Published in LiP Magazine
[http://www.lipmagazine.org]

View the full version of this article on the LiP website

Bring the Noise: Impacting the Sonic Commons
An interview with Infernal Noise Brigade founder Grey Filastine

by Daniel Burton-Rose
04.21.04

I first saw Grey seated on blankets and cushions in the common room of a three-chamber U.S. Army surplus tent at the Burning Man Festival's "Black Rock City". The nomadic tribe of Okie declassés camped out with him on the sun-cracked playa were the performance troupe !tchkung!, for which Filastine was the drummer.

In preparation for the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in the winter of ’99, Filastine organized the Infernal Noise Brigade (INB), an anarchist marching band which shocked and awed as their black-and-green-uniformed members, sporting gas masks, passed through clouds of teargas thudding coordinated beats from Ibero-America, North Africa and the Balkans. At the IMF/World Bank meeting the following September in Prague, the INB constituted the battle cry of the ultras, the blue bloc, as they got medieval on the capitalist conspiracy and stormed the conference castle in neo-pagan rage.

The INB’s second confrontation with the WTO, in Cancun in ’03, is documented in their second cd Vamos a la Playa, which, like their first disc, is put out by Filastine’s indie label Post World Industries.

Filastine is now taking a break from the INB. I spoke with him in San Francisco. The occasion: two-days of marches marking the one-year anniversary of the shutting down of San Francisco in protest of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

LiP: You and a lot of the people you work with come from Oklahoma, which is an intensely polarized place. How has this affected your outlook and protest strategies?

GF: That part of the United States—Texas, Oklahoma, which to me are inseperable—is a very hostile place. People in the counterculture, in the political culture, tend to band together and create a strong network of mutual support. You might find it in other situations, but certainly under very hostile conditions like that you create very strong bonds.
A lot of us had moved to the Northwest, which is a very soft place. We were a little more aggressive than people in the Northwest. Our approach to environmentalism was a little bit more extreme than that of a lot of people.

We weren’t alone obviously. Something emerged, which we were just one part, to form the aggressive, direct action-oriented consciousness of the early ‘90s.

The music you do goes beyond traditional protest music, in which people go to a concert or café and the performers consolidate a common awareness of being part of a counterculture. Instead, in projects like ¡tchkung! and the Infernal Noise Brigade the performers plunge into crowds of activists and incite confrontation with political targets.

Certainly. The last disc ¡tchkung! put out was called Incite, and we frequently went out in the street after performances. The Infernal Noise Brigade’s initial purpose was to provide a soundtrack [for street demos].

How did the idea for the Infernal Noise Brigade come about?

It was a systematizing of the music we did after ¡tchkung! shows and also taking it in a much different direction. Bringing in a lot of different kinds of people, bringing in a lot of different kinds of music. Taking the idea of drums in the street and adding other elements, like marching in step, vocals and horns. Obviously we’re borrowing a bit from contemporary marching bands, which’re all descended from Ottoman marching bands. It’s an obvious idea, but not a lot of people are doing it. You see it in almost every demonstration: flags, bateria, drump corps…it’s just been taking that a little further. And having a particular aesthetic attitude, which is what individuates the INB from the other groups. It’s a bit more aggressive or confrontational.

Has the INB inspired other groups to drill more and come off as more disciplined?

An ensemble that came together for the anti-G8 protests in Genoa was inspired by the INB. One of the organizers called and said “Do you want to put together a group for Genoa? I’m interested in doing it.” No INB members could make it, so he asked, “Do you mind if we use similar ideas and aesthetics?” We said, “Yes! Great!”

You were the director of the INB in an ostensibly collective environment. How did you balance wanting control of the product and working with people with their own ideas?

I founded the group so I had a lot of power at the beginning. My power continuously tapered out, intentionally on the part of the rest of the group and on my part, to the point where I’m barely involved now, and that feels really good. Over the history of the group there have been a number of people who have had strong organizational roles, not just myself, and now more than ever the power seems to have reached a very horizontal level.

The origin of a musical idea may be a single person, but the final product is usually crafted by consensus. The people who have more experience with music have more to say, because they can speak the language of music to express ideas, recontextualize them, and hybridize them with other ideas. People who have less experience in music have less of a voice in the crafting of music. Likewise with tactics and aesthetics. People who haven’t thought a lot about how a marching band should look haven't felt the need to have multi-hour consensus meetings about it. Other people really did. A lot of people did. In every single domain of making decisions in the group—whether it was our tactics, aesthetics, or level of confrontation—a different group of people who really cared about that subject focused on it.

Though less than five years old, the organization only has a couple of original members at this point. Is drawing in and empowering new people part of the mission?

Not an intentional mission. Over time, something can seem stale to you that’s fresh to someone else. In my own experience, people just left the group over the course of their lives. Sometimes they moved away to other countries or states, sometimes they just couldn’t maintain the commitment. There haven’t been a lot of big fights and departures. We’ve had big fights and people stay! [laughs] When they’re ready to go, it’s usually a good goodbye.

What are some of your other projects?

I’m doing some provisional projects, one of which is called “Moukabir Sawte”, which means “Loudspeaker.” The project is just something in my bag of tricks, and, at this point, in a number of people’s bag of tricks, because a number of people have participated in it and know how to pull it off.
We did a lot of these loudspeaker attacks against corporate media outlets during the invasion of Iraq. A coordinated surrounding of a media headquarters and, timed through use of radios and cell phones, let loose with super-loud, hi-volume sound. In this most recent case, it was a mixture of air-raid sirens and muzzein’s call to prayer. It was intended to give the context of war, and where this war is. We didn’t really need to explain with words. We just showed up, all in snazzy suits, surrounded an entire building, and opened up with sound. We also had one actual air raid siren attached to a battery with jumper cables. The duration of these actions was never more than five minutes. All the employees looking out the window, with people of course calling security guards, who got in our face. We’d just leave and go on to the next place. We did that all day long, doing six outlets, including FOX, CBS, and NBC affiliates, which all occupy giant one-square-block buildings. A pretty imposing corporate media infrastructure. You definitely know you’re there! We hit Clear Channel, which controls, like, half the radio in the United States. And one of the weekly papers, The Stranger, which was really dodgy in their editorial stance on the war and often tries to antagonize the Left. There is a video of this action at www.postworldindustries.com.

There was a lot of deep confusion on the part of the people who were surrounded. Sometimes people want to pretend that they didn’t understand, when it’s impossible not to understand.

Especially when that thing is their involvement, and complicity.

Yeah. They want to feign confusion because it is easier that way, so they willfully ignore the facts, or just pretend that what’s happening is unclear. And you know, you can see it in their eyes. You understand that they understand. But they’re asking you: “What are you doing?! What’s happening?!” It’s very clear what we’re doing, based on the sounds that we’re using, and the fact that it’s the first couple days of an invasion of a country and that their coverage is abysmal. To assist their comprehension we did make little flyers that stated, “Since the media only gives us noise we return the favor.”

What’s the line for you between communication and confrontation?

Very thin. Political art is frequently too didactic. This is why the art world despises political art. Political art for the most part sucks. We know it. We want to feel good about the little skits people do, we want to like the music our friends make, we want to support ‘em, we want our community to grow, and we want to foster DIY projects, but it frequently sucks. We have to stop making garbage and start making good political art. I’m not saying that it can’t be literal, it just needs to be improved. The delivery. It can’t insult your intelligence. It doesn't need to preach. It only needs to inspire the people who are already in accordance with you, inform the bystanders, or threaten those who are in opposition to you. It is hard to do all three, so it's best to craft the art to the anticipated audience.

I'm involved in another project called Audiofile collective. We travel all over the world and record sounds in the public sphere using binaural microphones. These are tiny microphone capsules that you can hide in your clothing which record high quality 360-degree surround sound.

It’s about presenting sonic space in different places and presenting it in a different context or turning it into an art. Certainly it’s the least political thing I’m involved in, but it's something I want to contribute to the world. This sound is already in the world, these other people are already contributing it—by accident, it’s a byproduct of their lives, a byproduct of cities, automobiles. I just want to bring some of that sound which is so beautiful and in some ways rare—rare to the listener in the kind of world where people own cd players—so they can get an idea of how things sound in the rest of the world. Or how they sound mediated by the technologies we’ve used to edit them.

Are all the sound clippings that you collect from outside the overdeveloped world? Does that make it a commentary on the sterility of city life in the country we live in?

Yes. The only cd that we’ve actually put out is specifically focused on South Asia. It only has sound from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka. Just because that’s where the three of us had all traveled within the last couple of years, by chance. And had tons of good recording because that is an intensely noisy part of the world, and it’s also stunning in its sonic beauty. It’s just rich. We felt we had to do something with all these recordings of rickshaws and people selling things on the street, distant temple bells and prayer, television sets coming through a wall…anything you might hear.

This work is definitely a comment about the increasing sterility of the world —about the lack of diversity of noise, about how sound is so controlled. But it is nice to hear the way that a train sounds, it is nice to hear the way that temples or churches or mosques do sound. Sounds are disappearing from our reality. It’s the closing of the sonic commons. It being regulated just like anything else....

Daniel Burton Rose is the co-editor of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Softskull 2004) and The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry (Common Courage 1998). An award-winning journalist, he has written for the Bay Guardian, Dollars and Sense, Middle East Report, Multinational Monitor, Vibe, and Z Magazine, among other publications.