an artist's process to the audience 100% - I've always favored media (in art, music, politics, anything) where the process is as evident as possible to an audience - less smoke and mirrors - more honesty. This is also why we never use any kind of vocal effects at live shows. I don't have an especially "gifted" voice for "singing", but I'll give you all I've got, take it or fucking leave it.

Another ritual I've used for periods of time, to point myself towards the path away from this body and the hell it resides in, would be the harsh choking and gagging vocal techniques, sometimes accompanied by brief instances of strangulation. The idea is sort of like a much smaller version of what the suspensionists do, maybe, in that I am trying to access aspects of myself only available in moments of physical trauma. Choking is only one of a few ways I've attempted this during Realicide performances, but it is the method I've used most frequently because until after a couple years practicing it I was never in any kind of substantial physical risk. But eventually I became able to use the mic cable to choke myself until I would start to pass out, which is not how the show ought to end and not a healthy thing to nurture in myself habitually. The times I feel like this technique was most effective were when it would bring me to a point of disorientation, on top of the incredible social anxieties I already feel when I'm in front of a group of people. Unwrapping the mic cable from my neck and pulling myself back into the mix of the music, I found myself able to summon and string words together that would not have occurred to me previously. Many phrases of this sort have struck me as profound and very to-the-point later, and are where many of the slogans I use in Realicide have originated.

But again, these small acts of violence and anxiety used to unlock a spiritual side to a performance, might be the way they are because we are attempting this all in the context of hardcore music. I'm not giving a disclaimer, just the assurance that I think it is very possible to have the same goals and succeed through other kinds of music, or through things besides music altogether! Many kinds of trance induction that I've heard of or learned about seem to have a system for it that is basically all cerebral. I don't think losing blood, bile, or even sanity, is absolutely necessary in doing what we are trying to do ultimately. Hardcore is just where we've found our voice for the time being. "Church Of Gabber" right?! Before I continue on, one other sidenote: Props to big Swill who got his heart surgery at the start of 2009 - his fucked up heart basically made it so Realicide shows were going to KILL him! It's amazing he made it through as long as he did, and hopefully things are on track without THAT kind of physical strain anymore.

Bringing this back around to our experiences dealing with the electronic music scene; that issue of casualness. At events in which we've been the wild card, being the only live band and not a DJ, I've had a lot of experiences that imply a complete naivety or disregard for the essential aims and procedure described above. Audiences come and go freely, mingling amongst one another, and the band is very much a background element to their party. This traditional rave environment is something I did not understand for quite a while, but I have learned what I value about it. Like the roots of Industrial music, Rave was intended as an alternative to the conventional rock concert in which an audience is ONLY an audience, almost in mock worship of whatever fucking band is on the big tall stage. Rave is about the audience being the spectacle! The DJ's are not needed as an elaborate visual presence, just to set the tone and prompt the energy of all the people there. In that sense it is extremely awesome, and truly an empowering approach to events for the audience that had no power in the context of a rock concert, unless they got the show stopped by starting a fight or something stupid like that. But the problem for Realicide is that we ARE a band, and are asking for peoples' momentary attention. But unlike a normal rock band, we are trying to gather the audience for a MUTUAL attention, a dialogue on any levels possible. In this sense we are most akin to the tradition of punk and its descendent scenes, in that an interaction and blurring of the audience / performer boundaries is very much the goal. I don't have hard feelings towards rave audiences at this point though, because I know in many cases they just don't understand what we're trying to doing socially, even if they enjoy the cacophony while they are mingling or dancing off on their own somewhere. It is just a different language for shows that I did not grow up with, so it's just somewhat foreign to me. I appreciate the basis of why rave parties are the way they are, even though we do not fit too well in those settings, and no I am not saying any of this because of Rave's common tie to drug culture.

During our 2008 tour in Europe we shared our shows almost exclusively with DJ’s and laptop electronic producers. I had trouble understanding the difference between their DJ sets and their “live PA” sets. My friend Jonathan broke it down plain and simple: “Playing live usually just means you’re DJ’ing mostly your own tracks.”

One other thing that comes to mind is a moment in which a DJ at a rave style party was trying to ask me questions about the mix and sound system while I was performing (as the vocalist of this Realicide thing I keep mentioning) - Moments like these are the ones that spell out painfully clear how the perspective on, and definition of, live performances are very different as far as what we do versus the norm in electronic music. It used to mean I should write songs about how mad those situations make me, but now that those are written it just means I'd like to avoid being in those situations anymore. You can still find me at hardcore and breakcore raves once in a while, but while I'm down with some of the music and activities I'll probably always feel ki