Free speech is probably the foundational human right. It is that on which all others are built upon. If you take it away, all the rest will disappear. Throughout history, speech was controlled in order to control people as resources. As slaves. In The Cheese and the Worms, a peasant farmer didn’t believe in God, which undermined the authority of the Catholic Church to own the land he farmed and paid tribute to. He only really kept barely enough to feed his family by law. The church punished him, humiliated him by forcing him to wear a bright red shirt at all times marking him as a heretic, and ultimately, imprisoned him until he died. It's a true story. Speech is a threat to illegitimacy, especially illegitimacy in power.

HMA: Would you say that freedom of speech is really essentially freedom of thought?

It’s more than freedom of thought. Under a tyrannical regime, for instance, you would of course be free to think anything you like, yet unable to express yourself to your full potential. A part of you would be imprisoned or restrained. It is true that talking can sometimes clarify your thoughts. But conflating the two is misguided.

It would be more proper to say that freedom of speech is like a freedom of movement. For instance if there was debate over “freedom to walk” or “freedom to see.” There has never been a government that curbed “freedom to see” or “freedom to use your arms.” Speech is more like moving than thinking. Speech is what manifests your thoughts as reality.

But it’s even more than that. It is one of the few things humans can do that animals cannot do. To restrict freedom of speech is to dehumanize. Restriction of speech is a fundamental building block of dehumanization, or perhaps its smallest divisible unit. Needless to say, I am against restriction of speech.

HMA: Works of art often depict world events and analyse social, cultural and political issues. Are metal music and art spearheading this, without compromising on political correctness, hate speech and censorship?

Generally speaking, I would not say that it is spearheading anything at the moment. It is a culture that has historically embraced freedom of speech, thought, and a willingness to offend and disgust. But at the moment, I don’t see it. I have personally received more support from random religious people than people in any metal scenes around me. These are the sorts of people who would have been against heavy music in the 90s. The metalheads are nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what they’re doing.

HMA: Considering metal ways of expression and content i.e. death metal, black metal, porn-grind, anti-religion, etc. Isn’t the case that if it wasn’t for freedom of speech, we would not have the ability to experience and essentially have the ability to create, share, sell, distribute the music that we support and love?

Yes, that’s a rather obvious thing to observe, isn’t it? The sad fact is, metal fans are going to lose heavy metal. Cowardice reaps but one reward.

HMA: Is there a line to be drawn between what is permissible and what isn’t? And what kind of people would you have to police it?

A line? People can draw their own lines. I am not a statist by preference, and I don’t believe in statist policies. Perhaps in a free society you might have a venue that only plays a certain genre of music, or something like the better business bureau that has a list of “approved” music. But that’s different from going out of your way to prevent artists from making their art, or from imprisoning or dehumanizing people for their statements. And that’s not even addressing those who make ironic statements which parodize a given perspective. People can no longer distinguish between parody and authenticity anymore. It’s truly pathetic. As pathetic as someone who can’t distinguish between shit and food.

HMA: In your country, do you have political or religious restrictions on free speech?

Yes. I live in the United States.

November 29, 2020

Diamond

Facets of Art Interview

November 29, 2020

Diamond

Facets REACHED OUT TO ME FOR AN INTERVIEW a while back. I’M NOT SURE WHEN, WHERE, OR IF THEY WANT TO PUBLISH IT, BUT FANS MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN MY ANSWERS. -B

You've mentioned that in the prison you played in two bands. But when did you start playing music? Were there any musical projects before that?

I started learning to play guitar when I was 15. My interest in rock music progressed from youth group songs to my dad's Led Zeppelin records, and then to heavy metal. I jammed along with Metallica albums after school.

By the end of high school I became very inspired by the Deftones' White Pony and Around the Fur. I also played in a high school band with some friends. We didn't do very much with it, but we did perform in a talent show, which we won. I have a VHS copy of it somewhere.

While in the military, a friend gave me a cracked version of FL Studio. One day I happened to revisit The Downward Spiral after messing with computer music for a few months. I gained a new appreciation for Trent Reznor. It planted the seeds for how I do music today, but it's been a long journey.

There weren't really any serious projects before elitefitrea.

As I understand, you write music under the influence of depression which took 20 years of your life. What caused that depression?

My depression was an undiagnosed food sensitivity which caused mood disorder symptoms. It was an all-consuming suicidal depression which I drowned out with increasing levels of alcohol.

I fantasized about death and dying quite a lot. Self-immolation. I would daydream about it. I was also very lonely. Eventually it turned to psychosis and I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder at one point.

In prison, I learned that it's better to just be a downer if that's what you are. Living like this made me happier which also made me more outgoing and talkative. I adopted several habits for coping and living with it. Then around age 31 or 32 I began practicing an elimination diet and the depression disappeared within a week. I had been living with it since age 12. It was like stepping into an alternate reality.

Depression like that prevents you from relating to most music, or at least that's how it was with me. The music I enjoyed while I was depressed is the same kind of music I enjoy today. Tortured instruments, alien landscapes, that sort of thing. I also enjoy moody piano music. Chopin's nocturnes for instance, Debussy pieces, Satie pieces, etc. I'm hearing them everywhere now so maybe it's time to change that.

What did you do to become incarcerated? And what is the relationship between depression and incarceration?

There was a point that I started to look at my life more critically. For all of my reasoning and intelligence, I was not able to achieve desirable outcomes. Depression kept me trapped at a lower level of cognitive functioning.

But it was difficult to see that for myself. The problem with depression is that good and bad choices feel the same. Success and failure both end with suicidal urges, emptiness and pointlessness. So, I had a habit of making unconscious or lazy choices. I was groundless and directionless, sometimes playing guitar and writing half-songs on FL Studio. I didn't make very much money either, despite working 60-hour work weeks.

In '07 or '08 I decided to change my perception in a way that allowed me to orient towards success despite my depression. Part of this was abandoning reason to see where that led me. I began to make decisions based on superstitious thoughts, synchronicities, coincidences, manifestations, and stuff like that. I used jars of coins, cards, and other divination-like methods to answer questions about what I should do in my life rather than using my own mind.

Things got weird very quickly. I saw synchronicities everywhere. It felt like spirits had become aware of me and were observing me. I felt invisible hands touching my face, head, and neck every day. I had psychic conversations with my future self, and with non-physical entities. I learned about the afterlife from my past and future selves. At one point I saw and spoke with an alien peering at me through an open door - probably the most terrifying experience of my life. And I'm not even sure what the hell any of that actually was. But it seemed to me at the time that I had discovered another way of living in the world. Some kind of ancestral way of relating to reality.

During this time I bought a house and found a great job -- probably the best job I've ever had. But I also committed some crimes, the worst of which was setting an old man's house on fire. Specifically, the father of an ex-girlfriend. I caused around $8,000 worth of damage, and left enough evidence to make sure I got caught. My motives were multi-varied and highly irrational. But looking back, I think it was mostly just a way to commit suicide without dying.

To answer your question specifically, the relationship between depression and incarceration is, that for depressed people, they have two big problems. One, they're closer to the edge, sanity-wise. And two, they have less to lose. They have a greater likelihood of committing some kind of crime. From my experience, all crimes are suicides. You're daring the universe to kill or get rid of you. And you're also murdering everything you could have been.

Why have you chosen post-industrial?

Post-Industrial plays really well to to my strengths and capabilities. And it's the most freeing genre. You can use any instruments; any mix of samples and real sounds, synthesizers, effects, etc.

Post-Industrial also overlaps very well with classical music. Almost to a point where it does the same job as classical music, and in a way that other genres simply do not. It feels more connected to the past and future for that reason.

You say that your music is for people who needs energy and a "hope in hell". To be honest, it is not my first interview with a musician who has an unlucky biography and writes music to make others feel they are not alone and their lives are not the worst ones (if I understood the main concept correctly).
Is it a popular trend in US now?

Well, my biography is not so unlucky as it might appear at first glance.

But yes, I have noticed the trend. Lately, it's got me reconsidering the artist's role. People can be rescued by music, to be sure, but it's better not to generate music with that particular intent. Doing that makes you vulnerable to exploitation by the political ouroboros that is destroying art today. Music by an outcast can help another outcast feel less alone. But music can't be what people are trying to make it be today. People are intermingling politics and secular religion into music and art. It's sleazy, disgusting; and also drowning in irony. It's an interesting phenomenon to portray artistically, actually. There's a fine distinction there. But it can't fix society.

Seeing artists engage in what can only be described as a kind of savior complex has also made me realize that...well, it's kind of sad, and seems to come from a place of disempowerment. I suppose I've transcended my own disempowerment to be able to see that. Artists don't need justifications or rationalizations for why they want to play music. Musicians are crazy and that's perfectly fine on its own.

Usually when I search for an info about a musician I find a lot about music and only few words about musicians themselves. In case of you I see an opposite situation. Is it a part of your concept?

I think it's more that I have such an unusual story compared with other musicians. There's not really that much to talk about with most artists. Not that that's a bad thing, of course. But a lot of musicians adopt a fake attitude to make up for not having anything to their lives. On top of that, a lot of artists like to talk about hardships. But meeting a person like me, with the things I've faced, can make them feel a lot of doubts about the things they've staked their identities on.

When I was locked up I made the decision to include my life story in my bio and make it synonymous with the music. People can be pretty weird about felons. I prefer that they show their true colors about that up front.

There's irony in that as well. Growing up, a lot of the rappers on the radio that my friends listened to had these criminal histories. I grew up overseas so it was kind of a new idea to me when I came to America. But even to ask about it was considered sort of taboo. To talk about it -- people reacted with irrational hostility if you even broached the subject. So I grew up thinking it was pretty normal for an artist to have a shady history or even a downright terrifying one.

Needless to say -- it's a little eye-opening to see some of the public reactions to my history in light of such experiences. I have seen hypocrisy you wouldn't even believe. But of course, more and more people are seeing it.

Let's return to music. What is more important for you: the lyrics or the music?

The music is more important. Music should convey what you're trying to say before you've even said a single word. But I have a somewhat tortured relationship with lyric-writing as its my weakest skill. I don't have conscious control over it. Usually I write music, then hum some melodic phrases as I'm writing, and my brain will spontaneously cough up a string of words. And that's what happens. Later I sort of do an interpretation-after-the-fact of what the words mean. And I do have a sort of hazy intent with my songs as I write them, but usually the words sneak up on me.

Do you have musical education?

A little bit. A few years of guitar lessons when I was a teenager. Some music theory. A few semesters of classical piano after prison. The rest has just been listening to other artists. I played a lot of acoustic guitar in prison as well. Lots of major pentatonic.

I don't have a degree in music and I don't have tons of playing or singing experience. I wanted to play drums and piano from a very young age but I was dissuaded from music by my family.

Please, tell us more about your bandmates. How did they came to the project?

How did they started to play music? Did they participate in any other musical projects before?

Well, I met my guitarist in a prison band program. He was one of the three inmates facilitating the program. He'd already been locked up for two or three years by the time I met him. He had a 20-year sentence for a crime he didn't commit. They released him 10 years early, actually, which is how he came to play in my band. But he was writing music under the name Pilatefish...he recorded an unbelievable amount of music in prison using a multi-track recorder, a drum machine, and guitar amp modeler built into the recorder. He's got literally albums worth of material.

My bassist also plays in this metal-core band called Iron Krill. It's a band him and his high school buddy started, I think. It's this sort of parody thing. Like, they have a metal-core version of a Christmas song, I think.

As I expand and dedicate more resources to each project I want to enroll more people into the process. I'd also like to have some in-house people eventually.

When you compose a new song what do you start with? How do you compose your songs?

It's a little different each time.

The Center started with me playing a few notes on guitar. Too Late started with a patch on my Sub Phatty. Lethe came from a few tuned major-chord notes on a monosynth.

Usually a song will come from giving myself space to try something out or experiment with a piece of gear. If it feels good I'll develop it into something more.

Is music your main job?

I wouldn't say it's a job per se. But I don't have any other jobs. Most jobs don't pay enough to justify the time sink. If you're a musician, I mean.

Being a musician is kind of like a curse. You can't live a normal life. And I don't mean that work is for suckers or anything. I'd actually be happy to just work somewhere random if I wasn't obsessed with this stuff.

But a musician is better off being a homeless-van-guy than an entry-level job guy. Prison showed me how to survive as an ascetic. I had to learn how to make it into an ascetic thing to be able to pull it all off.

I also learned that it's better to just be a prisoner if I can't do what I want to do with my life. That realization freed me up a lot. When I got out of prison I was living on $30 a week for food. Whatever I could do to free up my time and my mind.

What are you going to do next?

I just finished a small tour with a charity that plays music for at-risk youth. We played with them for about a month and did like 10 shows. Met a lot of cool people.

I'm settling into a new house with my wife, landscaping my yard, taking care of chickens, and writing songs for the next album. I'll also be doing a remix EP shortly.

After that? Videos, shows, promotion, networking, etc. Lethe is just the tip of the iceberg for the future.

November 28, 2020

Diamond

Iron Backstage Interview

November 28, 2020

Diamond

IRON BACKSTAGE reached out to me for an interview via Sliptrick. I’m not sure when where, or if they want to publish it, but fans might be interested in my answers. -B

Update: the interview can be found here.

Hi, ELITEFITREA. "Lethe" released on November [edit: he’s referring to the international Sliptrick release]. You must be excited?

Yes. I hope it does well. But I've always got my eye on the next thing, too.

First of all, we would like to know about the formation of the band. When and how was it formed? Do you think the band name ‘ELITEFITREA’ perfectly describes your music and philosophy?

When I got out of prison in 2015, I started working on song ideas based on advice from a friend, which was to try writing a 5-song EP. The project quickly grew larger than an EP and spun off side-projects, one of which was Lethe. At first the band was just me. I was living in a halfway house stacked 6 or 12 to a room. I was there just over a year. Inmates weren't allowed to use computers in the halfway house building, I think because someone was caught remotely running a meth lab, so of course they banned computers for everyone. So I would tinker with music ideas on my work computer when no one was watching. I was also taking community college classes. I learned classical piano and used the student loans to supplement my income.

A year and a half later I had moved back into my old house on an ankle monitor. I could only leave for 12 hours a day. I was still technically serving my prison sentence and was not "on parole" yet. I was experimenting with how I might sing over the music I was creating. I had never really fronted a band before, only sung on a few songs in prison bands. Shortly after that, a friend of mine from prison -- he had been in the same band program as me at the medium facility -- was released 10 years early due to his innocence and his case finally working up the court system. He had been locked up for 10 years already by that point. I asked him if he would like to help me perform the music I was writing. It was a sketchy time because a lot of the laws around parolees and halfway-house residents, etc. were in flux. Parolees were not supposed to hang out with each other and you could get sent back to prison if your parole officer found out you were even talking to each other. And I wasn't even a true parolee yet. I was what's called an "inmate-parolee." But we were both obsessed with music and we're both former military. So in other words, at least two levels of insane beyond a normal person. Speaking of, our bassist is actually pretty nice and normal. He is a friend of my wife's. They knew each other from college. She asked him if he'd like to play bass for my crazy band, I taught him the songs, and it's been great.

The name is something I've always had in mind for a music project. Fitria is an Arabic-derived, Indonesian girl's name. The word 'elite' is a reference to a track on the Deftones White Pony album. It came out when I was a teenager and was a turning point in how I write music. They have a track called feiticeira and it was my favorite track back then. I wanted a band name that sounded like that word. I like the name. It has meant different things to me over time.

Okay now tell us something about "Lethe", what are the ideas you wanted to put across?

Well, Lethe is this heady mythological concept, where the souls of Hades drink from water that causes them to forget their memories. It's a really freaky idea. Before I settled on the name I had been working on some soundscapes that depicted a subterranean feel, and some of them had lyrics. I was working on these tracks around the same time I was creating a setlist to perform around Denver. When the first concert was announced this weird activist dude came out of nowhere and tried to get me blacklisted all over town. He's one of those guys that likes to say "fuck the cops" and all that. So here's my band of former prison inmates, and in particular I had done a lot of work to come back from a severe mental illness, with a particular insight into preventing crimes like mine from happening in the future. And what does he do? Acts like a cop, basically. Go figure.

But he's a symptom of a larger phenomenon. I mean, I understand what's happening. But it altered my focus with the soundscapes. My working title at the time was 'under earth,' based on an image series I had found. One day I was doing some research on subterranean themes and found Lethe. The idea fit really well with what I had observed. It's about society forgetting its past and creating an underworld.

Where and when did you record "Lethe"? Are you satisfied with it?

A lot of Lethe was written/recorded in my home-studio in 2017. I have an old playlist of the raw soundscapes:

I didn't have the money to develop them in earnest until late 2018. I spent early 2019 recording guitars and synths in Tennessee, and we recorded the vocals later in Denver. I'm 99.99 percent satisfied. I often think of things to add. I sometimes think of rearranging the songs or adding a sound effect. Sometimes I wish the mix was different, that my vocals were slightly quieter or the guitars slightly louder, or that I had a real drummer in the mix, or whatever. But I think it's a fantastic album.

Are you going to release some official band merch?

Oh yeah - there's lots of official stuff on elitefitrea.com/merch. I actually screen-print the shirts myself and you can buy gear with my signature on it for a markup.

What are ELITEFITREA’s musical and non-musical influences?

Well, NIN is probably my biggest influence, but I like Radiohead, Boards of Canada, stuff like that. I don't listen to them that much these days. I wish I could write guitar riffs like Dime did on The Great Southern Trendkill, and I like a lot of the production on AntiChrist Superstar...this stuff is so old now...The Social Network and Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as well as How To Destroy Angels were almost all I listened to for 2 years after prison.

As for non-musical... I often reflect on things I read in prison. You don't have much of a choice for what you read. Just whatever's available, and what other inmates have ordered and donated. But I gravitated towards mythology. Not established mythology, more like that Melchezidek book about the flower of life, or a book I read called The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. I liked all of Carlos Castaneda's books. Or the one about Edgar Cayce. There was this one by this guy who was doing out of body stuff and he met a spirit he called AA who was searching for another spirit called BB that had incarnated on earth. I gravitate towards this stuff because my psychotic episode had experiences that overlapped with everything these authors are talking about.

But to contrast with all of that, I also like philosophy, objectivism, and reason. Form, philosophy and ethics helped me get my life back together in a big way. Prison itself was a big help in a way, too. The crazy stuff has value, but without form you couldn't do anything with it in the material world.

Could you please express your personal views on religion and god?

Not really, haha. I think religion is technology. And we're seeing now that you can take the human out of the religion, but you can't take the religion out of the human. For instance, we're seeing atheists engaged in holy expansionism. It doesn't get any more ridiculous than that. I was raised in a Christian family and I became a Buddhist in prison. Both religions have "smart" and "dumb" interpretations of their philosophies. When you get really abstract with it, they actually have more in common than you might think. For instance, Buddhists are obsessed with enlightenment and escaping from "suffering." Suffering is based in desire, they say. But desiring to escape desire is an enacted contradiction. You can actually bypass it all by ceasing to desire enlightenment in the first place. In other words, you choose suffering and cease to suffer. In Christianity, God also chose suffering. In fact, God chose death. I think God really did choose death. This is why there are no obvious manifestations of God on earth. But why would God kill himself? So humans could have free will. Most people are atheists because they hate God for not intervening in the suffering of the world. But to intervene would be to diminish free will. In order to choose God you must be free not to choose God. And that's only possible in a world without the influence of God. I haven't decided if I've "chosen" God or not. But I have not chosen death either. I believe in reincarnation. I was an atheist for over a decade. But now, atheists are so contemptibly boring, and so blaringly hypocritical, that it would be more fun to join a Christian fundamentalist church out of spite. But then again…why bother. I'm a musician. And my purpose is to make the music that I want to make.

Shall we expect some gigs across USA or Europe near time?

We finished a small tour this year in the US a few months ago. We were on the road for about a month across 11 cities. But with covid, things were pretty limited. We didn't do big indoor shows. We played outdoor, free concerts to people who were already there. We might expand on that in 2021. Outdoor concerts in out-of-the-way areas. Depends on how things shake out.

Europe would be more tricky because our band consists of felons. The EU isn't friendly to felons and most EU countries forbid American felons from entering. They are quick to criticize the United States and its prison system, yet work hand-in-glove to put down the same people, as usual. Just like activists who decry prison yet step over prisoners' faces. It's just public posturing for power. That said, there are a handful of countries that do allow felons in, so we'll see.

When shall fans to expect something new from you? Videoclip, single, documentary etc?

I released a mini-doc about making Lethe on our YouTube channel. It's low-budget DIY but lots of people that have seen it have really liked it. I'm also working on a remix EP of some of the Lethe songs. And I'm still working on an album called sever|us which is monstrously epic compared to what I've done so far. I have some music videos in the works, as well. Perhaps a livestream video. But sever|us is the next big thing for elitefitrea.

Thanks a lot for the interview. Speak out to your fans, supporters, critics and our readers before we wrap up!

Hi everyone - thanks for reading! I'm grateful to my many global listeners and I hope you'll check out Lethe. This album is just the beginning and if only you knew the humble beginnings of it all. Take care.