FROM THE DEPTHS

This interview was made with Brian few months ago; I'm really sorry if I'm putting this online only now. For me "From the Depths" are one of the most influential bands around. Born from the ashes of Catharsis and Requiem, they play a fast, melancholic, angry crust/hardcore with direct and really smart lyrics. A great band with a lot of things to say.


Introduce yourself as band, but in particular as individuals.

From the Depths is Neal, Rob, Monica, Steve, and me, Brian.

What do you think about all the riots that we have nowadays in middle-est?
from what point do you think they start, and why everything is happening only now?

Capitalism is entering a new period of crisis. Because technological progress has reduced the need for workers and so much of the wealth of the world has been concentrated in a few hands, the old ways of collecting profits and keeping discontent under control are breaking down. That’s why there are so many people unemployed in the mid-East, while other people have billions and billions of dollars. We’re going to see a lot more uprisings like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt. It’s up to us to help offer the possibility of fighting for real positive change, for true freedom, not for “better democracy” or any other lies like that… or, worse, for fucking fascism. This is an extremely important time ahead.

Sometimes it happens to ear words such as primitivism, but maybe it’s explained in a wrong way; it seems that people have a wrong idea about it, considering it more like a misanthropic-nihilistic attitude, than a kind of green revolution.
what’s your idea about it, and how do you live this idea in your life?

It seems that Italy and Spain are some of the only places in Europe that understand primitivism, no? For me, really opposing oppression means questioning Western civilization, which has done so much horrible damage to other societies that knew a lot more about living in harmony with the natural environment. I don’t know if I would call myself a primitivist—the wild nature we used to live in has been mostly destroyed, and even after a revolution we will have to survive in ruins, not in a forest—but all of us are critical of what you might call “civilization.”
We’re not just fighting for the workers to own the factories, but to end the industrial destruction of the natural world. That destruction can’t be separated from the projects of colonization and racism—the idea of revolution isn’t to make ourselves the rulers of the world, but to make an end of “ruling” itself. I don’t think this is misanthropic nihilism, but rather a part of trying to reconnect with the world that human beings lived in harmony with for the first one million years of our existence.
As for how we live this in our lives—it influences all the different anarchist projects we are involved in, shaping our goals when we are organizing for community events or social struggles. I guess some of us try to reconnect with nature on a personal basis, too, like Monica planting gardens and studying herbal medicine. And of course we try to help with struggles against pollution and environmental damage.

During these days i’m thinking about the idea of “happines” because it seems that in our modern society we are not able to be happy anymore and even when we reach our goals and we should be happy, this happiness can’t find a right place in our life; it seems that it’s just considered more like the end of a pain; do you feel the same thing or not? could you explain what’s your idea about it?

Personally, when I became an anarchist I set out to see if it was possible to live a truly free and happy life in this fucked up world. I have had lots of beautiful experiences, but things are still very sad usually, with so many of the things that make life matter being destroyed or taken away. In the moments when we are fighting together, when we take over a space and establish a new destiny for ourselves inside it, then I can feel a true happiness; but I never can get that from just trying to enjoy the pathetic luxuries of consumer society. But I’m a crazy anarchist; I’m different from most people, who have figured out how to accommodate themselves to this system, and have never experienced anything else.

One of the songs that I really like of your last LP is “Martyr”; but for you, Who are the real martyrs of this society?

All of us are, I suppose. The song is about soldiers, specifically, but it also could apply to anyone who reduces himself to an instrument serving one ideology in the infinity of the world.
A funny thing about throwing your life away is that it’s much easier to do it when you’re doing something that everyone else approves of and encourages. I think that in some ways it is harder for a young person in the US to break a window of a bank—thus violating all the rules and values she has been taught her whole life—than it is for people to join the army and go kill civilians and even get killed. There is a tremendous propaganda machine justifying the soldiers’ activity, along with centuries of traditions. But the vandal who breaks the bank windows has to take personal responsibility for her actions, reinventing the value system of an entire society inside herself. That’s true courage.

How was born the collaboration with next victim?

Monica and I have loved their music since they started! It is an honor for us to share a record with a band we like so much. Some of the members were in Mind Pollution, another great band, that a previous band I was in (Requiem) played with when we toured Europe in 2005.

Are you all vegan in the band? how do you live this choice day by day?

I’m the only strict vegan in the band. Everyone in the band thinks about animal liberation and about resisting capitalism, but people have different ideas of what the most effective ways to do that are. In the US, some anticapitalists are also critiquing veganism, arguing that it gives the impression that different consumer choices can solve our problems, rather than revolutionary struggle. The processes through which vegetables are industrially mass-produced are also destructive and exploitative and alienating. For me, though, veganism and revolutionary struggle together is the best solution. Everything is a compromise in some way or another, except the moment when you are working in the neighborhood community garden or wearing a mask and liberating animals from laboratories. All of us choose the compromises that feel right for us personally while remaining committed to doing a lot more than just picking “the right foods” in a supermarket.
But I will never eat animal products again. It makes me too fucking angry. It reminds me of the way they treat us as workers, using up our lives—only it’s even worse.

Nowadays with internet, facebook, twitter and all the stuff like these, I think that we are closer one to each other, it’s possible to share in a best way our thoughts, our fears and our dreams, but there are a lot of darkest parts inside everything; how you look at this thing? is everything positive for you or do you feel some negative aspects in all this?

I think that the new technologies are basically “new enclosures” of something that used to be free and uncontrollable. Hundreds of years ago, the aristocrats put fences around the common land that peasants had shared; this was the beginning of capitalism. In the same way, now that capitalism has conquered and used up almost the whole planet, our own mental processes and social networks are being colonized—things we didn’t used to have to go through technology to access. Riding in the subway, you can see that social class determines exactly how much access people have to each other and the assembled knowledge of our civilization. Now those too poor to afford computers are not just second class citizens, but second class human beings. In a non-capitalist world, perhaps we would develop different technologies from these same starting points, technologies that could be truly empowering and liberating. In the meantime, we try to find the best things about the current technologies: specifically, the ways we can use them to work towards overthrowing the capitalist system.

What’s the last movie and the last book that you have read and that you can recommend to our readers?

I’m afraid that at my age, my tastes are somewhat pretentious and obscure! Right now I’m just finishing up Milan Kundera’s book The Joke, and the most recent movie I really enjoyed was Tinto Brass’s l’Urlo. I guess I also saw Office Space recently, which was funny and sort of dumb but had a little bit of rebellion hidden in it.

Any future plan with the band? maybe another tour in Europe?

I’m afraid our band probably won’t make it back to Europe. I would love to, but we are now really busy with other things. Steve lives on a boat in the ocean, as a way of avoiding rent and work, so he’s rarely around. Neal is really busy with anarchist projects supporting prisoners and rebellion inside prisons. Monica is busy studying herbal health care and working with me and others on publishing projects, like the magazine Rolling Thunder. We will at least play some more shows in the US, though.

Here's our information, for anyone who wants to contact us: www.fromthedepths.info

Thanks again!