There Are Things Like Music And Water

Interview with Scott Soriano of S-S Records, Sacramento, USA

By Brohammer

Sinister sounds? Sickening sounds? Shell-shocked? Or maybe soothing sounds?

It probably depends on what you make of bands like A-Frames, Antennas Erupt, Crash Normal, FM Knives, Point Line Plane, Frustration and Cheveu. Not to mention the no-longer existing Los Huevos, where Soriano himself played guitar and sang.
Reading his monthly column on the Terminal Boredom website, it struck me that here’s a man, self-proclaimed cynic and information junkie, with a wide perception of what punk rock is – or used to be, so why not ask him some questions about sounds, music and water and see what kind of answers he can come up with.

I’d like to start by asking you about Your favourite sounds and here I mean any sound, not just sound produced by a musical instrument?

The two specific sounds that come to mind as being Favourites are the sound of rain and of the human voice. Rain has a strange and soothing percussive
quality to it. By human voice I don’t mean just the voice in song.
I like listening to the cadence of speech. The meaning of the words is irrelevant, as I can spend an hour or so watching foreign language news broadcasts on the television or non-English talk radio and get much enjoyment from it. Often when I am working, even writing, I turn the radio on to sports talk shows at a volume high enough to be heard, but low enough to
make the words unintelligible. To be less specific and approach this question as sound being something in a broader sense, such as a mood or approach, I am attracted to things that are raw in their aesthetic and approach, that seem to have an element of authenticity to them, and that are
informed by some understanding deeper than sound as a way to make some money.

In Denmark we have this ”the grass is always greener on the other side” idea of America and punk rock, R’n’R and lots of other things, but from your point of view, things might look different… Is it happening in America or do you hear some interesting sounds coming from other places?

Perhaps the Danish view that things are more interesting or better in America in regards to punk rock or rock & roll is based on what was going on in
the 1970s & 1980s or at least what you thought was happening.  As the place where rock & roll and punk rock was born; America certainly had an edge in creating good music, but how do you explain Krautrock in Germany, Tropicalia in Brazil, or all the great rock & roll produced in Australia? Good music, good rock & roll happens all over the place, all of the time. That should be much more apparent now with the access to music provided by the internet and MP3 sharing by bands to fans, as well as from fan to fan (I am thinking of things like myspace and MP3 blogs, not filesharing). If anything there is so much music being produced right now, it is very hard to keep up.
The percentage of good to bad music is going to be roughly the same, but since there are more people creating music nowadays, there is more good sounds out there… In Denmark, in France, in Korea, in America, everywhere.

Maybe one day there'll be a "Killed By Myspace" compilation series... (Strictly digital junk)?

There should be. A lot of great stuff is going to disappear and never be heard. People tend to think that whatever format is in vogue is going to last
forever, but as the 78, reel to reel, 8 track tape, vinyl LP, cassette tape, and now the CD has shown us, a format can be phased out whenever the powers that be decide they want to stop making it. Also people assume that digital is here forever and have been sold the idea that CDs will last as long as vinyl LPs. No one knows how long a CD will last. The first generation of commercial CDs are pretty much trash. People think CDRs are as hardy as CDs (which are very sensitive) and they are not. Sunlight will wipe the data off a
CDR. And as all of us know, a computer crash will wipe out plenty of data. The most stable medium for the preservation of sound is the vinyl record. It would be a shame not to commit a lot of the good MP3s circulating to vinyl. The same can also be said of the hours of great music generated in the cassette
underground in the late 70s & 80s. Some countries entire punk history (especially in Eastern Europe and USSR, as well as countries in SE Asia) are documented only (or mostly) on cassette.

After getting into the ”first wave” of punk rock in the late 70s, where did you go from there musically when punk rock mutated into all its hybrid forms, did you follow all of them or was there a direction you found particularly interesting?

I was very lucky in that the late 70s punk wave Came about when America was becoming very much more culturally conservative than it had since rock & roll came about. Rock & roll was also firmly a part of the music establishment. And because the physical marketplace in the United States is huge (unlike the
UK or France, where one city is THE engine that runs the economy), unless something sells a lot of ”units,” big business is not interested. Because of this
situation, anything that was rock & roll but outside the mainstream was considered “punk rock” by the mainstream. Thus punk rock to me was Black Flag, the Birthday Party, Savage Republic, Throbbing Gristle, MDC, Talking Heads, Dictators, Wire, and Discharge. Even bands like the Cocteau Twins or records like Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombone were dismissed as punk rock by those ignorant of anything that wasn’t played on the radio (Styx, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Abba, the Commodores, etc.). So as you can see, when I was young punk rock meant many different sounds. There were not all the genre ghettos or hyphenated styles there is nowadays. There was more freedom within “punk rock” to do things . From all those sounds I was (and am) attracted to what sounds honest and smart, while still being catchy (after all rock & roll is pop music). I also tend toward music that is more aggressive, though what I consider aggressive has changed with age.

Can you give us an example of what aggressive used to mean to you and what it means to you today, in terms of music?

When I was younger aggressive meant loud and angry, from Black Sabbath to Black Flag to Big Black. As I got older, I started to look at aggressive as more of an approach toward music rather than a sound. Something like Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch is a very aggressive record in that Dolphy and his band totally engage themselves with the music and challenge it.
They do not accept the assumptions that are laid before them and seek to create their own definition of music. This might sound like an intellectual approach to music, but it does not have to be. 

When did you start S-S Records and what sort of ”profile” did you have in mind for the label and did you have a specific idea of what kind of sound or approach to making music you wanted to focus on?

I started S-S Records with my friend Sakura Saunders in 2001. Sakura provided the initial money and I provided the work and the knowledge of putting out records (I did a label called Moo-La-La in the 1990s, which was dedicated to putting out records by Sacramento bands). There was not plan in doing the label. I wanted to put out two A Frames songs Chris Woodhouse recorded at the practice/show space I ran (The Loft). Sakura was friends with the A Frames and has good diverse music tastes so I thought she would be a good partner. If anything did guide the label it was that vision of punk rock I grew up with, that of it being a huge expanse and not a tightly confined
space. I feel it is important to try to break down these genre walls. Hopefully the label can be apart of >this “liberation.” By the way, Sakura has become less and less involved in the label as she has become more involved with political work, specifically around independent media.

You used to publish a "newspaper" called the Sacramento Comment yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about the voice of the Comment?  

The Comment was a monthly newsletter that evolved into a monthly newspaper. I published & edited it for about 5 years, during the late 90s and early 00s. I wrote most of the paper, reprinting things of historical interest. The subject matter of the Comment was Sacramento politics, art, & history. I tried to keep the literary standards high and the critique smart yet not lacking humour. As far as my intentions go, it was a success. Looking at how Sacramento has gotten to be a worse place to live (due to development,
gentrifaction, bad government, etc.), it had very little if no effect on the politics of the area. I quit publishing it because I got burnt out and tired of dealing with things like distribution and advertising.

In your review of Jake Austen’s TV A GO GO you Mention the first time you saw anything close to punk rock being played on the TV set. When you turn on the TV today: Brainwashing to the point that makes one want to throw up! Do you see any mainstream outlet for culture that isn’t all about getting rich and famous or doesn’t consider integrity (even a tiny bit of it) taboo?

What you are asking about isn’t so much a product of a specific media but of corporate consolidation of the media and the outlets used to distribute culture. I don’t need to tell you that commerce is less concerned with quality or content than it is profit. I would not be surprised to see a totally honest communitarian with great integrity on mainstream TV, if corporate media thought they could make money on it. And it happens, especially with naïve musicians who still think they can change the world if they just had their minute of fame. It is much easier to ignore this media concentration on something like the internet because the medium is much harder to bring under central control than television or radio. In this way the internet is like print and the zine explosion of the 1990s. There are plenty of options and places to distribute sounds and culture. We also can’t forget something as “primitive” as the postal system. Not every record  that passes through the post office needs to be a hit! I think we spend too much time thinking about the mainstream. The mainstream has never been about thinking and caring and deep meaning.
It is always important to remember that the mainstream gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Genocide of the Native American, Imperialism, the black list goes on and on.

The war on terror etc. etc. Scary what a powerful voice the mainstream has and that it apparently speaks the same language all over the world...
What do you think of Richard K. Moore's Matrix picture of how things work, by the way? (from www.cyberjournal.org)

I am afraid I am ignorant of RK Moore and his ideas. To  comment on his work without knowing anything about it or the little I gleen from looking at his website would be faking it.

Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets has said: I think music is the last refuge of the nihilist. For some inexplicable reason, it makes even the most cynical people somewhat happy, and they can’t figure it out. Can you figure it out?

There are things like music and water and the law of gravity and what comprises a soul that I don’t try to figure out. It seems like a fruitless study and I don’t get much from it. I do like to look at how people interact with these things. I just let music be.

This question is about rock and roll and the image of rebellion and I’ll start with a quote from one of your TB columns: ”Yes, rock and roll is dead. I would rather declare it food for worms than stand by with a clipboard seeing who does and does not meet the criteria for real rock and roll”.
Apparently a lot of people still think of rock and roll as being rebellious and a threat to the status quo, but often it seems like it's more about dressing up a certain way and subscribing to a value system where everything has been reduced to nostalgic symbols. Do you see any (musical) rebels out there anymore or are those days over for good?

First, it is important to ask what we mean by musical rebels.  Do we mean people who are trying to use music to rebel against the status quo, as perhaps a weapon of liberation? Or are musical rebels people who try
to rebel within music, to challenge musical or even social assumption within music and the music world. If we are thinking of the latter, then I say
that there will always be music rebels all of the time. There will always be people who try to experiment with sound and form, as well as attack
certain things within the culture of music (such as the 1990s riot grrl challenge to male supremacy within punk rock).
Now, if we look as music rebels as people who are trying to fight oppression with music than things get a little unclear. Culture will always have a place in political and social struggles. It will always be used as inspiration, as a battle cry, and as a rallying point. But it will always be subservient to or a tool in organizing. A perfect example is the role of Black gospel in the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The music of the Movement was
and is important. There are very few songs as powerful (and fucking good) as Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, but that song did not take the place of people marching and protesting in the face of extreme violence (though songs like that did give them hope and strength).
The history of rock & roll has been mythologized to such a point that we consider it rebel music, that it was the thing that molded history. Sure it had a cultural impact, but the opposition it created had more to do with racial tensions in America, with Black and White youth meeting in public places, than anything else. Also as important (and maybe more) as the cultural impact was the economics of rock & roll and it being the first product that
was consumed by and marketed to young people. The birth of rock & roll was shortly followed by the birth of youth as a consumer class. And part of the selling of rock & roll was the selling of rebellion. You don’t make money off of kids by selling them an image of their parents.
I think that this mythologizing about the rebellious nature of rock & roll is one of the things the status quo gets us to buy into so that we ignore the tried and true ways of creating social change - organizing. If we think that buying a record is all we need to do in order to stop aparthied or feed the world, that is all we will do. If we think that the system is going to fall by playing music, we continue to turn out anti-cop songs while the cops take over
more of our lives. Or to put it another way: Joe Hill never thought that his songs were going to bring down capitalism. The Spanish anarchist didn’t sing No Pasaran without knowing that a fascist was going to have to take a
bullet. People read Woody Guthrie’s This Guitar Kills Fascists much more literal than he intended. Woody was also an activist and knew that to be a true rebel, you needed to put in the hard work that makes things
change. Can music be a part of that? Certainly. But it is not rebellious in and of itself.

Instead of naming your current musical favourites (whom the readers can go to http://www.terminal-boredom.com/soriano2005.html
and find out more about), maybe you could mention a couple of interesting salad receipes, sorry I mean websites, where the agenda is different from the mainstream one you talked about earlier. There might be a lot of them out there, butsometimes they can be difficult to find.

Believe it or not, I don't spend much time surfing on the web. I post stuff on the TB forum, hit the music blogs linked to http://crudcrud.blogspot.com, and that is about it. Most of the time I spend online I do selling stuff (as that is my day job). I get most of my information from print. I read a lot of newspapers and always have at least three books going. One problem we do not have in the United States is access to information. Everything you need is there.
Unfortunately most people do not take advantage of this access, because they believe to do so would be difficult, that they wouldn't be able to understand anything, or that they have no need to know more than what the surface provides. People also tend to rely on other to interpret things for them.
I have spent too much time writing journalism and doing deep research to think that I have to rely on anyone else's take, especially on politics, which is really a pretty simple problem. If anything, I'd advise people to turn off their computer and go to the library and read the classics, as well as modern work on imperialism, ethnic & gender studies, etc. Arm yourself with Kant,
Marx, Russell, Chomsky, & Lenny Bruce and you will
make out fine.