Awesome response. I just thought it was intense. But At Sea's music is like that without the visuals. What do I say? I say how about you play some video of muppets and children playing? If a deathmetal band sang about bunnies and green fields, do you think people would notice the lyrics or just the feeling of the music?
 

Great show.
 

F U C K
 

Everyday American "liberal fascism" is at least as terrifying as German "totalitarian fascism", it's just alot more complex, dispersed and planetary, and therefore that much more difficult to discern, much less represent, visually. For instance, since WWII, the United States has killed more than 12 million "Others", in all of our foreign wars combined (see L. Mosqueda, "Shocked and Horrified" http://www.counterpunch.org/mosqueda.html and then adjust that for Iraq and Afghanistan), which is of course, twice what the Nazis killed in the concentration camps; the main difference between liberal and totalitarian fascism seems to be that our variety takes a great deal longer to exterminate the same numbers of people, but ultimately ends up disposing of far more bodies in the process. Because of the complexity of liberal fascism, which is not only American, but a dispersed, complex project of the West as a whole (as well as the dozens of comprador states throughout the non-Western world that do our dirty work for us), there are no films that can really capture the true grandeur of the horror that it involves - other than, that is, the more specific, situated kinds of narratives, such as Bahman Ghobadi's "Turtles Can Fly" (2004), but then those don't generally make great backdrops for this kind of music, so who knows, there's rarely a perfect match; I think what you've done here is you've opened a dialogue, and that's the manner in which At Sea's music has always spoken to me most deeply, not by "providing answers" like the "political punk" bands that dominated Ye Olde Scene circa 1977-1997 or whatever (hence the prevalence of lyrics in that music, to tell the audience what to think, how to think about it), but by provoking *questions*, by rendering the *complexities* of our time perceptible. I admit, I'm the one who said "fascism is not something to be played with", but I didn't mean by that the projection of Riefenstahl (which I think actually has the opposite effect), I meant the way that liberalism plays with it constantly, and the way that I've heard some people play into that element in casual conversation. As we all know, Hitler was elected more "democratically" than even Bush - that is, before using the loopholes that every modern state constitution possesses, including our own, he then declared a 12-year state of emergency and exterminated millions. So, this means that American-<myspace>style</myspace> - or Weimar-<myspace>style</myspace> - liberalism it is the very *condition of possibility* for fascism, because ultimately, it just says, hey, we're all "individuals", so therefore "anything goes", "everything is equal to everything else", it's all consumable, it's all marketable so "it's all good".

And it's precisely this kind of nihilism that capitalism requires in order to function in its global form.
 

One more thing, if a figure on the level of Hitler ever appears again, and no, I don't think Bush is quite there (as repulsive and violent as he is, he is still a liberal rather than totalitarian fascist), industrialized extermination will be far more efficient and extensive than it was last time around.

The Nazis simply used the technologies they had available at the time and pushed them to the furthest extent imaginable in the service of total war, which primarily meant the earliest form of the modern computer (IBM-supplied punchcard sorters, which had numbers that corresponded to those tattooed on the detainees wrists - this aside, of course, from the cinema, the radio, etc.).

All one needs to do in order to comprehend how much more extensive and complete the process of industrialized extermination would be in our time, is to take a look at the technologies the Pentagon is developing on a constant basis, such as "Total Information Awareness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office), which are based upon the convergence of *all* media into a single fiber-optic infrastructure of mass surveillance and social sorting.

Countries like China are already putting these American-produced technologies into use on their own populations, who will serve as the "testing grounds" for what they hope to eventually enact in Western societies (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12security.html ).

Paul Virilio's summary of these developments still hits me hard when all of this comes up:

"Hitler may have lost the battle, but he most certainly won the war".
 

In about a week or so, Syndromes and A Century (2006), the masterpiece of director Apichatpong Weerassethakul, will finally play in its home country after a year-long ban on its domestic release. No less than 5 scenes will be cut out due to a Facism-era law that has allowed various medical, religious, and social councils to control a national image where even a monk playing a guitar was deemed 'inappropriate'. The director has decided to replace the cut scenes with black space, the longest of which will run for 7 minutes. Hopefully the music will still be heard.
 

I'm behind your decisions as an artist and definitly think that your music merits visual aid. The blending of live music with visual art is on the rise and the interplay between the two could be said to be an art form all in itself. Rock on.