Online Magazine - Interviews

VITAMIN X recently toured the USA to promote their new album ''Full Scale Assault''. I caught up with them at their show in Cleveland.
Interview by Abigail D.

A:Why doesn't everyone introduce themselves.

AX: I'm Alex I play bass.
MK: I'm Marko, I'm singing.
M: I'm Marc, I play guitar.
W: Wolfi, drums.

A: All right, so how long have you all been a band?

M: Well, we put out two 7" in 98 and 99 and our first album was produced in 2000. Alex, the bass player, entered the band in 99. Alex, Marko, and I (Marc) have been in the band since 1999 and Wolfi entered the band two years ago.
MK: First practice we ever did was November 1996.

A: How did you all form as a band?

MK: When we started the band, it was me, another friend, and Marc. Of course, in the beginning, we didn’t take ourselves seriously, we just wanted to play music that we liked; 80’s hardcore punk without any (mosh) metal influences. At that time, the hardcore scene was really down, nothing was really happening. The scene was just filled with bad metal bands who called themselves hardcore. Fortunately there were quite a few new kids that liked our style of music, so after only a few weeks practicing we already started getting show offers and we started taking ourselves more serious.
M: Yeah, when we started, we just had some practices for fun, with me on drums haha. I've been in tons of bands but with this band we already after one month had an offer to play. We didn't even have songs. We just played everything we had which was like three songs. The show went down great and we got more show offers and then someone offered to record us a 7". One thing led to another and here we are playing our 160th USA show and touring the world. I don't know...Its really strange that we got so far.
AX: The whole scene in Holland was really on the rise at that point, from 1995 to 2000. There was a surge. There were a lot of new bands from all over Holland. We just had a really good scene going. VITAMIN X was one of the bands that started and helped the whole thing.

Online Magazine - Interviews

Zaragoza is a mid-sized city strategically situated in the northeast of Spain, 300 km from Barcelona, Madrid or Bilbao. This geographical location has enriched the DIY community since the early 80’s: Nowadays we can find a great quantity of bands of interesting and different sounds, but as a whole form an attractive political and cultural network. CHICARRICA, KARNVAPEN ATTACK, CRIATURA, BLOCKBASTARD, DOWN TO AGONY, INSOMNIO ROTTEN MEYER AND THE PSYCHOPUNKS and even YAKUZA HORROR are a clear examples of it. With the release of their new work I believe that it is a good idea to know more about them, of their activity and of their small but powerful local scene. From the police state of Zaragoza for the international community, here is YAKUZA HORROR!! Come in and read!!

Interviewed by Juanme for PE.
Pics by Sonia and Abel.

PE: YAKUZA HORROR have been out there for some years. Apart from playing in several places, you have also released a demo tape and a 7”. Please tell us something about your trajectory for the people who don’t know you.

Dani: We started back in 2003 with the intention of playing traditional crust. It was more a project, as most of us were (and are) in other bands such as DOWN TO AGONY, KARNVAPEN ATTACK, CRIATURA, TOTALIKERS, ASALTO 54, etc. We did some very chaotic gigs, with not many songs and not very many practices. This changed when Alex came to sing with us and the line up was definitely established. Since then we have recorded a demo tape, a 7” (La VI Extinción) and toured in the south of our country. Since there we’ve played all around Spain: Barcelona, Andalucía, Logroño, Valencia, Euskadi, etc.

Online Magazine - Interviews

Jeff “free” Luers is one of the most well known Earth Liberation prisoners in America. He has been in prison now for 8 years and was facing a 22 year sentence for a simple act of arson. His sentence was recently reduced to 10 years. I decided to catch up with him after I read his letter in the last issue of PE.

Interviewed by Abigale D.

PE: So Jeff, tell us a little about yourself.

I’m 29 yrs old. I came to prison when I was 21. I grew up in the L.A. area before moving to Eugene, OR when I was 19. I got into politics and radicalism at a young age, about 14. A lot of it revolved around anti-fascist and anti-police brutality issues. But at 18 I was exposed to Animal and Earth Liberation struggles. That has really become my passion. After moving to Oregon I got heavily involved in forest defense and local anarchist struggles, spending months at a time living in old growth forests and swinging from the tree tops.

Online Magazine - Interviews

SISTA SEKUNDEN interviewed by Flox / Fight for Your Mind

PE: Hey SISTA SEKUNDEN can you please introduce the band members and tell us what SISTA SEKUNDEN means?

Andy: I’m Andy, I play guitar and I have glasses. Tommy plays the bass and he’s the best story teller in Sweden. Dempe sings and is a tattoo artist. Julian is young, French and play drums. We are four douche-bags living in Sweden playing hardcore because it’s the one thing we know and it comes from the heart. Sista Sekunden means “the last second” which can be translated into many meanings.

PE: None of you are new comers to the punk scene and some of you have played in the bands SATANIC SURFERS, INTENSITY, SKITKIDS, etc... How is SS different than the other bands you’ve been in? Do you feel any pressure starting a new band since your previous bands have all been quite successful?

Andy: For me Sista Sekunden is truly unique because it’s the first band I’ve been in from the very beginning. In my early punk years I managed to join bands that were already established, which was great, but sometimes it didn’t feel like I was playing my own stuff. The only pressure I feel today is keeping up with all of the deadlines and stuff that needs to be done. Booking, layout making, printing, merching, releasing for the band and it’s taking a toll on me.

PE: Has singing in your native language been a problem when playing abroad?

Andy: Even if people don’t understand the words hopefully they appreciate that we sing about things we actually mean instead of screaming worn out phrases that we don’t really know the content of.

Online Magazine - Interviews

The artwork of Jeremy Clark has appeared under the name "Hush" on the cover of Slug and Lettuce and on such record covers as the CONTROVENE LP to name a few. His medium is mainly pen and ink yet has a totally unique and distinctive appearance. Jeremy can often be found behind the distro table while touring with hometown bands such as KYLESA and BARONESS, usually with pen in hand. We have long admired Jeremy's work and are pleased to have him appear as our featured/cover artist for PE #58. This interview was conducted via email by PE's Mel Hughes.

PE: What is the earliest age you remember drawing?

My mom says I've been drawing since before I could talk. She has an attic full of boxes of scrap paper, church bulletins and school papers that I scribbled weird giant mice and robots all over. I always had low grades in school. To me it was eight hours of drawing time. Add Southern Baptist parents and I had another several hours a week to draw in church. I would find dead wasps in window sills and do my best to recreate them. Or dollar bills. I was obsessed with the line work on money. In sixth grade I was grounded for drawing the cover of IRON MAIDEN’s Killers in church.

Being an artist was never what I set out to do. I just couldn't sit still. Always had to be fidgeting with something. So I doodled on everything. In high school I'd burn through sketch books really fast. No white space left untouched.

PE: How did you get into punk and what attracted you to it in the first place?

My family was military. In the 80's all my friends on the base were metal heads. So I was introduced to aggressive music and bad behavior at an early age. Confining a bunch of kids in a fenced in area is a great way to breed problems. The problems our parents warned us about. Those were violent times. It wasn't until I was in high school in Tennessee, the middle of nowhere, that I discovered punk rock and stopped getting into so much trouble. I started skate boarding and meeting punk kids. The power of the mixed tape changed everything. Friends would make me tapes. Like 7 SECONDS on one side CORONOR on the other. Metal and punk blurred together for me. No one there was strictly one sided. Underground music was fairly hard for us to find.

Online Magazine - Interviews

January 24th, 2009 in Austin, TX

Starting out back in the early 80's, AMEBIX were one of the first punk bands to introduce dark and tribal ethos to their art and music. While they initially launched themselves as a generic CRASS-style peacepunk band (as made famous by their appearance one of Crass Records' Bullshit Detector comps), two EPs and three LPs later, AMEBIX had transformed their sound with unlikely influences ranging from KILLING JOKE to MOTORHEAD. Musically the band had broke the peace punk mould and their lyrics also deviated from the sharply divisive sloganeering of the day. Instead of preaching black and white politics, AMEBIX spoke in broader spiritual and metaphorical terms as demonstrated by these lyrics from Chain Reaction:

"Feel the strength from within, do you believe it's a sin
 To find the power lying inside your mind
 Not from the cross or the gun
 Not from the moon nor the sun
 But rising from the very soul of mankind

"Use your head, take control
 Use your head, no gods no masters"

Feeling misunderstood by many of their peers, and totally exhausted from pouring their heart and souls into the band, AMEBIX split up in 1987, shortly after the release of their final album Monolith. In the 20 years since the band's demise, AMEBIX has become an institution within the international punk movement and spawned an entire sub-genre collectively known as "crust punk." During that time the band never sought to cash in and vowed that a reunion would never happen. That is until mid-2008 when minds were changed by the persistent prodding of a persuasive life-long fan and friend. The following interview was conducted over the phone with Rob Miller (AKA "The Baron") who can tell the story better than I can.

Interviewed by Dan in August/September 2008.

PE: Never in my wildest dreams did any of us think an AMEBIX reunion would happen. What brought this on after all this time?

Rob: Never in my wildest dreams either. In fact emphatically we said no fucking way, as Stig made a rather rash claim on The Power Remains re-release, or pretty much something to that effect. I tried to explain this on the MySpace blog that I did at one point. Basically I got involved with Roy Wallace, who did the Day the Country Died DVD, which is a retrospective on the whole UK anarcho-punk scene, and he came out and interviewed me here. Roy is such a great guy and he said, “Rob, how would you fancy putting something together around the AMEBIX material you have?” And I thought it was a great idea because I had been saving stuff up for years and years: anything I could get a hold of like interviews and snippets of stuff like that. In a very real sense I wanted to lay it all to rest because there was a lot of conjecture and speculation about the band. There has not really been anything out there for consumption and you couldn’t go out and find anything that said who was this band, what did they look like, and what did they sound like? I decided it would be a good time to bring all of that stuff together. So Roy said “How about we use some of the old material, dig up some live stuff, mix it all down, and think about doing some interviews.” I thought that was a good idea and told him to do it.

During the process he interviewed some ex-band members, including some great footage of Martin being a complete nutter, and Spider and Andy. Then I went over to Belfast to meet up with Roy, because he asked me to come over and see what he’d been doing. We spent a long weekend basically reviewing all of the footage that he had put together so far. Now Roy is a really persuasive guy, you know. He gets right into your head, puts an idea in there, and then it kind of nags. He was on me all the time and would say, “Rob, is there any possibility of playing some of these songs again?” And I was like, “No fucking way is that going to happen, we’re not doing that and we’re not going there at all!” Then the last time I went down to see him we tried to do a time-line because he didn’t really know the context of all the material. We wanted to put things into place, like this happened then, so we could make different chapters Devon moves onto Bristol moves onto Bath, blah, blah, blah and all the subsequent stuff. So we put the time-line together and started looking at this like a story. I found it really intriguing and really objective for a change, looking back and thinking, oh wow, this is a really interesting story and some interesting takes. It is something that deserves to have a final note on it, to bring the story to a full stop. And Roy would say “Would you ever do a...?” And I would be like no, fuck off Roy, no fucking way! We really got relaxed with each other about it, that last time I was there, so we were like let’s think about it and what was really realistic here. Stig has of course had a few issues in his life and is finally in a position where he can come through and anything can happen. Spider was not available because he now has tinnitus and can’t listen to music, let alone play it. I had heard about Roy Mayorga and knew he had always been a supporter of the band, but I didn’t really know anything else about him at all. About that time I had started to receive emails through MySpace from Alicia [aka Alicia Non Grata from early issues of PE —ed] from a band called band 13. You know I didn’t know anything about anything these days, because I had been 20 years out of the loop, fingers in the ears and no listening to anyone. Anyway, she hooked me up with Roy because I had been asking her for months and months to meet this guy. Eventually she did and it was really fortuitous. When I got back from Belfast she came through with his phone number. So I phone him up and said “Roy, would you possibly consider this sort of thing happening? I know you’ve been into the band for a while and would you consider coming over and playing some songs with us?” And then he said “Yeah, fucking in a heartbeat!” So what that did is call my bluff and made me think about this seriously now. I mean we now had to think about how we could organize this plane fare for Roy to come across. I told him that I couldn’t promise anything other than revisiting two or three old songs, with yourself as a drummer and me and Stig playing these songs, and we’ll be very critical about it. The idea was to see if we can nail these things down and see how we feel about it. After we had done it we looked back and said, “Fuck, this is really good!” For instance the first song we did was Winter. The first take was a keeper and that’s the recording we mixed down from.