Damn skippy, when you talk about English anarcho-punk, you better mention ANTISECT. To me, the band was more than just epic, they were crustadelic and gnarlytastic. When I first heard In Darkness There Is No Choice, I was like, oh yeah, it’s on…Rudimentary Peni better watch out. ANTISECT had that off-the-deep-end vibe like Disorder, but packed the fury of Discharge. There is not one weak song on this album and the metallic guitars on this album are death blades. What about the drums…they have this killer primitive tribal energy about them, and the way they were mixed was perfect. On the track “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” you can hear how they laid the foundation for the emotional parts you find in crust today. Also, when you listen to this record, you realize that world has not changed too much; many of the injustices that ANTISECT sang about have only gotten tenfold worse.
I see at your gig in London the movie ‘Zeitgeist’ was played, do you think our world is truly fucked and has turned into George Orwell’s ‘1984’? You used to have TV’s on the stage showing animal abuse etc in the eighties didn’t you?
No. We don’t think our world is truly fucked. If we thought that, there would be no point to any of this. Central to any libertarian standpoint has to be the belief that people are basically good. Circumstances may influence us to behave in ways that we feel may offer the best chance of self preservation, and this may not
always be for the greater good, but we must understand the reasons why, before we can hope to find any clear solutions or possible ways forward.
It’s not 1984, but it is 2012 and things are a lot more subtle in this version. Modern technologies make the potential for control ever greater, but access to
technology also throws up possibilities for greater organisation for those with the will for change. The internet, for example, cannot be censored. Sure, ways will be found to restrict it’s use, but for the most part, it’s out there now and it will be nigh on impossible to turn back the clock. Unpredictable? Yes. A lot of unsavoury shit? Yes. But right now, this is an inevitability, as for the most part, all the good and the
bad that’s out there can only represent a mirror to our society with all that that entails. Access to communication though, is a valuable thing and cannot be
underestimated.
We used to show various films, etc. Not specifically only centred around animal abuse, though that was a part of it. Music and images when set together can have an uncanny knack of presenting something more than the sum of their parts, and this is definitely something that we will still explore.