on seeing Sex Vid live in Barcelona

Sex Vid are, i guess, on the verge of not being cool anymore, as they're popular with 'hipsters' (the great phantom menace of the punks) and liked by more than ten persons, but it's still one of the two bands in recent memory that make my skin crawl whenever I hear them. The sheer amount of unbelievably real bad vibes present in their songs and layouts -which somehow reek (to me, at least) of Throbbing Gristle's nightmarish soundtracks to doing cheap drugs in grey tower blocks, or the early SST Records camp's explorations of the dark side of '60s counterculture- are something I just can't help but develop a certain affinity to and identify with, whereas even the best of the rest of the bands of today are nothing but (in some cases GREAT) entertainment. And no, this has nothing to do with the retarded "modern day Black Flag" tag that's thrown around every three months to describe every other band, and no, Sex Vid don't seem to be better than they actually are because of the shitty general state of hardcore punk music of today.

The show itself was pretty much a blur of crushing noise, yet executed with tightness and precision, much like being caught inside an early Die Kreuzen rehearsal tape from the day when Dan Kubinski had a sore throat, the band played for about 15 minutes, beers were flung, drunken mosh antics ensued, authentic crusties hated their hipster asses, and we all went home drunk and with ringing ears.

a real life dialogue, circa today...

...between me and somebody I barely know.

-You know, you popped up in one of my dreams today.
-Really?
-Yeah, you see i was riding a train and as I got off you approached me and asked me 'When am I gonna stop???'


This was made all the more creepy by the fact I've been asking myself that very question a lot lately.





--------------



the abnormaly long hiatus has been due to my being extremely busy with the real world and also waiting on two interviews with people who seem to be also extremely busy. sorry.

i'm not dead, i'm just busy preparing an art show.

i'll be back soon, with some good stuff, meanwhile, you can go here:

putrid diamonds!

I'm pretty sure you could probably write a full book based on Jam song titles alone, but 'Days of speed and slow times mondays' is such a brilliant line, except Paul the asshole forgot about the word 'terrifying' in his glamorized recollection of being a teenage upper lover. For example, he forgot when you look at yourself in the mirror after a full weekend awake and you realize the usual pasty plaque brought in by dehydration has started to dry up for good and darken and turn different hues of green and brown in just a few hours and your teeth look like something out of a Rudimentary Peni record, just two rows of perfectly aligned (well, maybe..) putrid diamonds just waiting for some strange fetus-esque goblin to pop out of your throat and take you on tour with Disrupt or something. Scary, scary, scary. That's when you brush your teeth with so much energy you might as well pull them out and proceed to freak the fuck out for a few minutes until you realize they're actually ok, they just had some dirt and dust from the squat you were in last night stuck to them.

Go kiss your mom in the mouth.


------------------------------------------------


also, remember kids: DFTS / DFTS

Mateus Mondini

Mateus Mondini, a.k.a 'Maradona' is the best thing to happen to band photography since Glenn E. Friedman, and the best current documentalist of the DIY hardcore punk scene. This interview was done for Vice Magazine, but it was not to their liking and thus rejected, and I didn't really feel like letting it rot forever. Granted, I could have gone back and added a few less stupid questions to it, but I really did not feel like taking up more of Mateus' precious time. No I did not ask him about Sarcófago or Regina Do Santos, but hey, you can't always win.

Brazil seems to be a very dangerous country..aren't you scared of carrying all your equipment around to dirty punk shows in sketchy places? or do you have a private escort like some people do out there?

I would love to have a body guard if he is a chimpanzee or a gorilla, but we are not that wild, even living in São Paulo I never had a lot of problem with thieves but of course I’m scared walking everywhere with my only equipament in the backpack, so I did a insurance of it all and now I can walk with the camera everywhere without fear.



My friend Pablo asks if you've ever been beat up for being in the pit taking up space and getting in everybody's way while they're trying to have some fun..

Beat up never, but spits, bubblegum sometimes, I used to have a lot of problens with cider in London, but it use to happening in big shows where im working in the front of the fans crushed in the grill, im punk shows I already had problens with broken equipament, flash, lenses, glasses, camera, well, everything, but it’s the result of someone stage dive, pogo or even my fault, I don’t think someone broke my stuff for evil, always it happened I think was one accident, in a punk show I..m there to have fun too, so I do the pogo, singing, Im just one more in the crowd, It's a little more boring to be with the camera but…




Please tell us about 'Fodido E Xerocado', the book you and your partner in crime Daigo have produced..

It’s a fanzine with just photos of punk(or related) bands that was taken by me and my friend Diago, inside a silk screened envelop, its free and its used to be 100-200 each edition that goes out every 2 or 3 months, we are working in number 11 now and we start it because our photos was just in internet and we wanted something that you can hold and carry to toilet. Two years ago our friend Thiago released one better looking volume with some colour photos but it still not a book, maybe one day.
Daigo is nice, one of my best friends and one of the best journalist photographers of today, very talented, dedicated, organized and can fucked up any amazing band with a bad taste tattoo in his arm as one "Everything went Black" with a baby hand, or a Embrace word game

In my country, Brazil is famous for producing excellent shemales, myth or truth? are there or have there ever been trannies in the Brazilian hcpunk scene?

Yeah transvestites are one of the biggest brazilian exports, I don’t know any punk travesti today but have some historys about a punk gang from the early 80s called Punk Dolls, the old punks always refer to they as “punks travestis” but I don’t know if they were more to New York Dolls or to Wayne County, anyway they were always involved in fights had one show that someone put fire in their hair and the venue was taken by the smell of burnt hair.



You've travelled all over Europe photographing tons of bands and scene celebrities, i'm sure this has produced embarassing stories you can now tell to millions of readers...right? is it true that Invasión/Destino Final have an art director that coreographs their poses and sprays the room with hairspray every three minutes?

During a show in sweden after the singer of Clorox Girls was doing a lot of sieg heiling while naked and also wearing a pink cowboy hat, he commanded for everyone else to be naked, after it he was almost arrested for lighting cigaretttes and placing them in everyone's mouths (still while naked) since smoking indoors is illegal in Sweden. With Press Gang was normal some members jerk off in the van while watching 80s porno movies.
In a festival, I entered in our room and see a couple of completely drunk crusties going out of my bed, I'm not sure what happened there but I prefered sleep in the sleeping bag that day.
Not so embarassing but uncomfortable was 4 days travelling across Austria, with 9 people in the van that just had seat for 3 people in the front and no seats or windows in the back, so were 4 days of long drives lying in the dark with 5 other people, more all the bags and gear, pissing in water bottles and trying to sleep the most possible.
haha, i don't think Invasion need it, they are a amazing band and very easy to photograph, Guille is the Gisele Bundchen of punk rock, any click and you have a good photo.



I recently saw the 'Botinada' documentary about the history of punk in Brazil, and there's this dude that lost his arm throwing a molotov cocktail at a rival gang and now has a fucking hook!!! i'm sure there are millions of amazing stories related to this living legend right??

well, nothing compared with the molotov and hook story, he isn't a guy that you see everyday but he appears in some shows, I remember a show that his band played, it was he singing and much younger guys playing, but he got very drunk before the show, so just the young guys played and he stayed drunk behind the stage, in other show, while a vegan straight edge band played he took the mic and start scream things like "fuck the cows, we have to eat the cows..." but nobody gave a lot of attention, in end 90s he directed one "Opera Punk" about the fights between punk gangs from São Paulo and ABC, and its all that i know.


Photos: Concentration Summer Camps, Gorilla Angreb, Masshysteri, Invasión.
http://www.flickr.com/mateuspatche

the number eleven.

Chop it off? nah, not really on my list. I mean, if i got through high school with an extra pinkie I might as well let it stay. After all, I'm already used to it, and it's not like it's a huge deformity or nothing. Clever guys always ask if it's hard to get gloves, but it's not like you need them with this weather, right? It's always in the mid 60s at least around here, barely any rain.
Besides, it's not like surgical amputation is a walk in the park, specially not on your left hand. Hands are complicated, man. They're a very complex structure of bones, muscle tissue, cartilage, they're all tensed up, perfectly engineered. So, if you chop off a finger, it's not like you can just bandage it up and wait for it to heal, you know? It's like taking the corner stone out of a cathedral wall, all those cute arches will just go to hell then. You have to cut up some extra tissue, tuck it in, sew it up, and then you still have to wait for it to readjust, for all the different parts to fit into each other, and that's a good four months or so of physical therapy, things shifting places, bones and muscles and veins crawling under your skin and fitting into each other. You even get bruises all over your hand because of all the moving and shaking down there. And then, even if your surgeon is very good at it, there's the chance of ending up with a small stump. See, in order to avoid ending up with one on the side of your hand, you need a surgeon who can actually sculpt the flesh and bones where the finger was, and even still, once everything is settled, some bones might have been displaced so you can still end up with a little poker on the side of your hand, and I'm pretty fucking sure that looks even more fucked up under a gnarly scar than a sixth finger.

MAXIMO VOLUMEN: inyecciones por el bul.

If you're from Spain, you'll listen to Eskorbuto and La Polla Records around the age of 12 or so, even if that's all the contact you'll ever make with punk rock, they're kind of an institution here, even my mom throws the name 'Eskorbuto' around when she wants a cliché band name to describe the shit her son is into.
It's also pretty usual that you eventually end up neglecting those bands when you get into American hardcore. So all the interest that classic Spanish punk has been getting in the past few years from the scenester elite is pretty baffling to say the least. The funny part is seeing people jock stuff like Cocadictos or Morticia Y Los Decrepitos which was never that good to begin with and would never warrant any interest if it wasn't for their 'classic third world rare punk status', the actually FUN part is seeing that classic style being picked up by bands like Peligro Social or Deskonocidos and done very very well.
Anyway, it's pretty amazing that with all the interest in the genre, when even the super rare (and RAW!!) Delirium Tremens demo has been repressed, the hordes of MRR-worshipping youngsters STILL don't name drop the MAXIMO VOLUMEN demo like it's going out of style. Very little is known about this band, and their only recorded output seems to be this mysterious 1987 demo (there's rumours about an unreleased 7", but nothing is confirmed), which showcases their crazy, over the top manic energy, totally under the influence of then contemporary American (esp. early C.O.C., Septic Death and the Venice Beach scene) and Italian hardcore, specially when it comes to singer Riski's ripping vocals, which definitely bring to mind Negazione. According to my sources, the band was formed by ex-members of other bands from Girona like Exterminio, Diskordia, Vomitos Clandestinos, Kritenio or ADR/Atake De Ruido, and later morphed into Hugger Mugger when Riski quit the band.



Even though the crude recording adds a layer of sloppyness to the whole tape, the band is a lot tighter than earlier Spanish hardcore bands (i.e. Antidogmatikss, L'Odi Social..), and even manage to construct songs that go a bit beyond the verse-chorus-verse,and seem to have a thing for slower intros, constant tempo shifts, and lengthy songs (all but one of the 11 songs are over 2 minutes long).



Lyrically, they are pretty much what you'd expect from a mid 80's hardcore band: blatant socio-political statements, often viewed from a deeply dark and twisted philosophical perspective (another aspect shared with Italian hc), bloating everyday situations into grandiose horror stories. This reaches it's maximum expression in "El mas pequeño" a traumatic childhood experience narrated in over 5 minutes of slow, dark, brooding hardcore. which could very well be the Spanish equivalent of Jerry's Kids 'raise the curtain'. It's not, however the top hit of the tape, this being "Transportes públicos" a raging, vicious attack on the local transport authorities, which extorts the listener to avoid fare whenever possible, making it seem like the most epic of ordeals:

Don't pay, they're ours.
They're ours, they're a public service.
If no one payed, the train conductor wouldn't dare step in,
and then, we would have won the final battle,
our battle.


Besides the band itself, singer Risky later fronted the band Youth Spirit, which apparently played instrumental Slapshot covers (?) and also ran Anaconda Records, a small extreme music label/distro, which gave birth to countless rumours and anecdotes throughout the 1990's about his legendary persona (including him cooking Youth Of Today some paella) and the insane reviews in his mailorder catalogs, and then disappeared from the scene. A few years ago, I was working at a record shop and while processing a credit card payment I noticed the name...yes, it was Risky himself. I had been brought up in the scene hearing about this man, and now there he was, in front of me, wearing a Judge longsleeve and looking after his baby daughter. I shivered, introduced myself and mentioned how much me and my friends worshipped his band. He smiled shyly, as if he was embarrassed of having been involved in this piece of history, and said that "that was too long ago, I barely remember myself", but still thanked me for the praise. I told him he should reissue the demo, and he laughed while waving goodbye.


Maximo Volumen - demo 1987


Also, 90s hc nerds will remember E150 covered Maximo Volumen's "Locura de guerra" on their 1996 split with Ivich.

Believe the hype.



Note: this post would have never been the same without the wealth of information and images passed on to me by Edu from One Chord. Thanks!!