Episode 19: Mark Gergis (Porest, Neung Phak, Sublime Frequencies)

The Who Cares Anyway Podcast · Jan 04, 2024

Transcript

you know, I got held up at gunpoint three or four times, you know, other people, you know, were beaten violently and stuff, but it was worth it.

Hello and welcome to episode 19 of the Who Cares Anyway podcast. My guest on this episode is Mark Gerges. And where to start with Mark Gerges? Well, maybe the place to start would be Porest, P -O -R -E -S -T, which we heard a little snippet of there in the intro music and we'll hear more excerpts of throughout this episode, but Porest being the more or less solo project that he has had going since at least the early 2000s, although as we'll hear in this episode it arguably dates back to the 1970s. But in addition to Porus there is also Monopause and Neuengfock, a group that he co -founded with previous Who Cares Anyway podcast guest Peter Konheim in the early 90s in Oakland. And for the same reason that I wanted to have Peter Konheim on as a guest, I wanted to have Mark on to get into some of that adjacent history meaning adjacent both in space with Oakland being on the other side of the bay from San Francisco and time with most of most of monopause slash knowing Fox activity coming just after the period where the book ends you know 1995 being sort of the end of the book but a Monopause slash Neuengfag continuing into the mid -2000s and then as if that weren't enough Mark Gjergis has also been a key contributor throughout the Lifespan of the Sublime Frequencies label and that in turn connects us back to another previous guest Hisham Mayet Guest on episode 6 and so there's some overlap in both of those senses, but how does it all fit together? Well that was sort of an overarching question that I had coming into this episode that I actually almost forgot to ask, or did forget to ask, but we sort of wind our way through all these different topics and then toward the end Mark sort of brings us back to that question of, you know, how does this fit together in terms of his original music under the name Porous and what he did with Monopause on the one hand and then his archival slash audio excavation work, unearthing and compiling music from far -flung parts of the world, from Southeast Asia to Syria and Iraq and elsewhere. One other thing I wanted to mention, Mark's brother Eric, who is referred to a couple of times in this episode, had an accident, injury in the fall of 2023. I don't know the details, but I know that there's a GoFundMe that I made a little contribution to and many others have as well, but there will be a link to that in the show notes. I think they've almost reached their goal but the link again will be in the show notes along with links to Mark Gerges' various Bandcamp pages with poorest sublime frequencies etc. And so I think, I

think that is enough background for us to get on into this episode. So without Without any further ado, here is my interview with Mark Gjergjes. Well, I grew up in the East East Bay in the suburbs and we lived in Oakland. And then in the early 70s, we moved to Lafayette, California, which is out near Walnut Creek. And it's there that I grew up and the damage was done out there. So I came from a kind of a wildly normal, but wildly crazy family at the same time. My dad's from Iraq. My mom is a woman from California

and she became a Seventh -day Adventist in the mid 70s. and grew up in a household where the policies were such that it was G -rated films only and no rock and roll and that kind of thing. And I just got super obsessed with whatever I could get a hold of in the world and in this giant world just from the TV set if I was allowed to watch it. So at some point, I just realized that was nowhere. And I had a tape recorder. And I had a sibling, Eric, who I still collaborate with. We would do these kind of radio plays and play instruments poorly and just kind of do, you know, weirdly scripted stuff for people on tapes and perform it on the fireplace mantle

and that kind of thing. So it started at a really young age. I just released a, here's a plug. I just released a 19, porous 1976, 1977 album album up on Bandcamp and that kind of cements or imagines that there was a porous in the 70s but I guess there was because it's just me and and Eric's on that too but yeah it all started way way way back then and then you know fast forward in the mid 80s or so I just you know kind of realized that I lived next to Berkeley in Oakland and it was a Bart right away and I would just start venturing out there and, you know, met a lot of great people, some at school, some out out there and go to going to San Francisco and just, you get blow my mind with music and literature and good psychedelics and, you kind of force my perspective into something else at some point, you know, there was a lot, it was a big world out there. And there was a lot going on. I didn't understand politically at the time, you know, like, in literary terms, and my knowledge of anything,

you know, I just felt really small, all of a sudden, which is a great place to find yourself, I think, and just wanted to expand that and start learning and start, you know, creating, I just, I always wanted to create, I was always doing like cell animation, or super eight films and and sound and audio. So you end up gravitating toward people that do things like you do, you know, and I was lucky to meet some other Californians, some in Southern California, some around me in school and who wanted to do those sort of things. And throughout the late 80s in Lafayette and Concord, you know, I had these kind of just balls out noise tape bands, you know, we just do basically like, you know, field recordings and then distort them through line, Radio Shack line mixer, and know, like this is in the late 80s and add stuff to them and yell over them or, you know, do weird, random, you know, poetry that made no sense, or, you

that kind of thing, and just had a great time doing that stuff. And we were, you know, super inspired by what we were listening to, and also what we what we couldn't hear what we were, you know, ideas we had that weren't being expressed that we thought so some of that stuff is, uh, obviously left better on those old tapes, but, uh, but, but we had a good time and, uh, eventually that became a little bit more refined, we thought in, uh, in the form of like, you know, using samples or, you know, I say samples because at the time samples were, yeah, it was pretty radical. It wasn't like, you know, sample, you know, it was like, um, more, you know, you're incorporating your phone, your field recordings or stuff you get off TV and, you know, you'd hear that on Chrome records and stuff like that too, you know, where, you know, obviously like you're playing with media, you had negative land, negative land blew my mind, you know, accidentally again in the Bay area, you know, there's this, there's a, there's the blessing of radio. We free internet, you know, eighties, you're a teenager and you're, you're in your room in the suburbs, KPFA had a really strong station and negative land had that show over the edge for, for so many years, decades. And I accidentally tuned into that, I forget what state of mind I was in, it was about one or two in the morning on a Halloween, 1985. And I had never really heard anybody do anything like that with sound that clicked so hard with me. And these were the live shows they would do, just mania, a lot of them are archived. I can't find that one, I've tried.

But I think that sort of changed my life that night. I like those life changing kind of influences and events and they were certainly one of them. I was fortunate to get turned on to Sun City Girls that same year in 1985. A friend of mine, Ron Dillon, came up from boarding school in Arizona via LA and he had that first record of the Sun City Girls and we'd listen to that all the time. You know, it's just, I was kind of like bombarded with all kinds of music that year. And it blew my mind from, you know, really deep stuff like, like the girls or negative land, or, you know, to, to like, kind of well -loved post -punk stuff like, you know, minute managers Purdue and like, you know, the punk scenes all over the place, super regional stuff I would get into. And, uh, it all just kind of made a lot of sense, you know, uh, just immersing in that. And I'm, I'm pretty obsessive anyway. So I get deep into stuff like that. And have I answered your question yet? Well, yeah, and we can actually, we can, as they say, circle back.

But I was going to interject one thing because you sort of said something that I had already been thinking, which was, you know, there's these two kind of traditions that that are in your music, Negative Land and Sun City Girls. And those are both West Coast, very distinct lineages or traditions and Monopause might lean a little closer to the negative land side of things. Porous definitely has those techniques but also maybe the, the darker sense of humor of, and some of the other commentary of Sun City Girls. And then I guess Sublime Frequencies I guess you could say maybe Sun City Girls slash Sublime Frequencies and negative land but but those are both present and so I was going to I was curious when, yeah, when you came across those but hey, both of them in 1985? Pretty early on. Yeah. I mean, you know, I went from listening to pop music in, you know, a couple of years earlier just because that's what was on the radio or whatever to English, you know, new wave stuff I would hear at school as a 13 or 14 year old, you know, whatever the, you know, the stuff you'd get on the radio that was like more, you know, that showed you that there was something else, you know, like even Devo would make it to the radio or Sparks or something like that.

And then you'd realize, oh, there's was this kind of quirky world or there's this or like and I don't understand it but I want to and let's dive deeper into that and or Frank Zappa or you know obviously the world of music and sound in a pre -internet world you've got your radio you've got your television and you've got your influences I think that's a really astute um you know if you were my therapist and you just told me that but it's a fusion of negative land and sun city girls I'd probably you know yeah you're probably right because you click with what you feel is like -minded as well. Also, then when you start doing your own work and you start taking that work a little bit more seriously, or at least working a little bit harder on it to try and make it do something, turn on a machine that's you and it says something and expresses something at its base level. Me anyway, I'd like to express or do something on a stage or on an album that I'm not able to hear, that I feel hasn't been expressed. And, you know, I want to be proven wrong all the time. I want to go out and see something that I'm, you know, that I'm feeling and thinking about, but yet I don't often see it. So, I have to do that.

And that's kind of the feeling of with bands like Monopause, with more of the conceptual, you know, hijinks or presentation or, you know, whatever behind those outfits, like, you know, or even my earlier band, Screenbread, which was a duo, you know, with a guy named Doug Lofswald. It was like a lot of loops and samples, and we did some performance stuff too. It's basically trying to pull off something that we would like to see on a stage or hear on a record, but we aren't quite hearing it. We're hearing elements of it, but, you know, I guess we have to get up there and blow our own minds, you know, in addition to everybody else's. But it's, yeah, it's about presenting something that isn't seen that you feel. And so I feel there's a kinship there. there. And I found that in the kind of no rules, you know, kind of anarchistic approach that both of those negative land -sensitive rules had, for sure, that really defying everything that had been laid out before and showing that there are endless possibilities. There's no answers to any questions. There's, you know, it's do whatever you want to do. You know, it's not just a free -for -all, you know, plink -plonk. There's a lot of thought going going on there, but it's also allowed to plink plonk around, you it's also allowed to meander and, and do crazy things and then turn on its head at 360 degrees and be something else.

And that, that, that was the most inspiring, you know, those are the inspiring facets of those groups that I think really did it for me for sure. Yeah. You know, there's something, I was curious and something I had no idea about before doing some of the interviews for the book was that the early days of 924 Gilman, there was the experimental music night and Seymour Glass, as I know him, mentioned going there on Friday nights and that would be when Negative Land or Thinking Fellers or those kinds of bands or outfits would play. But did you ever see shows there in those 80s, I guess 87, 87 -ish? I

can you say the venue? Again, it dropped out right there. Oh, yeah. Gilman Street. Oh, Gilman. Yeah, of course. I didn't see that. I didn't see the Negative Land show or shows at Gilman, unfortunately. And I'm a little bit younger than than some of those guys just by a few years. And Francisco, the Bay Area was so stringent with fucking age restrictive shows. Like, you know, it was a death sentence to be into music before the age of 21 in the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. And I missed so many good things because I know Gilman's all ages, this defies the purpose, but know, I beam or, you a lot of those places like that just, it was so prohibitive, man, I would try to like fight with the security guards, like, or, you know, become friends with them, or, you know, drive them and nothing could work.

It so that was really horrible, but but I was able to see, you know, there was a place called the farm. There were, you know, yeah, Gilman had had had some cool stuff that I saw I would go What were some other venues in the 80s and 90s? I Eyebeam, I snuck into a few times under 21. Stone, you know, yeah, there were a lot of them and I'm getting older now and I forget. But then also you'd have like weirdly curated nights at random places or like a cocktail bar would do something or Night Break or God, where else? The Know Theater, which was, yeah, that was a place that had shows too. But you'd get like shows like a touring band like Public Image Limited in 1986 would come play. always with Faith No More and Camper Van Beethoven. You know, those were like the two opening them.

I think I saw Camper Van Beethoven about 30 times in that period of time. And it was that early, early Faith No More, you know, pre -Mike Patton. ATA, Artist Television Access, was a cool place to go in the 80s or early 90s, you know, for cinema stuff. Yeah, I would just, you know, when was a luggage store? See, now you get older and you lose the timeline of when things were. But the chameleon, these are ghosts because I lived there so long and watched the whole thing die. And then you just walk by these old venues and think, hey, I saw a great show there, but it's now selling these weird, this like dog ice cream or something. I don't really know what that is, but yeah, it's a wild thing. When I interviewed Peter about a year ago, he was telling me about that stretch in West Oakland and, you know, Hekos was a place that I had a chance to go to a couple of times in the early 2000s. But what was the sort of timeline around that as far as monopause forming and then Hekos

and that sort of stuff? Yeah. So what happened is I finally got it together to leave the suburbs like around, I don't know. Yeah, it was April 1991. I remember it now. And I moved straight into West Oakland, not knowing anyone there. Moved in with a friend. I moved in with a friend and we went, we lived on 8th and Peralta. And the landlord there, who's a cool guy in his 30s, you know, he said, you know, there's a, there's of a thriving neighborhood here, you know, amidst the chaos and violence, you'll find several, you know, really creative bands and artists doing all kinds of things and we're like okay man cool you know so we went there and sure enough you know every night you'd hear you'd hear these bands rehearsing and playing and i got to know them really quickly there were bands like at that time in west oakland um which we can come back to is a very very separate thing from san francisco at that point like very very divided um bands like fibulator who were amazing uh bands like little my people these i'm friends with these guys to this day. Alexa Walsh lived down there. She would end up running the nights at merchants in downtown Oakland with and eventually her own Heinz after world lounge, which I'm sure you've heard about. And she was my neighbor. Rick Weldon was my neighbor there too, also an ex Adventist. And he's he's married to Ann Eichelberg from Thinking Colors

now. He had got so many bands down there just doing bands like Amsterdam Hamster Damage, Mingo 2000, you know, I can go on and on. And then you have the legendary, like, the Fear House, you know, where the band Fear lived and rehearsed, just moved out before I came in. And that house, like, went up in flames. There was a band called Sinister Sisters of Satan there. And I think they burned the house down. But yeah, so many stories. There was also a theater there, an old vaudeville theater that, God, the name escapes me now. I hate this.

But, uh, it was my neighbor too and, and they would host shows there like Sleepy Time Guerrilla Museum played there and others, and they would have cinema nights and, uh, it was just such a cool scene down there. You know, I got held up at gunpoint three or four times, you know, other people, you know, were beaten violently and stuff, but it was worth it. Were a lot of bands rehearsing in their house, would they live there and rehearse there? Or was there a separate, okay. I've seen a monopause, something on, uh, I think on either Porous or some kind of YouTube clip that looks like it looks it's a house that looks well lived in but also a lot of music equipment. And that's something that can't really be done in San Francisco. No, especially at that point. No, no, it's true. I mean, so yeah, I ended up moving around different places in West Oakland and downtown Oakland until I finally settled in 95. I got this really giant space that we were able to play music in at all hours of the day or night. And that became my domain for the next 15 years. And that was directly across the street from Heco's, which is lovingly called Heco's Palace, which I think they hosted a show last week. You Heco's still going,

he just visited my brother in Detroit. But, you know, yeah, that whole scene was really, really something and also very inspiring on another level. And in all of that through friends, I met Peter Kahnheim that same year in 1991. one. I met him because I was on a quest to find this like, song that had disappeared, or this album that had that I'd known in my youth, that had disappeared from my life, didn't know the artist names or the music. Peter figured it out within about five seconds. And, and I just have him to thank for that, you know, to this day, that was Perry and Kingsley in Sound from Way Out. And I'd had that when I was 11. And he just knew right away knew what I was talking about. He worked at what, Asta's Records at the time in Oakland, uh, and eventually at a, at a video rental store called movie image.

And, uh, just, you know, we hung out a lot and, you know, realized we were into a lot of the same stuff and, and started working together creatively making, you know, recordings in my, at a basement flat at one point in downtown Oakland and then back to West Oakland. So we started just, you know, making music and sounds and kind of deep listening to stuff together, you know, and ended up coming up with, um, A plan to, I guess, I think Peter just booked a show and we came up with a name for the band. And that was in November 93, which is, oh my God, 30 years ago. I think it was November, November, like next week, it's 30 years ago. So, um, Monopause had their first show, uh, at Lexus Heinz after world lounge. I think it was nearly around the same time that I saw maybe the last heavenly 10 STEM show ever, which was the only heavenly 10 STEM, 10 STEM show I ever saw, uh, where they in plain clothes. Sometime around that time, I don't know, it all gets mixed up. But anyway,

yeah, monopause started then. I that we confused people by saying we were from Wisconsin. Isn't that funny? Little regional humor. But at that point, I think we were really into the Wisconsin dialect of speaking, you know, like in Minnesota, like, oh, you know, let's go back to my house, you know, and like, like that kind of thing. And this is before Fargo came out or something. I think we were just into these regional differences that were disappearing in the United States and we had to come up with a fucking bio, you know, like, okay, what do we say? And so then a lot of people really thought we were from Wisconsin. And there are genuine bands from Wisconsin. I it's like, I think that's statist, isn't it? You can't just do that. You can't just say, I'm from that state. But yeah, sure you can. I don't know.

Yeah, Monopause was, yeah, Monopause was Monopause. It everything and nothing. And was kind of funny for us to just start a band and do these shows. And we kept doing it and it started developing and turning into something viable. And, you know, we started taking it a little more seriously and then, you know, in monopause parlance. It was a ridiculous group that just tried to do anything we possibly could to, you know, entertain ourselves and confuse audiences and antagonize in a very loving way to our friends. I mean, we're insular, like a lot of bands in the Bay Area. So, you know, we never really toured that much, but we had a 10 -year run of just doing a lot of kind of what we called situationist, you know, performance, rock, theater, whatever. And, you know, we had these really high concepts that would get pulled off in the monopause way, which means like something would always go wrong, but we built, it was foolproof because everybody, nobody knew it was going wrong. You know, it always seemed like it was part of the plan. And so we kind of had this foolproof way of like, yeah, and if we played a song really badly, everyone thought we did it on purpose, but we didn't.

And I love that about Monopause. It was just kind of like this free for all in a way, but also had a very specific way of operating, you know, and a rotating cast of really great friends and musicians that came and went over the years. And yeah. Yes. Yes. I mean, when I, when I really was seeing you all live, it was by that point, you're mostly doing the knowing fuck shows, if I'm not mispronouncing that too badly, but, uh, and then before then as, as, cause I moved out there kind of midway through mono pauses, uh, tenure, uh, I moved out there, yeah. October 99. And then it took me a while to find some things and it was kind of through the Spock morgue. I remember the, the clit stop and some of that stuff. And, and I sort of was aware that monopause had this history of, you know, having been around, but I didn't really know much about it and it took me a little while, but do you feel like, you know, post whatever, post 2000, post something else that there was a, that that was a distinct era? A percent. I noticed a new era starting in 99 or 2000 with the clit stop and, uh, other, you know, like grux come out of the, I was just like, Oh my God, Is that Grux?

I hadn't seen him in four years or five years or something, you know, since the earlier mid -90s. Oh, wow, these noise shows at the quit stop. And, you know, a lot of new people popping up and a new energy. I there had been, like I just described the scene in West Oakland that eventually petered out and, you know, dissipated and people ended up moving away. I saw so many eras come and go, you know, in the Bay Area. And I was pretty insular. I mean, like, you know, I mean, I would, I'd love going to shows and seeing stuff and like being inspired. But I also love just hunkering down and making sounds and music by myself as porous to whatever and dropping out of the 90s culture or whatever, trying not to, you know, be influenced by trying trying just to leave the TV off and that kind of thing.

Like, you know, no cultural references for me. You know, if somebody at work tried to bring up something they saw in Seinfeld, I didn't even know what they were talking about, or whatever, that kind of world where I just kind of built this world where it was all about the music and, and the, you know, that lifestyle and, and the cigarettes. But yeah, I think, I think then it dropped, you know, San Francisco had the post the .com post .com boom really was, it was just a weird thing to watch happen. And I felt like it obviously killed a lot of the spirit that was there in that way made it unaffordable for people, undesirable. You know, I was really proud of the Bay Area when people would come from out of town. I where I lived. It was a strange thing to realize. I know a lot of people don't love where they live. But it kind of felt like the end of the world after a while. I was tripping over dead people and feces and just looking at some horrible despair. It getting ridiculous and I think that it wasn't that conducive. There was a dead spot. There was a dead spot. And that's when I really turned inward and monopause really started honing our thing and like, you know Going full speed ahead on our ancillary and you know small whatever, you ten people that liked us and Then I kind of my brother and I kind of let's kind of said let's go into San Francisco I saw a flyer for a show Let's just go check it out like around I don't know 99 or

2000 and it was at the clit stop and that's when I you know I saw grux there and I saw the people who was like, oh my god idea. Where did this come from? And then, very quickly, that just exploded. And this is my perception. I'm not John Dwyer or like some other people who were probably in it or Paul Kostouros who watched that whole transformation happen. I had kind of like given up and I'm like 30 something, 32 or whatever, and I come in there and I'm like, wow, this is again like something is happening here. And monopause kind of sort of integrated into that and became a part of that too, and we met some great new people. That Oakland -San Francisco divide seemed to have narrowed. I had spent a few years traveling in the Middle East and Syria and spending a lot of time in Europe and Germany. Then I came back and there was this. It seemed like there were just different influences, different attitudes now. There was a bigger commotion overall, locally, I in a kind of a can -do attitude, you know, about putting shows together at all times. There was always something going on. And that's when, you know, you came in around that time. And, and, you know, yeah, I mean, Monopause just plodded along in our, in our way, and met a lot of new friends, and a lot of offshoots started happening, too. You know, relationships started with, like, Reciprocite Records, Zeke Shack, and, you know, Brand Pause. Then you had Hans Grusel, and you had all these other kind of, man, it's so much, so much. I mean, then you had the pink and brown.

You had everything, kind of all kinds of things going on in San Francisco. I think it was, again, it was an exciting time to be there. And it's a time that somehow, and I know this, I've noticed this covered in your book quite well and in the people that you've discussed it with, but there's a sabotage -y flair to San Francisco. There always has been. There's like a, I I went to Chicago in the late eighties and I was talking to a bartender who had spent time in San Francisco and he said, you know what, San Francisco, nobody gets anything done. And I was like, okay, yeah, interesting. So thought about it. And it's like, okay. I took that home with me because Chicago's got like the, the undisputable work ethic. Right. So it was like the perfect thing for Chicago to say. But, in a way, what he means is, I think, that there's almost a decidedly self -sabotage, or decidedly, like, we're not going to do anything that gets recognized. We're not going to take this out of this room. We're going to keep this so secret and so, you know what I mean? So I think there is something there. it's hard, it's hard to, and I'm a California native, you know, and I know there's I know this kind of like, thing that happens even and even to the people that just moved to California, there's this centrifuge of kind of defeatism or something that that happens. And it's, it's not that it's a bad thing. It's a reaction. It's a reaction to something. And it's, but it's decidedly not stagnant. It's very alive. But it's also like, and we will never tour another city, we, you know, we will, we will, you know, we'll make this album and then never press it or like, nobody will hear it or it'll be like covered in dirt or, you whatever

like this. There's some, there's something about San Francisco that makes certain groups of people want to do that. And that's, it's, it's, it's been evidenced in your, in your research and your book, which I've appreciated hearing. I Trey had something good to say about that. I was listening to the Trey podcast or reading something he wrote. He of summed it up really well. I wish I remembered what he said. But does that resonate with you? Yeah, I think a lot of it, when I started on it, there was something in this handful of things that I knew and I didn't necessarily know how they connected, but I was like, what is this quality about this stuff that, yeah, it's like you said, it's not necessarily that it's a good or bad thing. I was like the popo pie. So I was just finished editing and putting out that episode with Joe and thinking about all of the different things, like on the third record, there are two backwards songs because there were engineering issues with the forward versions.

I never even knew why they were backwards, but I just knew it's kind of one of those things that is both annoying and at the same time you appreciate that it's part of what they do. And they never, whether it's Flipper, Amarillo stuff, Sun City Girls not being from San Francisco, but still has a lot of this quality. It's like they, yeah, they never make things easy for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Antagonism, but it, but it's at the same time, it's not just like they're up there abusing you in a, in a sort of sadistic way. It's nothing like that. It's, it's always hard to kind of, it's a push and pull. It's a thing. And I don't know that I'm any closer to being able to articulate it now than, than when I started, but at least gave me an excuse to, you know, to talk to people and hear what they had to say about it. For sure. I don't think it's a negative thing, that antagonizing. That is, it's a device.

It's not easy. It doesn't give too much away. It's not broad, but it's also not exclusively pretentious and narrow. There's something very giving about it, I find. you know, and, and, uh, yeah, it's confounding for sure. And I think, I think there is a, there's a long history of that there. I mean, you know, yeah. That's why I felt, uh, and I think, I don't know, again, what you've heard or what you heard from, or what I left in the interview with Peter, uh, of my own speaking, but I was saying to him that, you know, when I moved out there, I had this idea of this music that I was interested in, but it was stuff that wasn't really happening anymore. And then And was going on was interesting in its own right, but it just felt different. But Monopause, Knowing Fuck, I felt like was one sort of exponent of whatever that old, not old, that previous tradition, that tradition. And I mean, you had like minded people, but I think that what you are doing was pretty different from Pink and Brown or Total Shutdown or.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had our thing and we were whatever that was, that thing was shifting all the time. but I feel it was quite separate from that. We were definitely in our own world and maybe we were more related to what had come earlier, but just by the end of being a bit older too, yeah, I mean, it was what it was and we really enjoyed doing it. And really, it's that era, people seem to really embrace what we were doing, in a cool way that we would use, we played historic club a lot in the 90s or whatever and just do for friends and whatever.

And then we just kind of built ourselves into some kind of monster that there were a lot of demands that we put on ourselves to keep changing it up and keep doing things to defy the last thing. Whether anyone noticed this or not, but that was the internal. So it's just something we really enjoyed doing. And it did feel quite separate though. And going back to this divide between the two cities across the bay, it's like in Oakland, And we felt like we had the best of both worlds. We had Oakland and Berkeley, and we had San Francisco. That was all ours. San Francisco didn't feel like they had Oakland, or they would never come visit.

They didn't understand what was going on there. All that vibrant stuff I described in the early 90s, very few people from San Francisco were coming over to check all of that out. Very strange, very strange how that shifted then. And then around that time that we're talking about now in the early 2000s, that had definitely changed up where there were, um, you know, there were bands playing both sides of the Bay three times a week or whatever, you know, people come and checking stuff out in Oakland or Richmond and whatnot. So I find that interesting. Very provincial actually, isn't it? Yeah. Well, yeah, I definitely, I definitely had some times when I went to see shows in the East Bay, I didn't have a car and, uh, I had some adventures getting back, you know, whether you could find a ride or otherwise you're trying to take the, uh, the AC bus and, and, Oh my God. Yeah. I've been there. I've been there. Yeah. There's the, yeah, for anyone listening, the BART runs, but it stops right around midnight. And so you'd either have to, I don't know, most shows wouldn't be over. Yeah. And then you've got to, you got to figure out how to get back and if you didn't go over there that much, you wouldn't know your way around too well. And the ACE, the bus would go, I think once an hour and then it drops you off at first in mission and you got to figure out how to get home from there. And so I have, so I do remember getting home after 4am for some, some shows that I went over to a warehouse shows in the East Bay. So that's part of it maybe. It would be true. It would be true going in the other direction though as well. Yeah, that was me. And it would drop you off in downtown Oakland and he'd walk back to West Oakland, you know, and you get there by sunrise or something, you know. The first Sublime Frequencies project you did, was that the Cambodian cassette archive? It was in there. I think that was the second one. The first was, I remember Syria. Oh, Okay. That might have come out in November of 2003, the same time the first Porous actual CD came out, November 2003. And then Cambodian Cassette Archives came after that. You came across those cassettes mostly at a library in the East Bay? Is that right? For that release?

Yeah, a lot of them came from the Asian branch of the Oakland Public Library, which was amazing. And they had a bottom drawer of cassettes that were kind of neglected because CDs were the thing, and these tapes were from an earlier era. Most of them were from the early to late 80s. And a lot of them were Diaspora -recorded recordings made in the States, made in Long Beach or Rhode Island or wherever Cambodians settled after the war. And same with the Vietnamese tapes that were also there that I was concurrently digging into. I would just go through these drawers and check out six tapes at a time, and bring them home and take them over and transfer them, bring them back, and just super getting into this music. And in addition to that, I started going to a lot of the Diaspora shops in San Francisco and Oakland, the Laotian shops, but the Cambodian shops were a plenty down. There was a little kind of like unmarked little Cambodia in East Oakland. I maybe only one of those shops remains today, if not. And and Thai shops. And I just I would start going in there and meeting the people that ran the shop and just asking questions about the music

and just like getting deeper and deeper into it. And that kind of really became an obsession, too. And, you know, I was also traveling. I traveled for my first time to that region, to Southeast Asia with my brother in 2000. We went to Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and stuff, but spent a few months in Laos and Burma, in Thailand, et cetera. So started really, really digging into the music. And obviously on my travels, I'm always getting tapes and bringing a radio and tuning in and doing the same thing, asking merchants questions about the tapes, learning about these styles and taking them home and kind of like processing them and getting blown away by them.

But for the Cambodian Cassette Archives, yeah, so it's a combination of tapes I found at those shops and tapes in that drawer, in those drawers at the Open Public Library. So yeah, I've been putting that together for a few years, and I think my obsessions with all of that started just kind of in the mid -90s, going to libraries were such an incredible place to go before we had phones and internet and stuff, you know, remember? Yeah, it's just like I'd spend hours at libraries and in the music section or in the book section and just or even looking at microfilms and that kind of thing. So yeah, that's where I would kind of lose myself and get super into certain sectors of music, starting with, you know, whatever was available on the global music labels at the time in the 80s and 90s, but then really wanting to dig deeper into that. And when I heard this dance floor music that was coming out from the Cambodians, it really affected me. I really, really enjoyed it. And I felt like it really needed to be heard. And I was lucky to meet Alan Bishop and Sun City Girls and the whole crew, Rob Millis and everybody else.

Hisham Matt and I had met in San Francisco a couple of times in the late 90s. But through friends, yeah, I was a big fan of the Sun City Girls, but I'm not the kind of person that seeks people out because I like what they do, whatever, I just enjoy what they do. So I never really imagined that we'd be partnering up and becoming pals and helping kind of form this label and do a bunch of releases for them. That was incredible. And, you know, we had a lot to talk about with our different radio recordings and field recordings, but also especially just about this music that had, that we were hearing on our travels that didn't seem to have any kind of exposure or, you know, nobody seemed aware of these, of these sounds, you know, more and more like the street sounds, the raw, the raw stuff you'd find on tapes, which is kind of how Sublime Frequencies came to be. You know, just the thought that why, why isn't this heard, you know, and, and can this be presented to, you know, a different kind of audience? Yeah. Trey would tell me about some of that. Uh, he told me about Prince's nicotine before it was reissued. Um, I forget before it was a sublime frequencies. I don't know what it was before then, but, and he would tell me, Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. He, he would tell me about, uh, and I would go over to some of these shops in Berkeley,

really not know what I was looking for, but I have a few things I got cassettes of Ananda Shankar in particular, 2000, I think 2001, some of that stuff I really got into, but you know that's in a way, that's another thing that I came to realize was this, I don't know, alternative ethnomusicology, this, maybe that's not the best way to put it, but between Hisham, you, the rest of the Sublime frequencies people, but you know, Secret Chiefs, Heavenly Ten Stems for whatever controversy was there. It was all sort of, you know, A, it's decidedly not quote unquote world music, but it's also, and maybe I've made too much of a big deal of this, but I just find it interesting how as the so -called underground, you know, underground music of the 80s is becoming big mainstream rock in the 90s, so many people were turning to these other sounds, other eras, or other places for inspiration. I don't know exactly what there is to say about that. It could just be coincidence there. No, it's very true. I mean, I felt insatiable with music and I felt like I had exhausted everything I could in Western music. I mean, I had grown up listening to Arabic music by default, you know, with all my uncles and my dad and it wasn't as, you know, foreign a concept to me at all to be hearing Umm Kulthum or anything like that.

That was kind of like this base level up until I was about 10 or 11 years old, you know, in the background. But it was also something I, kind of with America's kind of unspoken forced assimilation, you know, I don't know, it's something that you're embarrassed of, you come of age and and you don't want to be seen as something, you've seen how people are treated from other places, and you don't want to be that, you want to fit in with the clan. So going through puberty and coming of age at that time, it's the kind of thing you really, a lot of people at that time wanted to run away from. The music of their parents, if their parents come from the Far East or from wherever,

it's not just the last thing you're going to put on when your friends are over. But coming full circle, still, you know, just falling in love with music in every dimension, you trying to hear as much music as I possibly could from, you know, everywhere. I don't know. When I started traveling and immersing in non -Western music, it just felt like this giant unobtainable world, you know, with life, with, you know, mystery and secrets, but quite normal for the people who are living it, right? but it was just me that was in the dark and I wanted to, I just wanted to hear it all. And, you know, I don't know. It's weird these times that, you know, what interests me is like how it all gets processed. You know, you end up presenting this to a Western audience too with a label like Sublime Frequencies and the letdown about like post internet, YouTube, archeology, you know, where everyone can watch everything from any continent at any time now, you know,

and get a crash course on any facet of any culture. It's a great thing on one hand, but it's also, I don't know, I feel like it's kind of like just dulled a lot of things out and made this kind of static thing that where it's made us believe there aren't any more mysteries and if there are, we're gonna find them, goddammit. And as if the point was to kind of like hurry up and demystify the world and then classify it as such and kind of like, you know, like, yeah, I guess how colonialists would put things in museums too. It's like, all right, now we know what this is, you know, this, this animist thing, you know, they did, it served this purpose, you know, it's, it's a strange, it's a strange thing to present, but it's also, I don't know, I'll speak for myself, but I'll speak for the US here, being originally from there myself, and I've been, I left 10 years ago now, but, you know, where there doesn't commonly tend to be a lot of thought about the rest of the world on a broad level, and that's a dangerous thing. You know, there's like this inherent insularity there that, I don't know, despite all the, you know, talk of being a melting pot, you know, in America, which is true on one hand,

it seems to silently kind of reinforce this invisibility, invisibility. It perpetuates this lack of interest or a reinforcement of irrelevance when it comes to East Asia or elsewhere in the non -Anglo paradigm. I have some experience in that sector. After years of invisibility, the Iraq War, for instance, and the 9 -11, and these brought like kind of a sudden negative visibility for Arab Americans who, you like Iraq was a tourist destination when I was a young kid, you know, it was of this exotic place where flying carpets were or whatever. I think people, the cocktail generation was still kind of getting over their holiday to Baghdad.

But I partly blame that ignorance and the lack of visibility like that invisibility on something super destructive, you know, because when something barely exists and you don't see a relevance to it, then it's super easy to demonize it overnight and eventually just kind of like sideline it or destroy it, right? So that's kind of, there's kind of an engine there in me that knows that and that feels that and it kind of works its way into the way I present this stuff too or that I try to. Yeah, no, there's a lot there. I'm thinking, you know, that era, the early 2000s, you know, I actually went to a show on the night of 9 -11, Crack was playing over at a Covered Wagon or something like that.

I might have been there too. But I certainly had no context to, you what to make of things. And, you know, I know that I had an uneasy reaction to tourists when it came out. But it turns out that, you know, that that was really, you know, effective because you're not most of the time, you're not there with a guitar singing pedantic songs with lyrics telling people what to think. It's much more subtle. And it also reminds me of something Alan Bishop said, I think I quoted in the book where he talks about the idea of a character and it gives you a little bit of something to play with.

It's kind of like you are a character is porous. But obviously, you know, there's it's a fuzzy dividing line between that character and you. But clearly, there's a lot of you in that character. But they dealt with these topics, some of these topics in ways that I haven't seen or heard many people do. I mean, it's hard to do so intelligently, but also in a way that isn't just a complete buzzkill, you know, to, you know, to do so with some humor to leave some openings for people to think, was he joking about that or not. Yeah, that's the thing. I it can be very, you know, political work, you know, arts and work can be very off -putting and pedantic. And you don't want that if you, you know, I mean, I don't know if I even consider myself, you know, political or an artist, you know, I don't know. I mean, politics is in everything, obviously. I'm galvanized by things I've witnessed and things that I consider to be important and things that I kind of see in people around me or at the time I was making those records that nobody's thinking about this in the same way. It's shock value on one hand, your reaction to it is, you know, I'm sure other people had that reaction to it too, I mean the artwork alone, but it's not necessarily obscured, it's quite overt, but then there's a fine line between, I guess it's up to the maker at that point, how they're going to present this. I'm usually turned off by political records in a lot of ways. I don't know. It's just by the sheer, just how pedantic it is or how kind of preachy or soapboxy. So you have to kind of subvert it in a way. You to kind of, yeah, Alan says a character can be a good device. That's true. There are all kinds of ways to embody it and try to make urgent or relevant work.

You're also dooming it to a certain time. 9 -11 isn't going to happen every day, or is it? I I think it just happened a few weeks ago. Yeah, right, right, yeah. But I don't know. I go back to those records sometimes, and as much as I don't really love listening to my own stuff, I do return to it to just kind of see where it sits, especially that stuff, that kind of porous that goes there.

And yeah, I'm pretty happy with it, you know, I'm, I think, well, or I'm pretty unhappy that it's still does this, you know, I still feel the same way or that that I were still dealing with a lot of the same issues that made me want to do work like that. At that time, 2016, you know, if you take that poorest album, which has a long title, what is it? Popular Guide to... Oh, I like that one. It's called Modern Journal of Popular Savagery. Modern Journal of Popular Science, and the tourists are kind of bookends of that era. And I was rereading your interview in the interview for the Quietus that you did around the time of that album. And you were saying it might be irrelevant in a month, but maybe it'll be relevant later on. That's kind of how I've been feeling recently. But like, yeah, I thought it was very timely. And then the next thing you know, we're off into this whole other thing with the 2016 election. And then whatever has happened for six or seven years, but then, yeah, we're kind of back in the, we're back. We're back. Yeah. We never, there's just like, yeah, we're back. We're always back.

It's, it's, we're making like a hundred year loop at this point, you know, it feels like, so, you know, I don't know what we're returning to, but it's, yeah, it's kind of like you're shooting yourself in the foot, doing a record, like, like you can imagine, I mean, I didn't think of it at the time and I don't care, but it's ultimately, I'm sure a lot of people People turned off if somebody recommends Porous somehow and then they come across some of that material, which is a plenty sprinkled throughout the records. There's a lot of that. I'm sure it's a real turnoff to people because it's not meant to be polarizing. It's not even meant to be shocking. I don't know what it is. It's just an expression. So it's like I kind of play with the concept of being on a soapbox or preaching, just like I play with in Porous with other themes of even like misogyny or self -delusion or narcissism or inflated sense of self. I these are kind of common Porous themes that I don't know if anyone gets the joke but me. But is it a joke? I don't know. It's just expression. And it's just kind of that's what I think music should be. I it should be working with the times like that.

I know. Part of that is like going back to the 80s for a second. I'm like one of those guys now. So in the 80s, all these guys that were saying, back in the 60s, you know, it was like, you know, now here I am. But then, when I was quite young and coming up, you it's weird, like subculture. And in the Bay Area, you know, it was pretty apparent. So my young mind thought, and I've shared this idea with others that agree,

you see a person who kind of dresses a certain way, they're listening to this kind of music, you're going to assume that they've got similar politics and world views to you as you are also coming of age and learning about politics. Politics is really intimidating to get into when you're a kid. What do you have but what your parents and your environment gave you? That's it. Unfortunately, that leaves you bereft of anything really. You don't have good context. History isn't taught that well in high school. If it's taught at all, some version of history is taught. Where do you start, though? It's so intimidating. I think a lot of people just avoid it. It's too complicated. I'm here. This is my world. America is a safe place to be. It's a construct. It is a bubble, though. The Bay Area is a particular bubble. It's literally at the end of the world. You look at where it is geographically. It's the end of the world, you know, it's like the end of the continent. And then you have Asia again, it goes in a loop. But it's like, how do you even start? So you know, I don't know, the Iraq wars, the first Iraq war kind of, you know, galvanized me in some way, but I took a look around me and saw the kind of apolitical, you know, what, like, why do you know, you know, like, Oh, did you hear what happened in Korea today? Why do you know somebody in Korea? Like, what would it what would it matter to you? You know, that's, that's a line that my sister got at the office once. But politics were extremely polarized in the US at that time. And more so, now the kind of polarization we have now is next level. Like in the last seven, since I've left the US,

it's like I can't even compute it. But then in a different way. But it was also like, you know, these signifiers I was talking about with people, you kind of figure, hey, that person's gonna be into this kind of politics, read these kind of books. And it's kind of like, you know, subculture was this and there were so many like splinters of subculture. culture. That's all been obliterated now. I like subculture doesn't mean anyone can be wearing anything and it doesn't mean anything. Or they're a total fascist or whatever they got a nose ring. It doesn't mean it. They're wearing a meat puppet shirt. It doesn't mean anything at this point. So it's like it kind of got crumpled up into something. But it was somehow cooler to be apolitical. And that was kind of enforced in an unspoken way amongst music scenes, at least that, you know, and that was the kind of exact climate that got me really riled up in my art and music. And eventually with, with my Iraqi and Syrian work presenting that stuff too, and the diaspora music work was applying frequencies, but making, making those albums, you know, felt relevant, but I didn't, I also felt like the room was empty.

I wanted to see a hundred bands doing stuff like that, but then you just get, you know, I don't know. Who's the big, like, mainstream political band? It's not Queens of the Stone Age. It's, um, oh God, help me, Will. Rage Against the Machine. You know, all, yes, thank you. Rage Against the Machine. Yeah. Rage Against the Machine. That's right. You know, yeah, you get, you get that, you know, and then that's a huge turnoff, you know, listening to that music, you know, it's like, who's going to be into that thing? You know, but again, these are, these are important. I believe in gateways, you know, there's like gateway drugs for music, for cinema, you can't fault anyone for getting into Rage Against the Machine when they're, you know, 13 or 14 or 16, and they want to, they have a rage and they want to rage against some machine, tell me about

this, right? And so that can lead to things, right? But it feels and felt important to me to do that. I know if I should give this away, because it's already been done. So on October 28th, Porrist did the only public performance that I will do this year at Cafe Otto here in London. And I decided that I was going to psychically assassinate former U .S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And I had 20 minutes to do it. And I had the help of Peter Konheim, who is a Kissinger expert and CEO of H1 Dreamseer, which has this beta kind of platform, it's going to help me hone my psychic skills. And so I had 20 minutes to do it and I failed. And but we can only try. Right. And so when Kissinger dies, I think I'm going to release that video and blame myself for it. And, you know, it's fun. It's fun to do that stuff. And it's fun. It's fun to put that anger somewhere. And, you know, the anger is real. And the cognitive dissonance is real. And commentary on that that level of fucking of dissonance that we're seeing in the last 10 years. I somebody's winning this war, you know what I mean? It's like, I've never seen a more polarized time. And I thought we were kind of headed somewhere different, even at 9 -11 times, right? Yeah. Yeah, I thought you expressed, or Horace expressed on that album, whose title I mangled, the disillusionment, the disenchantment with the sort of slogans and the sacred cows like the democracy protest. And that's 2016. And what have we heard? You know, we're constantly told about threats to our democracy. And yet, when 80 % of the public is even just asking for a ceasefire, the Senate is saying 100 to nothing or 99 to one, no.

And, you know, it's like, we don't, we don't have, it's what democracy, these are this, these are like these, these platitudes. And even poking some holes in those balloons is something you don't even hear that much. But it's, it's almost like you're, or Porus, because it's a character, is the bearer of these, you know, the one who is acknowledging the elephant in the room. And other people are like, why do you, you know, it does make you want to do that, man, we were just coming to have a good time, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's cool. Yeah. It's so stigmatized. And this is another thing, like within subcultural talk. I don't know if I really got that across the way I wanted to, but within that also, you have like very tribal stigmas almost in, in, in the States where identity is a big part of that. And we work really hard on cultivating our identities, right? As a youth and coming of age and college age and then being an adult and what that means and who I, what I am, what I believe in. Here's the music I listen to. Here's how weird I am. Here's how weird I'm not. Here's what I do.

You know what I mean? All that stuff is like very important. And out of that comes a hyper -focused kind of rugged individual way of processing and thinking tribally in a way that's like, I don't know, that's where we get this kind of polarization. I think it's just on steroids, It's next level polarization in that way. And at that same time, then I felt like politics got very stigmatized being if you go to a demonstration, which we can all agree really doesn't do any good, they're gonna do whatever the hell they want, no matter whether half a million or five people show up to a protest, they're laughing at us, right? Like it just, it makes sense to do, to show that there are bodies that care about this event. But there's an impunity there that supersedes, I think we're beyond like a march at this point, right? so the democracy protest. And I felt that way before and I feel that way this month as well. But I think, unfortunately, it's easy to stigmatize, you know, it's like what Santa Cruz did to reggae and dub music, when you think about, you know, or what, and what Berkeley did to politics, like, oh, I'm not a person that goes to the protest, or I'm not a person that is, does any form of activism. I'm not a person, I don't do politics. That's a privilege. How do you not do, you know, I guess I, but it's, but I know what they mean. You don't have

to do politics. You can just kind of, I don't know, do something else, right? Like the, it's a privileged place to be and to not do politics. And I guess people are in just enjoying their privilege blatantly, but I feel that, um, what I'm trying to get to is that, you hard place music that is political or touches on politics without abstracting it too much or obscuring it or like in the guise of a love song or something you know like light politics like other than that like it gets really relegated and it works with those stigmas really work against it so like the places that we've put all of those things you know into these compartments i think it doesn't help us move forward and it also helps keep people uh it also makes people avoid entering into that arena. But I just felt like, you know, whatever, I have nothing to lose. And you know, a lot of that porous material is as like, I don't know, as bombastic as it sounds. It's probably just like emo at heart, really. You know what I mean? It comes from a humane place and a place of real humor and real disdain and all of that. So it's just kind of a strange cocktail, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think the best, yeah, that was not to bring everything back to the book, but um, the, the places where the humor blurs into something else and you, and it's both at once, whether it's dark humor or the tragic humor or something like that, it's, um, you certainly wouldn't call poorest comedy, but again, I wouldn't file it in the political only bin either because there's, there's always more, more that's going on. And certainly, you know, I was thinking just as you were talking there, you know, what does politics mean? I mean, you could sing a song about voting for this candidate or it could be something

like sublime frequencies, putting out music from, you know, pop music from Iraq in 2005 or 2004 or whatever it is, you know, you know, that, that was, you're talking about countercultural in the two thousands, you know, that was important and countercultural, but also not in a reactionary way. It was just kind of, yeah, I don't know. Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm glad it was taken that way by you. I I speak for myself, you know, with that work. I'd say the motivations, there was a politics to releasing that stuff and there was an urgency in releasing stuff from Iraq, material from Iraq, from Syria, at that time, heavily demonized. We were, you know, we, I'm not part of it, but, you know, the country I grew up in, you we're pummeling Iraq, just pulverizing Iraq. And, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, there is a politics in there for me, each of those releases were political. And there was an approach to working with music from the Arab world, it was really just kind of spawned by my growing awareness of American foreign policy. And then finding ways of operating in diametric opposition to that, you know, into the myopic kind of that apolitical numbness that you can find in the States at that time. Maybe that's changing now. I know if I'm very qualified

to talk about the States of today because I've been gone for so long, but maybe the younger generation. But particularly at the onset of the two Iraq wars and the insidious post -9 -11 mindset. I don't know. Just watching the destruction of Iraq through war and sanctions and as someone who'd spent a lot of time in the region getting to know Syria and whatnot, and then watching the demonization and just the constant ignorance about the country and the region. There was that sense of urgency to release music from these places to kind of disrupt the narrative or present a narrative where they're, to present music and culture from a world that was obscured or abstracted intentionally even and dehumanized in the West.

So that is a sense of urgency that guided the work, and especially with the Iraq and Syria releases for sure. And Omar Suleiman as well fits into that. Right. Okay. Yeah. And, um, you were, you were back and forth between, uh, it was, you were spending a lot of time in Syria in particular in the 2000s. Right. And I, cause I was in that quietest interview, you've mentioned that you noticed some things that seemed off And you were there a last time in maybe 2010, but I don't know if you've been, yeah, but what, what all, what all were you doing there? And I mean, what can you tell us about your time in Syria and, you know, how many times did you go over there and how much time did you spend there? It would, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it started in, in 97, late 97, I went to Syria for the first time. And I was, I was really into Syrian and Iraqi music and learning more about it. And I thought, you know, that was one, one drive. I was learning about the Syrian communities that live along the Kabour river in northeastern Syria. And I just wanted to go out there. I I didn't feel I could go to Iraq because I felt like I might be conscripted into the military at that time, but I really regret not going at that time in Saddam's time. But, you know, I went to Syria and really fell in love with the place and, you know, I always say this and it just, it really moved me. So I, it was a, it was a game changer. And I went back as often as I could, you know, I went back four times or so and then, you know, I was getting into the tapes I was bringing home, for instance, music on the musical side of things. Omar Suleiman was something that I brought home in 97, five or six tapes. I went back in 2000, got a lot more of his tapes because I just really love the urgency of the sound. And I just, it was just my brother and I and some friends and like Chris cones and some other people listening to that stuff, you know, for seven or eight years before the idea came about, you know, going to propose making an album or a compilation to him, which,

which we're lucky he said yes to and, and all of that. But yeah, so I just, I would go to Syria and Lebanon in the region quite often and it became a part of my life, and I would get apartments there in Damascus three months at a time. It's a fantastic place. And it was really fucking heartbreaking to watch what happened, which happened starting around 2011. 2010 was my last trip there. And then my wife and I moved to Vietnam, to Hanoi, for a few years around the time that Syria was just descending, and then ISIS came up, and Iraq was descending, and the world was getting really, really weird and sad.

Lived in Vietnam and Malaysia for five years and then relocated to London, which is where my wife is from. So I've been here for the last five years. But yeah, in the interim, I started something called the Syrian Cassette Archives, which is at syriancassettearchives .org. It kind of speaks for itself. It's a place to share, document, research, all these hundreds of cassettes that I got over the years. and it's a growing collection. We're going back in, I was supposed to be in Syria in three weeks for my return to Syria, but due to what's happening in the region right now, that's, and some of the stringent policies, like I'd have to have a tour guide in Syria, which doesn't, it's not conducive to getting the work done.

So I have a Syrian partner who's gonna go in, we're going to Jordan and we're going to bring the Syrian guys down from Syria to bring some tape decks to them. We've got a thousand more tapes out there in Syria to digitize and archive. And that's been a really cool project. It's kind of like, even like I say, letting go of the curatorial steering wheel of these kind of releases I've been doing of compilations and just kind of broadly making a lot of this music available and kind of collating it and telling stories about it and interviewing people who've done work on those records and or distributed them or did the art or whatever. I mean, those are really interesting stories to us and we're learning so much. And kind of a way to, um, hopefully, you know, all of the, all of the kind of like demographic shifts that can happen with war, uh, been violently displaced in Syria. You know, like music may never sound like that again in these parts. And we're over here, you know, like the people all moved to Europe or they got out or they're, they're not

making music anymore. Traditions are lost. So that, that project kind of upholds that. And And that's something I'm super into doing these days. I did see that you had that porous show up just a few weeks ago, and I don't know if that Henry Kissinger thing was the full extent of it. But what else? Was there anything else involved in that show? And or is there additional things on the horizon for either either Porous and or Mark Gerges? I mean, Porous continues when I can when life doesn't get in the way. It's something that always just, you know, I feel drawn to as long as it calls me, I'll do it. And it's a slow machine. And always, you know, it's not always going to be a record like Tourist or Modern Journal of Popular Savagery. And some of them or just fun or stupid or, you know, like an amalgamation of all of the above or moody.

But you know, I'm always I have three or four records in the can that I'm, you know, working on and slowly and piecing together. But the Kissinger show was a once was a one off. It's just something I pulled together, I was invited to do a festival for Vicki Bennett, people like us here does a kind of like residency at Cafe Oto. I've done two of them with her. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. The idea came up before October 7th, but then, of course, you know, the show was a complete incitement to murder of a head of a state, right? So with such a fervor and determination. But it was pretty funny to me, you know, like it was great. But I think I could feel that it was tense in the room. You know, and I think it might have shaken a few people up. People were laughing, you know, and everyone hates Kissinger. It's easy, but I think the point of it was that there is a power dynamic that doesn't exist, which would allow Kissinger to be prosecuted for war crimes. It just doesn't exist, so I was going to have to take it upon myself and be a vigilante and psychically murder him in his sleep in Kent, Connecticut, you know, from afar.

But, you know, I mentioned Palestine, I Bibi Netanyahu, I, you know, worked him into the lyrics, you know, you know, I mean, I made it speak to The Times, but it wasn't overtly this. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on that is overtly now in this, that like Radio Al Hara in Bethlehem, which is like a collective of people from all over the world working on Palestinian -centric programming and awareness on this stuff, mixing music with speeches and with context, which is lacking. So yeah, I mean, what's next for Porous? I mean, yeah, I'll just keep going and I have plans to keep doing it. Life gets crazy and puts a stop on art sometimes and money becomes a problem, whatever, life, sickness, illness, everybody, stuff like that, all that fun stuff. But I mean, you did ask me, I don't know if you want to touch on this, but you did ask me about the cultural work I do versus porous. And I had to think about that. I remember in a chat and probably don't have any time for that, but no, I was just going to say that. Yeah, you were saying, like, where do you make the separation? I can't remember what you said in the chat, but I took a note of it

and I was thinking about it. And I think it's, you know. Porous is something that that's as much me as that as the cultural work that I do. It's the same person. But there's a really, there's a different, decidedly different approach. Whereas, you know, Porous is like a personal project, which in a lot of ways is this, you know, informed by radical sound art and music and cinema and shock value, but it can also be novel, you know, or bombastic.

And that way, I always think about keeping it separate from the more like cultural human or collaborative cultural work I do. It's a different hat altogether, but I can't escape that it's still me. And those worlds kind of intersect sometimes. You know, like, for instance, in Porous, I do compose with field recordings, but I can turn them upside down and shape them into something unrecognizable or, you know, change their agenda or the context of them into something, you know, when it might have been something quite lighthearted originally, turn it into something really insidious and dark. And I take liberties with Porous, you know, that are different than the approach I can take with cultural work that I feel. That's a self -imposed thing. You know, I add context that wasn't there. I context to serve a, you know, like a nefarious purpose. Play with themes or or I role play the worst human beings you can possibly imagine doing unspeakable things, you know. And and whereas I'm not going to do that in a in a release where I'm trying to present Iraqi music or Syrian field recordings. All of that's allowed in porous. But, you know, with field recording album like I remember Syria. It's a tribute to the place and the people. And even though I'm employing kind of porous editing approaches, and there's a little bit of the violence in the edit or, and there are political statements in the jump cuts and the way kind of, yeah, I think, I think anyway, on a micro level, and all those techniques creep in. but there's a line drawn by me where I'm not going to just do a disservice to the country. And in my opinion, I want to honor the country and honor its sounds and stories and knowing that it's going to be a document that somehow preserves a period in time and a place that's important to think about. So there's thought given to that process. Yeah, that's kind of just something I wanted to say about it. I know it's no horse or crab