The Emptiness of All Things started out as a commission from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music as part of their Composing Earth series. What’s the story there? How did the commission come about?

Our now former bassist, AJ Santillan, is a composer and she had been working with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. I forget the name of the program that she did, but it was quite intensive. It was essentially a year-long program and there was a syllabus involved. There was required reading material and viewing material all centred around the climate crisis; ways of conceptualizing the climate crisis and ideally, ways of responding to it as well. My understanding is that she talked to the person in charge of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy, which is Gabriela, basically saying, “I have a band. We would be interested in doing something like this,” and they went for it.

Initially we were writing with the mindset of creating a commissioned piece and the initial writing sessions weren’t particularly productive. We ended up focusing on the split we did with Quiet Fear. This is how far back the commission goes. When we eventually revisited it, we decided that we were going to use it as an excuse to write our third album. The commission still provided a conceptual framework, or at least a thematic framework, that we were able to work with.

That’s an extremely broad topic. We could approach this in an X-Files-esque monster of the week way, where every song is about a different sub-topic within the broader topic, but we wanted to find a more theoretical lens that could organize all of the ideas on the record. That became the challenge: How do we approach this in a way that’s more narrow where there’s focus but we’re still able to touch on a lot of things? I don’t know if we did that. Even though the record kind of evolved beyond the initial bounds of the commission, to the very end the commission did still guide what the record ultimately became, at least from a thematic point of view.

I think you do touch on everything. There’s an evolution of storytelling on the record and you’re bringing in all these different things.

Thank you! We were trying to do that. I say this as someone who loves screamo, but sometimes it can feel like there’s a presumption of autobiography within screamo and certain styles of writing or even certain emotions can feel out of bounds. It’s hard to imagine a screamo band being funny in their music, for example. As people, most of the screamo bands that I know are fucking funny as hell, but their music has to carry a certain sombre quality. Not that our record is a laugh riot by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think there are a couple songs on the album that make me laugh. That was the intention that there was a sort of sardonic, cutting humour. Not a “ha-ha” kind of funny, but a humour that sticks in your throat. With that came a focus on storytelling and writing from the point of view of a character and trying to incorporate pieces of ourselves into that framework rather than starting from ourselves and working out. It was different and sometimes incredibly fucking frustrating, but it was worth it, I think.

What are the songs that make you laugh?

“Pèlerin”, the second song. That song is written from the point of view of someone who has totally bought into the idea of neoliberal capitalism; a real, seemingly salt-of-the-earth person but in actuality they’re probably not, they’re probably a fucking landlord or someone like that. They’re just creating such ridiculous straw person caricatures of the pro-environment opposition while at the same time holding onto this delusional belief that through their strength of will they’re going to fix things. For me, there are some lines that are really funny. For a couple of the lyrics I paraphrased Scott Morrison, the former prime minster of Australia. There’s this documentary called Burning that came out in 2021 and it’s about the Australian brushfires of 2018. The fires are ravaging the continent and everyone is overwhelmed, people are panicking, understandably, and Morrison is basically coming out and saying, “You know, if we turn our backs on fossil fuels then our children will be living in huts, boiling in the dark when it’s hot out.” [laughs]

The line about “wanting a warmer winter” was actually was inspired by something that I heard someone say. I used to work at a community mental health centre and one day, I was waiting for the landlord to open up the door because for whatever reason I didn’t have my keys. So the landlord comes and it was February or early March. It was unseasonably warm, probably in the mid-60s which, for New Jersey or New York, that’s warm. I’ll never forget it, he said, “I don’t understand what the big deal about this climate change shit is. Who doesn't want a warm winter?” [laughs] So for me, that song is just ridiculous. It’s ridiculous, but it has a point.

The next song, “Avalon Cove”, I think is even more ridiculous. Avalon Cove is a luxury apartment complex in Jersey City, which is where I live. A studio apartment is probably $4500 USD a month for 600 square feet of room. You have to pay a fee for your pet, you have to pay for parking, and no utilities are covered. It’s just a fucking racket. The whole first verse like, “Designer gourmet kitchens / Granite countertops,” those are just lines from the Avalon Cove website. As is the, “Where you live is where you come alive” line. I wrote that down when I was looking at their website and for weeks I was trying to think of something else to write and I couldn’t think of something more ridiculous than that so I just kept it in the lyrics. [laughs]

Then the second stanza about freestyling down the slopes of Erebus, it’s just a grab-bag of ideas pulled from Encounters At The End of the World, the Herzog documentary. One of the articles that was in the syllabus that we were provided was called “The Uninhabitable Earth”, I think it was subsequently turned into a book. The article is broken down into all these different sub-sections. The author talks about climate change-related illness, the effect of climate change on conflict, on hunger, on mass extinction, etc, etc.

At one point, he brought up this Antarctic tourism company called White Desert. This is real. You fly out of an airport, I think in Johannesburg, South Africa, and you fly to Antarctica. For $50-100 000 you basically can spend a week in a sky pod watching emperor penguins hatch or you can climb the Nunatak summit - that’s a real summit that they list on their website. You can drink Champagne once you mount it or whatever. Just ridiculous bullshit. So that’s what I mean too, when I say we were trying to be un-screamo in a lot of ways. [laughs] That song, for me, is funny in a kind of absurd, ridiculous way but the absurdity should hopefully leave a pit in your stomach. There’s laughter, but it’s a hollow sort of sickening laugh.

Like, “How is this real? How is this happening?”

And you want to laugh because it’s so ridiculous, but it’s real life so you can’t laugh because it’s affecting the world that we live in, the planet that we share. Then “Mechanical Sunrise” makes me laugh. The previous song, “The Best is Over” does not make me laugh. [laughs]

I’d be concerned if it did. [laughs]

Yep! [laughs] I think the initial point of inspiration for “Mechanical Sunrise” was again, from “The Uninhabitable Earth”. There was mention of people in Honduras, I believe, who were suffering from what they were calling Sugarcane Kidney; kidney failure as a result of working in the fields, harvesting sugarcane in increasingly hot temperatures. I ended up reading a much, much, longer study on this phenomena and apparently there isn’t consensus as to whether the cause is rising temperatures or the usage of pesticides. Neither is good. I can see the merit scientifically in wanting to have a definitive answer, but at the same time, it kinda feels besides the point. These are both bad things and we know that people are literally dying because of this so maybe instead of figuring out exactly what the cause is, we should do something about it. The song isn’t about that specifically, that was just the starting point.

The idea is the narrator or narrators of the song are in positions where they’re locked in the status quo, they don’t really see a way forward. They’ve kind of retreated into this nostalgic reverie and that isn’t enough, obviously, so in the end, they resolve to keep their heads down. They do what they need to do because they have a family to support or because they have bills to pay and what power do they have? They can’t change the world. “Mechanical Sunrise” is kind of a response song that basically says, “Well, you could do something. What if you bought a Tesla?” [laughs] It’s written from the vantage point of a salesperson for an EV company.

There’s the line, “Heavy industry with low emissions.” When I started doing research for this record, I went on YouTube to watch a video about planetary boundaries that was included in the syllabus we were provided. I think I just watched that video and maybe one other. I opened up a third video only to be shown an advertisement from a fossil fuel company basically attempting to communicate this idea that in fact, fossil fuel companies are leading the fight against climate change. At the end of the ad they said this slogan, “Heavy industry with low emissions.” I spent a month trying to find that ad again, just so I could write that phrase down. I finally found it after watching however many more dozens of videos on climate change and degrowth communism and all of these other topics.

The song is ridiculous. The bridge, “We’ll cruise the streets / In electric cars / With the wind in our hair,” is stupid. It’s kind of meant to be stupid. This is what some mouth breathing, neoliberal, hyper-masculine ad exec would think is cool. Then at the end, it quotes the movie version of Starship Troopers, “I’m doing my part”, to make unsubtle the connection between even the most seemingly progressive forms of capitalism and fascism. I think that song is funny and I’ll never forget when we were recording, Mike [Taylor], the guitarist from Pageninetynine, came to visit and harangue us. [laughs] I think we were doing vocals for the song so Chris [Rodriguez, guitarist and vocalist] was recording and Mike says, “What’s this song called?” I told him, “Oh, it’s called ‘Mechanical Sunrise’,” and he was like, “That’s funny!” Then he stopped and said, “That’s actually really sad,” and I was like, “Yes, that’s what I want!” Those songs make me laugh. The others don’t. I don’t know if that makes me or my bandmates deranged, but yeah, I hope other people laugh but not “ha-ha”, like a reticent laugh followed by a thousand mile stare. [laughs]

In keeping with the reading material, you’ve also said that you were inspired by Autoportrait by Edouard Levé, Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher - who’s been a huge influence on your other albums too -, and In The Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami.

I have Ghosts of My Life right here. [laughs] Mark Fisher, for me and Chris in particular, has been a major influence on how we approach art and how we look at the world. Just in trying to conceptualize the feeling of inertia that we all seem to have - I shouldn’t say “we all” because as we’ve seen in places like Nepal and in the Philippines right now, people are on the streets. Change is not impossible, change can happen, and the tools for that change in some ways are still very simple. If a bunch of people take to the street, what can anyone do about it? If people get organized with each other, that’s power right there. I certainly think that within the United States for a long time and maybe within other Western, liberal, “democracies” there was a feeling of things are just the way they are now. There aren’t gonna be any more revolutions, there aren’t gonna be any major shakeups in the system. We’ve - as Francis Fukuyama would say - reached the end of history and all we can do is just kind of iterate on that. Mark Fisher connects that directly to what Simon Reynolds would call a sense of retromania where in the absence of political possibility and philosophical possibility, instead of trying to chart a path forward art looks backwards instead. Maybe I’m working backwards from a conclusion, that’s certainly possible, but I definitely feel like in my lifetime increasingly it feels like even within the underground, people are just recycling and regurgitating old forms, old modes.

These cycles of nostalgia happen faster and faster and faster which is unnerving. Maybe for some people it’s not, but we’re a very anti-nostalgia band. [laughs] That’s not to say we’re the most original band on the face of the Earth, obviously we’re not; we’re playing rock ’n’ roll at the end of the day. [laughs] But there still is a disturbing sense that things are kind of circling in on each other and people are retreating to this idea of the past that never really existed. In some cases, it’s a past that they didn’t even experience. Certainly that was the case with the ‘80s nostalgia that was running rampant maybe 5-10 years ago and still is to an degree. A lot of these artists, at best, were born in the ‘80s so they didn’t really experience the ‘80s, they experienced the afterimage of the ‘80s through older relatives, through their parents, through whatever remaining strands of ‘80s-indebted pop culture there was. Now we see that with the 2000s. It’s crazy. I’m not a fan, I don’t like it. [laughs]

Mark Fisher definitely helped us clarify and put together a lot of feelings and thoughts we had that we hadn’t necessarily connected one thing to another thing. Also through his writings on hauntology, he introduced us to a lot of incredible art; artists like The Caretaker, The Focus Group, the Ghost Box label, really weird esoteric electronica and ambient music. There’s this old British show I learned about while reading Ghosts of My Life called Sapphire and Steel. I’s a sci-fi show from ‘70s or ‘80s England. It’s about detectives, but the crimes that they’re investigating have to do with time. Basically, things from previous eras have somehow escaped through some weird slipstream in time and they’re winding up in the current era - but it’s not a person or an entity, it’ll be maybe a song or a style of dress or something like that. They have to restore the timeline by combating these temporal abnormalities.

I was reading Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait while we were touring Europe last year. Autoportrait is basically an autobiography, hence the name, but it’s a bunch of statements that are similarly unconnected. He might write, “I’ve never cared for Brussels sprouts,” and then he might say right after that, “I cried after my first sexual experience.” Then he’ll say, “You know I’ve never really worried about how much money is in my bank account,” then, “I’m afraid of going on an airplane.” The whole book is like that. But through all of these seemingly unconnected strands, an image of this man emerges. I thought that was such an interesting way of writing. Some of that made it’s way into “The Best is Over”.

In fact, “The Best Is Over” originally had a different title that was basically from that book. The book ends with him more or less saying that he fears that one day he’ll wake up only to realize that his best days are already behind him or the happiest moment of his life has already passed, he’s already felt the best he’s gonna feel. But that was a little bit unwieldy, so we chose “The Best Is Over” because “the best is over” combined with the first line in “Mechanical Sunrise” - “So you came in at the end” - it forms a two-part Sopranos reference. [laughs] In the first episode, when Tony is seeing Melfi, he says, “You know, in many ways I have it better than my dad. I’ve made more money, I’ve reached the heights that he never even dreamed of, but you know, lately I’ve been thinking that I came in at the end. The best is over. My dad, he had his people. What do we have?” He can’t really articulate what’s wrong outside of his very narrow worldview.

In The Miso Soup I read three years ago when we were touring the West Coast with Quiet Fear. It’s still the only Ryū Murakami that I’ve read, unfortunately, because I really did enjoy it. I devoured that book while we were on tour. I didn’t really get any thematic ideas from it, it was more so an appreciation of how much you can achieve through grotesquerie. I remember thinking, “I would like to incorporate more harsh, more grotesque, more confrontational language in our music.” That’s also were bands like Crippling Alcoholism influenced us.

And [Crippling Aclocholism lead vocalist] Tony [Castrati] is on “Lavender”.

We had reached out to him before the lyrics were written. I wrote the lyrics with him in mind, trying to craft something that was suitably perverse. [laughs] Again, all of that was trying to compose a more literary record. Our previous record, Derramar | Querer | Borrar, and the Quiet Fear split afterwards, were definitely academically informed. We were doing research, we were reading, we were watching things, we were playing video games and trying to understand what our experience was, but we made a really conscious effort to be as non-didactic as possible. It was all very explicitly filtered through our personal experience. With this record, writing from the point of view of characters and writing from a more abstract position, I felt like I could bring in some of these literary influences and these literary devices that maybe I shied away from in the past.

It’s all really visual when you’re listening to it, especially with “The Best is Over” and “Death Shall Flee from Them”.

I really appreciate that. At a certain point in the record, lines start coming back and they’re paraphrased and that’s the point where the record starts folding in on itself. A lot of the influences were from movies too. The title “Death Shall Flee from Them” is from the Bible, but I did not know that because I’ve not read the Bible. It’s from Revelations, basically the people of the Earth are going to experience all of these plagues, all of these traumas, and they are going to beg for the mercy of death and death shall flee from them. The phrase changes depending on the edition of the Bible that you’re reading. I learned it while watching the Herzog documentary Lessons of Darkness. [laughs] It is his sort of survey of the gulf oil fires in the wake of the first Gulf War. He and his crew went almost filming the landscape as if they were alien visitors trying to understand another planet. He divides the movie into a bunch of different chapters, many of which are titled after quotes from the Bible and one of them was this sentence about death fleeing from these people. I just thought, “Wow, that’s quite a phrase!” [laughs]

A lot of the lyrics on that song that aren’t harkening back to earlier points in the record or even earlier releases that we had, are just from personal experience. While we were making the record or while we were about to begin making it, my uncle died, Chris’s grandma died, and Aeryn’s grandfather died. Again, trying to incorporate personal experience and give voice to personal experience but in a way that doesn’t hijack the album, were it doesn’t suddenly become the Massa Nera diary. [laughs] We were definitely going for a very visual lyrical style. For the lyrics that Aeryn wrote and the lyrics that Chris wrote, they adopted a very similar, very visually minded approach, so it all kind of worked together.

“Death Shall Flee From Them” has a callback to “Hatsukoi” off your debut EP will it be enough for you to keep going? and “New Animism” has callbacks to “Division” off the Quiet Fear split as well as “Wanting (Ghosts Haunting Ghosts)” and “Lost Faces” off Derramar | Querer | Borrar. What inspired those callbacks?

With each record we’ve done, I feel like at least in part we revive ideas that we couldn’t make work on previous records and we say, “Ok, now’s the time, maybe.” I know that for Derramar | Querer | Borrar we did want to include a bit of intertextuality but it just felt forced. I guess in some ways this album felt like our first adult work, whatever that means. [laughs] I remember I was doing an interview for Derramar | Querer | Borrar and the person said to us, “Wow, this record is so weary. You must all be in your late 30s.” I was like, “When we wrote this record, I was 27. [laughs] Chris was 26, Allen [Núñez, guitarist and vocalist] was 25.” [laughs] That was when we recorded it, let alone when we started writing it. Maybe that album’s more adult than I’m giving it credit for, but I guess, for me, this record felt in some ways that it represented an end to certain ideas and fantasies about the world. I wanted to bring back these lyrics but I wanted to have them placed in context where they were stripped of whatever yearning they might have once carried. I wanted them to be placed in context where there was a much greater feeling of weariness, of resignation. To really suggest that even within this thing that we’re calling Massa Nera, there’s this passage of time and there’s this sense of being beaten down and no longer being able to make sense of the world.

I thought that maybe one of the ways we could do that is by taking some of these older lines that in context might not have been the most cheerful, but the music that was supporting those lyrics was maybe a little bit more urgent, a little bit more hopeful, even if that hope was operating on a subconscious level. Whereas, by the time you get to the “faded like stripes across your cloth” part of “Death Shall Flee From Them”, there’s no sense of catharsis whatsoever. [laughs] I wanted it to feel like I was acknowledging how much time had passed since the band had started and what we’d gone through. I wanted to kind of refract those lines through this prism we were working with; this much more dour, bleak vision or conception of the world. For better or for worse, it can’t be said that we didn’t put a lot of thought into this record. [laughs]

It has so many layers!

Yeah! That’s what we were trying to achieve. To the point where while we were writing it, I remember I would just rant to Chris. I’d be like, “This record, it’s fucking overburdened with meaning. The next record we do, I want it to be totally spontaneous! I don’t wanna think about anything. I want it to be totally intuitive.” As if we would ever allow ourselves to write an album like that. [laughs] It could be a good exercise like, “Ok, we’ve got 2 hours and by the end of these two hours, we have to make decisions and stick with these decisions and come out with a song.”

You also wrote and co-directed the video for “Mechanical Sunrise” with Wendy De Armas Dominguez. How did the idea for the video come about? What was filming it like?

My spouse and I directed it together and this is another instance of old ideas having really long and strange half-lives. When we were making Derramar | Querer | Borrar we ended up making five or six music videos but originally, we intended to make a companion film for the entire album and I had even written a screenplay. The film was gonna incorporate all the music videos that we had filmed and they would be part of this meta-narrative. We had in our practise space a whole wall of CRT TVs and PVM monitors that we were collecting. [laughs] We bough PVC piping from Home Depot and we were gonna construct a weird, makeshift tent. I was buying all of these adaptors and we were learning how to do these Max Live patches so that we could project different things on different screens simultaneously from the same computer. Long story short, we did not finish that project. [laughs] And we never will, which is fine. Chris had the idea of someone wearing a horse mask for a video for “Hipócrita” that we were going to do. He wanted there to be a horse mask somehow. While we were writing the record, I was employed at a community mental health centre in Staten Island, New York, and I was fired for trying to unionize my workplace. I thought, “Ok, well this video could be about a bunch of workers. Maybe they’re servants of some kind. They all work at this estate for this horse-headed man and on their own time, they try to collectivize. They try to organize and someone snitches and they all end up getting punished.” The person’s reward would be the horse-headed man regurgitating food and the person eating it, which is how this video ends.

A lot of our videos in the past have been a little more abstract or conceptual, they haven’t necessarily told stories. For each video we were always trying to communicate an idea that maybe was more subtextual on the albums so we could say, “Hey, here’s this feeling or here’s this mood or here’s this thought that the record hints at but it doesn’t outright state. Maybe we could use the video to make that more explicit.” But I think because we were so in our heads and because everything was filtered through our experiences, and because we had never made videos before, as much as I like them, I don’t know if we communicated what we were trying to communicate. So for this video, I thought, “I wanna tell a story and I want it to be blunt. Just unambiguous. We have a budget of $0, so how can we do that?”

Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, talks about Slavoj Žižek’s idea of liberal communism. It’s basically the idea that capitalism almost absorbs and redirects leftist energy sometimes. Capitalism ultimately has no value system other than generating endless growth and so it behooves capitalism to absorb aspects of leftism and to regurgitate them back to consumers. If it does so effectively, you can in point of fact consume left-wing art and feel like you’ve done something, even though materially, you haven’t done anything. I mean, this record is an example of that. It’s a left-wing record. We are all anarchists and communists and we’re making the very thing that Žižek talks about. I was like “Maybe we could poke fun at that idea and draw attention to our own complicity in an endless dance that doesn’t necessarily result in anything greater. We’ve mapped the territory and we realize things are bad and we understand why those things are bad but what are we doing? Are we just reaffirming our beliefs? Are we just congratulating ourselves for having cracked the code? What are we doing beyond that?” I could definitely say that as an individual and as an artist, I don’t feel like I’ve done nearly enough beyond those things. The video was our attempt at commenting on that, hopefully in a funny way because, again, I feel like the song is funny so I wanted the video to be funny too. In thinking of ideas, I thought, “Ok, well we’ve got all of these burlap sacks that we bought for the old videos, and I’ve got this horse mask that I bought for this video that we never ended up getting to film, maybe we can use it.” It was a lot of fun.

All of the older videos were edited using Photoshop, really barbaric when it comes to video editing. I can’t make heads or tails of Photoshop as an editing software for images, but for videos I got a handle on it because I didn’t want to spend money. [laughs] I mean, I didn’t spend money on Photoshop to begin with, but I certainly didn’t want to spend money on anything more advanced. Eventually, I found a way of getting around that. With this video, I finally used Premiere and I felt like an idiot for basically duct-taping videos together for so long when the process could have been so much smoother. [laughs] It was great!

We have a couple more music videos that we want to film. We have the treatments written, it’s just a matter of making them happen. Again, they were all written with a budget of $0 in mind, so they should be doable. [laughs] With the way I imagine those videos, they won’t involve such fast cutting so theoretically, even if the songs are longer, we can film less individual shots and the videos will come together more smoothly. As opposed to the one for “Mechanical Sunrise” which is comprised of fucking 100 shots or something stupid. [laughs]

The videos are a lot of fun. I really hate performance videos, personally. [laughs] “Hate” is a strong word, I just feel like most of the time I’m not learning or seeing anything that I haven’t seen before. It just seems like an attempt at making the band look cool, which kind of repels me. So for these we really feel like it’s another way to be creative and it’s another chance to explore these ideas: How can we do it?

I like the little sticky notes in the video too like the one with, “Critically acclaimed (by who??)” on it. [laughs]

There’s a whole email that I wrote out for the video that’s so over the top, basically saying, “Massa Nera’s sales have depreciated by 30% over four consecutive quarters and because of that, we’re implementing a new sales approach. Our research and marketing division has concluded that Massa Nera’s target audience responds most enthusiastically to organic word of mouth.” I’m paraphrasing, but I’m really proud of it. I was like, “Man, I should’ve edited the video more slowly but it’s too late!” [laughs] It didn’t occur to me until I was editing it, I was like, “Fuck, without this email does the video even make sense?" But I think it does. [laughs]

All of your digital music on Bandcamp is free now and you’ve pulled everything off of all streaming services. You have some links to organizations to donate to on Bandcamp that people can donate to. What went into that decision? How did you decide which organizations to highlight?

For the longest time our music was Pay What You Want on Bandcamp. Then with Derramar | Querer | Borrar and the Quiet Fear split we initially did charge for the digital versions. Of course, if anyone reached out to us, we would’ve sent them a copy. I’m not saying we have the right answer, I think this is complex issue or at least there’s a conversation to be had. A lot of work does go into art. Hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of hours can go into it before you’re even at the point where you feel comfortable showing something to someone. I practised drums for years and years and years before I ever played a single show and I know that was the case for my bandmates. I definitely don’t begrudge anyone who feels like they should be compensated for their art.

When Deerhoof made their post about Spotify, we saw that and we felt that it made sense. We know that the vast majority of these streaming services are owned by corporations, or they’re part of some investment portfolio that a marketing company or an investment company has. Spotify is not different from them in kind, it’s just different in degree. It’s cut from the same cloth. After doing some research we felt that to be consistent, we really should remove our music from all of these services and honestly, it felt good. Maybe this is rationalization now, but we never had a great deal of monthly listeners anyway. I feel like a lot of the people who like our music and who we’ve connected to have always been through shows, through touring, through conversation. Maybe for someone, that started with streaming instead and that definitely has happened.

I don’t like that capitalism always moves towards this idea of efficiency and in making things efficient, things necessarily have to be reduced. That’s why art becomes content. Tinder and dating apps like that are the equivalent of browsing a human catalogue. I say this as someone who met their very spouse on Tinder. [laughs] So in that regard, it feels like music is ostensibly more accessible and that’s great, but accessible for whom? Who is that benefitting? How does that impact that way we relate to music? For us, it felt like, “Do we continue to acquiesce to this or do we try to do something different and find another way even if it’s unsuccessful?” For us, taking everything off streaming felt like the most obvious decision in the world and then from there, we felt like at this point in the interest of making our music truly accessible, we might as well just make it free.

We were already sending emails to people with all of our shit in folders. I was sending emails explaining which releases were included. That’s all well and good, but then you send it through WeTransfer and if you agree with their terms and conditions do you have to agree to some A.I. shit? Or, what if just practically speaking, someone doesn’t download the files? Now you have to send it again. That’s a little bit of a hassle and I don’t want people to be left hanging. It felt like we might as well just make everything free.

One hub where everyone can get at it.

Exactly! I feel there’s no excuse as to why we haven’t done this already other than just wanting to do more research and being paralyzed by this idea that you have to do a certain amount of research before you make decisions, but I would love to add our music to Subvert or Ampwall or one of these collectively owned alternatives to Bandcamp that have been cropping up. I’ve even heard mention of collectively owned streaming platforms, that I’m very skeptical of because how are they generating money? Is it just through meta-data like all of these technologies do? I don’t know, but if there is truly a collectively owned streaming service I’m not opposed to that either. We’ve been looking into alternatives to Google, different collectively owned email addresses, just trying to be as consistent as possible. Sometimes it takes a little while because you want to do the research. That was our idea behind why we made everything free.

Then for the organizations, because we’ve been so knee-deep in the process of getting this record out there, I admittedly outsourced some of the research to Adrian [Ayala], the bassist from Quiet Fear. He’s a really intelligent dude, he’s really thoughtful, he’s really politically engaged out there in LA, and he and his bandmates are all involved in the struggle. Chris [Tortoledo], the guitarist from Quiet Fear, suggested that he would have good recommendations and he had tons and they were all great! [laughs] Movimiento Cosecha are nationwide I believe, but they are very involved in New Jersey. So we knew about them. Similarly with Dahnoun Mutual Aid, Allen, our guitarist, found out about them. But all of the other organizations were suggestions from Adrian. Thanks to Adrian!

Helping everyone out.

Yeah, that’s what it’s all about. Otherwise to do anything you’d have to be an expert on all things at all times and that would be crazy. That’s what community is for, even if it’s just asking a simple question like that to someone who knows more than you.

Which part of The Emptiness of All Things are you proudest of?

This record more than anything we’ve done, at least as of now, I feel like we achieved our goal of making a totally cohesive work where the music informed the lyrics and the lyrics then enhanced the mood created by the music. The artwork was the informed by the music. It all came from the same place. It all felt integrated. I’m proud of the entire thing. I guess on a personal level, I am really proud of the lyrics because I definitely put the most work into shepherding them and trying to craft a record that felt like a cohesive whole lyrically. It has an arc and it builds on itself. It has a sort of literary quality to it where you can dive into it and get lost in it, but not necessarily at the expense of more surface-level pleasures. But it’s hard to say because the lyrics wouldn’t be what they are without the music. I really am just proud of everything about it.

Chris went above and beyond with the artwork. Our friend, Fulgencio [Bermejo III], who we’ve worked with on a few releases now, played a big role in getting it to where it ultimately ended up, especially when it came to the insert. The vision for the cover, that was Chris. He created that canvas that’s featured on the cover. He actually made the canvas, he was cutting drywall and cutting bits of wood out and gluing things together. He painted everything, he figured out the location where we took the photos, and he and my spouse, Wendy, figured out how they were going to frame it; where they were going to set up the camera, who’s going to be the model. Then from there, people like Wendy and Fulgenico and our friend Kevin [Salcedo], who was the model on the record, and our friend Isaac [Jiménez], who’s on the inner jacket, all contributed in their own way. It really came from Chris’s vision and Chris’s execution because he’s a fantastic artist in his own right. As his friend and bandmate, that really made me proud to see. It felt like another step forward like, “Ok, we can really do all of this ourselves or as much as possible. We can develop a vision for the record and without necessarily needing someone to help us figure out what that is, we can clarify it for ourselves and we can actually take the material steps needed to bring it to life. That for me was really special to see. That made me really, really proud.

It looks sick!

Yeah! I really do think so. On some of our previous records, the imagery is a little dense and one thing we were talking about for this record is it would be great to have a more iconic image - not iconic in the sense that it’s gonna be memorable or historical, but iconic in the sense that it has an elemental quality to it, a simplicity to it. There’s something very immediate about it that stands out. If you look at the canvas, you can really dive into the details, but the image itself on a very surface level is striking and communicates the ideas of the record without being too heavy handed or too obtuse or obscure. Derramar | Querer | Borrar I love that artwork but there are so many layers and there’s so much detail, I don’t know if anyone understands it except for us. [laughs]

It kinda felt like a step forward maturity-wise to be able to make something simple or relatively simple, and to create something that has depth and complexity but there’s a simplistic element to it that stands on its own, that doesn’t need qualification. We can create an image like that and stand behind it without necessarily needing to hide behind additional layers of complexity. That made me really, really proud and I hope Chris keeps working on the art for everything we do going forward. It’s nice, it’s like the one part of the record I can geek out about without being self-conscious or egotistical because I really got to experience the making of the art in many ways as a supportive voice. [laughs]

Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?

The title of the record comes from a great, great film called First Reformed by the filmmaker Paul Schrader. I saw the movie for the first time about 7-8 years ago now. In one of my freewriting journals or poetry notebooks, I was trying to incorporate the phrase “the emptiness of all things” into something. I couldn’t do it and I kind of left it behind and then while doing research for this record I rewatched First Reformed for like the fifth time, wrote down the phrase because it had always stuck with me, and was like, “Yeah, there’s something there! It’s striking, it’s powerful, it’s communicating something that we believe in or that we feel.” Near the end of the process of making the record, I went back to whatever journal it was and I saw the phrase scribbled and I was like, “Wow! It’s stuck with me for a really long time.”

First Reformed is an amazing movie. In it, the protagonist, Reverend Toller at one point basically states that certain people are called to do God’s work because of their all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things. We’re not a religious band, needless to say, but I felt like there was a secular reading of that phrase. I think even the most secular of persons - and I include myself in that - we’re all still yearning for something greater; some sort of transcendence or self-actualization or a moment of euphoria or epiphany where everything makes sense and you feel like you can exist outside of yourself for a little bit; you’re not constantly scrutinizing yourself, you’re not constantly searching for something and you’re not tormented by that search. At least within this world that we’re living in where everything is reduced to a monetary value, where relationships are increasingly transactional, where the idea of a shared meaning, and intersubjective reality has been basically annihilated at this point, it feels more and more, to me at least, that we’re all standing on quicksand or we’re floating in space just rudderless, grasping for something to hold onto or steady ourselves and coming up with nothing but air. I felt like even if you don’t have a religious bone in your body, there’s something about that phrase that captures at least how I feel about the present moment and how my bandmates feel. It made sense.

In many ways I feel like we’re living in the stupidest dystopia possible. Not that anything would make systems of imperialism and colonialism justifiable, but you feel like maybe on some level, it would be easier to understand the stubbornness of these systems if the people benefitting were living in a gilded utopia, like the future that people genuinely believed in that one day there would be flying cars and renewable energy and there would be interstellar travel and all of these things. If things were like that for people who lived in the centres of colonial power and imperial power maybe I could understand, but all of this shit exists so that we can watch TikTok videos and drink coffee at Starbucks and eat McDonald’s. It exists so that we can debase ourselves, essentially. In that way it feels like staring perpetually at a yawning, gaping maw, just an endless, velvet void that just gives you nothing. You look into it, you try to understand, but you don’t feel satisfied in your understanding and you’re given nothing in return except maybe the most superficial, base momentary feeling of pleasure or comfort or distraction. That’s what the record’s about, ultimately, and this delusion that green growth, green capitalism, is going to save us in any way. It might forestall the inevitable.

I wish I was clever enough to think of this - I’m not - I believe it was a video about degrowth communism that I watched on YouTube that planted this idea in my head, and if not that, it was the book Doughnut Economics, which was also part of the syllabus that we were assigned. The author of that book or the person who made the video essay, or maybe both of them, said something to the effect of. “The only thing that grows endlessly in nature is cancer.” The system prioritizes endless growth when we all know that resources are not endless, they’re not infinitely renewable, they have to come from somewhere and if they’re depleted, there has to be something to substitute for them. It can’t go on forever.

No one expects a car to last the rest of their lives anymore. You buy a car and you get maybe 5 or 6 years out of it, or maybe you get 2 years and then you trade it for the next model. If electric vehicles are still operating by that principal, then there’s gonna be tons of cars on the market that no one needs, that no one wants, and that aren’t being used. You have to create new models every year and those models have to come from somewhere and, more importantly, the materials used in the lithium-ion batteries that power the cars are coming from places like Congo. We would end up at some point in time, maybe a couple years down the road, we would end up at the same point that we are currently barrelling towards at full speed. That’s the record in a nutshell, just happy thoughts about the future. [laughs]

Everything’s going to be ok! Like the “I’ll save us” line in “Pèlerin”.

Quite notably, that person doesn’t explain how exactly they’re gonna do it, other than by taming the air and invoking a Biblical kind of dominion. We’re doing great.

The last song on the record, “New Animism”, came from another book that was part of the syllabus that we were assigned called The Great Derangement. The person who wrote it is primarily a novelist though this is a piece of non-fiction. He’s essentially trying to figure out why in his view serious literature, which I guess means dramatic literature essentially, has more or less reneged on its responsibility to address the climate crisis. Depictions of climate catastrophe have largely fallen upon genre novelists: science fiction writers, fantasy writers, horror writers. Obviously, you work for Punknews, I play in a punk band, we don’t recognize this high-low culture divide, but nevertheless within the annals of literary criticism, it would seem that only “low” fiction or genre fiction has offered a way of addressing this looming catastrophe that literally affects all life on the planet, including every single human being. It’s the biggest existential threat of our age and every other issue that we can identify is subsumed within it. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that a lot of it has to do with cultural imperialism and this idea of dramatic literature following a Western mold that focuses on the individual. The climate crisis is such a huge issue, it’s really hard to address it from an individualistic point of view. But throughout the book, he’s constantly invoking this idea that in order to address it we don’t necessarily have to invent a new way of seeing the world, maybe a lot of what we need to do involves looking backwards.

He’s an Indian novelist and he mentions an Indian city that the British colonial government intended to turn into a great, powerful hub of power or trade. The Indian people who lived there had never attempted to construct a city there because they understood that there would be massive flooding. They knew just by living on the land, by living harmoniously with the land, and by sharing information with each other. They understood that it wouldn’t be smart to build a city there. But the British tried anyway, and I think within a decade at most it was essentially abandoned and any grander designs they had for it were given up. At another point, he brings up this point of “new animism” and he doesn’t go into detail. He just says that maybe we need to look back at older ways of navigating the world, older ways of relating to nature, and viewing nature as something you exist within. Looking at a tree as if maybe it has a soul and if a tree has a soul, in this framework we’re going to argue the same way a human being has a soul, then you would probably want to grant it similar legal protections. You would probably think differently about clear-cutting a forest. Maybe that sounds silly, but it could have profound philosophical implications. These aren’t new ways of looking at the world. These are very old ways, ways that monotheistic Western cultures viewed as less enlightened and more primitive but in fact, maybe they were just more attuned to a natural world that colonial industrial powers had forgotten that they’re a part of as well. That was the idea behind the last song, just reflecting on this idea that maybe there is another way of looking at things. In attempting to create something new, we can draw upon stores of information that are in fact very, very old. Of course, the protagonist of the song ultimately comes to the conclusion that they are too weak to do that and if given the choice, they would basically just step into the thresher one more time. [laughs] But we don’t all have to be like that.

Things seem insurmountable and in many ways, that’s for good reason. Especially as things become seemingly faster and more complex with any given second, the very idea of truth becomes more elusive, but in many ways the best approach to dealing with it are still the most elemental, the most simple. Just getting to know people, collectivizing, organizing, getting bodies in the street, coordinating with each other, and consciousness-raising which can be as simple as just getting a bunch of people together in a room and talking about your problems. Then one person says, “A lot of us are describing similar things, maybe there’s something greater going on,” not in a conspiratorial way, but in a systemic way. Are there systems that exist that are maybe linking all of our experiences together? These things are so simple. I don’t want to suggest that striking or protesting doesn’t come without risks, but they don’t require some great, innovatory force to save us from ourselves. We don’t need to wait for some miraculous invention. We don’t need to come up with a new way of being in the world, or at least we don’t need to do that right from the outset. We can look back at things that have worked and ways that people have related to the world and we can revive them and apply them to the here and now. This record is not an example of that at all. This record is very much mapping the territory and trying to deliver a psychological expose of how it feels for at least us, and by us I mean the four members of Massa Nera, to live in the world. I don’t want people to come away from the record thinking, “Well, that’s it. There’s nothing that can be done.”

There’s always something, no matter how hopeless things seem.

Exactly. Maybe that thing is really simple or it starts with a really simple idea and then grows. Look at Nepal. I’m not a fucking expert or even an amateur at Nepalese politics, and I’m not the most social media savvy, I don’t think I even knew it was happening until a few days later. I’m not the person to ask about it. [laughs] But from what I observed, it felt like in the lead-up to the protests and the movement, this uprising, people were making very simple observations like, “Hey, you have nothing even though you work all the time and this person who’s the offspring of a politician is wearing a fancy outfit in Europe on vacation right now. They’re like three years younger than you and have worked way less hard than you. That doesn’t seem fair.” That’s the simplest, most elemental observation we can make: some people have a lot, other people have nothing and there doesn’t seem to be any meaningful correlation, even though some people try to invent them, between how hard you work, how smart you are, what your values are, and the things you have. Maybe that’s fucked up and we should look at that more closely.

It’s not just “how things are”, it can be changed.

Exactly! That’s why the record is a little evil with “Mechanical Sunrise”, but the song is so ridiculous, hopefully no one listens to it and thinks, “Wow, Massa Nera are really into EVs!” [laughs] That’s a very bad-faith manipulation of someone’s halting nascent analysis of the world where they see that something’s wrong, maybe they don’t understand what exactly it is and the response is, “Well, we can’t do anything collectively but you can do something and maybe if we all do the same thing individually, and that thing just happens to benefit a fucking company or whatever, well then maybe the world will change.” Things aren’t just the way they are, change is possible but it’s not easy.

This record is not a good soundtrack to creating a vision of the new world, but hopefully it is an accurate assessment of the dying gasp of the old one. You’re standing neck-deep in the void and you’re trying to describe what you see and hopefully in the future, people can look back at records like ours and wonder, “How the fuck could things have gotten so bad that a band thought to make a record like this?” [laughs]