READ MORE, HURT LESS: Charged! Memorializing Hyperreality Bin Laden's Diary

[by Scott Thill]

Jazz, punk, noise, whatever. Zandosis seems like it could care less. With a disc called George Bush Go Straight to Fucking Hell filled with cacophous songs that sometimes last only seconds and sometimes last over 20 minutes, they don't fit the mold anywhere. But they have balls, and lungs, because they bash both on hilarious, terrifying tracks with names like "John Ashcroft Flattened Under the Weight of a 5,200-Pound Replica of the Ten Commandments." Scary stuff, but so is real life, and Zandosis cares about that more than comfortable conventions. What's in a name, indeed.

Morphizm: Your music killed my ears and spine.
Stewart Voegtlin : That's cool. It killed our ears and spines making it.
Marshall Avert: People do seem to laugh at the ultraviolent titles -- we do too. Obviously we're not out to actually kill anybody, but seeing these administration officials get a taste of their own medicine or feel some of the pain that their actions and belief and lies are causing others would feel very good. I think all great hardcore is also easy to laugh at because it makes me feel so good, like someone else feels like I do, and is able to focus that energy into performance. Certainly for me there's nothing more empowering than yelling, “George W. Bush go straight to fucking hell!” as loud as I can. I think a lot of people would like to say that too. The first time we performed some of these songs was just after the invasion of Iraq. We were upset about an obviously trumped-up, over-hyped, uncalled for and deadly conflict along with everything else the administration was doing to this country. Longtime fans of the Dead Kennedys and DOA and the like, and having the amplifiers to do it, we tore through about 20 songs in 20 minutes making up the titles as we went along ( that session was released as a 3” CDR called Screws in the Ceiling). The titles and the songs have been somewhat fine-tuned by live shows since then. We started at the roster of the Project for the New American Century and branched out from there. People at the show where we first performed these songs live loved them -- lots of applause from an art gallery crowd. When we played them in front of kids at a Stickfigure showcase a few weeks later, they went nuts too. This was two or three years ago. We announced in late October 2004 that we hoped not to have to play any of these songs again, but now they do seem to have a wider, more receptive audience. And there's new targets/titles in the news every week.

Morphizm: But it made me laugh so hard at the Bush administration's expense that I liked it. Is that what you were going for? With song titles like "Karl Rove Forced to Roam the Earth Forever as One of the Living Dead Feeding on Raw Sewage” and "Donald Rumsfeld Buried up to his Neck in Dogshit with Lawnmower on Top”, I'm guessing the answer is yes.
SV: Are we going for laughter? I don't know. The song titles, mostly from Marshall, are intentionally ridiculous. Ludicrous ways for ludicrous people to meet their demise.

Morphizm: Is this type of fury finding a home after Bush has fucked everything up?
SV: What can I say? "Protest" has found a voice in over-intellectualized art and under-intellectualized pith. But, we were looking for something visceral and we had to push ourselves to find it.

Morphizm: You've got songs that are seconds-long blasts of noise and frustration, then 23-minute epics of noise and feedback. If it's all about the catharsis, then why so short?
SV: For me, it's about playing as hard and fast as I can. So, sure, it's about catharsis. But catharsis comes in many different packages; we try to demonstrate that. Plus, this disc is really only representative of an earlier incarnation of the band. We rarely even play this stuff anymore.
MA: Short songs allow for more titles, and there's no way any of us (except maybe Tony) could keep up that kind of explosive meltdown for more than a few minutes at a time. The hardcore stuff is also only one side of the 20-sided dice that is Zandosis. We've done shows that are 60-minute minimalist pieces and others that involve prepared piano and amplified metals and conch shells. We try to keep it interesting for ourselves and the listener, and that better reflects our own musical interests.

Morphizm: Is political music too apologetic? If it truly wore its heart on its sleeve, would it sound more like Zandosis?
SV: Oh, completely. I think the only thing I've ever read about Zandosis that was dead on was some kid at UC Berkeley saying that it was "political music." And then he said, well, it might be "making fun of political music." Sure. It's never this or that: it's both.
MA: Not sure about this. The politics of dancing? The politics of love? Isn't everything political in some way? Maybe. I know for me there's no better way to get my point across to the audience than to grab the microphone and say it point blank -- especially when dealing with the current administration. Most people read headlines, not stories. We feel like this grabs their attention before they can move on. There's no lyrics for them to get bogged down in either, just feeling. And besides, none of these songs are copyrighted, so really everyone should start sounding like Zandosis. Or making up their own songs.

Morphizm: Your frustration is legit and everywhere. What else do you think the world should do about the Bush administration?
SV: Vote, obviously. Use logic -- or learn it. Educate yourself. Read from many different sources: liberal, conservative, moderate. There are a lot of evil people who don't want to relinquish their grasp, education is the only way to eradicate the problem. As long as the herd remains ignorant.
MA: The basic answer is to vote these people out of office -- from the White House all the way down to your local Board of Education. It's not that hard to pick these right-wing, backwards-thinking, blowhards out. They tend to generate their own nutty publicity. They're trying to rally the world into a fight against Islamic extremists who want to rule the world based on their own strict opinion of religion, yet most of today's “conservatives” want the same thing in this country for our school children, women and society in general. Doesn't anyone else see this? I think there is a growing awareness of the damage done to this country in the last six years, and hope that voters will bring us back to the middle where we should be. I don't particularly think we need to swing to the far left or anything. I think our government needs to represent the voices of all of us, which makes me a crazy dreamer, doesn't it? The Bush administration has placed so many of their own kind -- upward failures, donors, hacks, etc. -- in positions of power in our government that it's going to take a lot of undoing to make things right again and make government work for all of us again. Look at FEMA. We all should pay taxes and we all should expect our government to be there in times of great crisis, but to stay out of our private and personal lives. Is that too much to ask?

September 15, 2006