Chicano with pride

He’s a Mexican-American and that has all the importance for him. The multi-instrumentalist and composer of San Francisco is in the front-line of California’s experimental music, with a work that includes free improvisation, songs and chamber pieces, all of them political in some way

Rui Eduardo Paes

Ernesto Diaz-Infante is one of the most active experimental musicians in California, denying that in this state everybody prefers New Age alienated music. And he is a winner, even if his music only can circulate in the underground of the white dominated and racist country that calls itself the Freedom Land. His avant-garde is made of rage, against the present American “corporate fascism”, and with love, for his newborn son. And yes, he’s building a new world...

Rui Eduardo Paes - You live in San Francisco, "the psychedelic capital of the world", as you like to say. In what way does this city and the Californian environment influence the music you play? There's the general idea that the California state is a desert in what concerns experimental and radical musics, and it's usual to identify it with mellow, academic, new music, New Age stuff and so on. You're showing to the world that's not the case...

Ernesto Diaz-Infante - San Francisco, the home of the Grateful Dead and a lot of the radical movements of the 60’s, is a compelling place. Psychedelic experimentation burgeoned here and opened people up to “the moment”. As a musician, it is improvisation that keeps me there. San Francisco is a port town, and for a long time people have come here looking for freedom. It is presently the U.S.'s sanctuary (refugee camp?) for hippies and gays. There's an atmosphere of tolerance, and my music has a lot of freedom because of it. As well, this openness allows people to break from traditions (even their own). This inspires me, allows me to change and take chances. When I travel, I sometimes sense that "tradition" is keeping a lot of people so grounded that they are buried, consciously or unconsciously. It takes a bit of pioneering and passion to confront the old and conventionally wise.

As far as the reputation of the Californian experimental and radical musics that you describe, I would say that is the reputation of the Californian “artworld” in general. Tolerance and openness is confused with not being "critical". Sometimes that is the case, but certainly not always. Sometimes people are a bit jealous of the life on the West Coast. We've chosen to suffer a little less. A life of more pleasure and less pain. That gives California a bad rap. Suffering seems so laboriously fundamental to people's creative process that they are dubious of any other. Being surrounded by nature out here is humbling. Compare yourself to ocean coastlines, deserts, mountains, and Redwoods and the man-made world with all of its' petty battles seems just that. Motivations expand. It is almost impossible to be here and not be effected by it. Perhaps because we're closer to the Far East, that philosophy seeps in. Or it's the psychedelics? Who knows... but I know I don't want to be "Jesus on the Cross", sacrificing and dying for my art. Another artist martyr.

But my real point is there's a lot of great music happening. A lot. I'm impressed and inspired by so much of the music being made around me. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the scene mainly consists around venues like the Luggage Store Gallery and 21 Grand (www.BayImproviser.com). There is a difference between Northern and Southern California, as you might already know. Los Angeles is one of the most unabashedly commercial places perhaps on the globe. And yet even there, and in San Diego, active and vital experimental music communities (Trummerflora Collective, Line Space Line, Ventura New Music Concert Series, and Open Gate series) continue to thrive miraculously with only pennies of Federal or State funding. I'm not sure what the arts-funding is like in Portugal...

R.E.P. - A complete disaster, to say the least, in what concerns everything avant-garde or experimental...

E.D.-I. - ... but I recently heard that California is giving about three cents a person. I guess the silver lining is that this keeps our music genuinely and authentically underground. Even without big crowds or big New York Times write-ups or small crowds or small write-ups, people are committed to the music. They need the music for real. But my last point is, or maybe I'm just expanding on the same point, is that there is incredible music occurring in California. And even underground publications like Signal to Noise or The Wire rarely cover it. Who knows why??? I'm not surprised that the mainstream press ignores or mocks us, but why the underground publications? The Big Sur Experimental Music festival had a hundred free improvising musicians gathered together, the largest gathering in our continent's history, and no one covers it. At all. San Francisco Alternative Music Festival, ditto. San Diego's Spring Reverb, ditto. Meanwhile, some idea or reputation about our music prevails. How could anyone even know what we're doing? At Big Sur the organizers and the musicians were not paid. Not a cent. A modern-day bloody miracle. If more money was passing between hands, would the festival suddenly be worthy of coverage? Perhaps it needs corporate sponsors? Sometimes this kind of stuff makes me want to freak and at other times I don't give a fuck. I'm happy that our music is like occult secrets, hidden.

R.E.P. - When you present yourself as a "Chicano" musician and a former militant of "Chicano politics", you're telling that race is an issue in your music. That opens an interesting subject to debate, considering that another music which was once a "racial issue", jazz, it isn't anymore: there are more and more white jazz players around and even when jazz is played by African-Americans, the audience is white (strangely enough, black people don't go anymore to jazz concerts in the United States!).

E.D.-I. - I've been inspired by the black jazz musicians who've spoken out about their lives and the racism they've confronted (Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Waddada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton). It helped me say, "yeah, this fucking sucks!". No two ways about it. The list of abuses and humiliations I've experienced and watched my father and family go through is just too long. And it makes me angry. I know it is hipper and more pleasant perhaps if I could get over it and not bring it up (not bring up “the race card" as it is now dismissed as). But that wouldn't be honestly how I felt. Maybe I'll feel differently and understand differently as I grow older. I hope so. The issue of being "Chicano" is one of self-determination. Or self-definition. Saying survival isn't too strong. Me deciding that I'm going to create my life on my own terms, and be suspect of a lot of the bullshit around me. Seems like the smart thing to do! And it was good for me to have an example with the black jazz musicians. They didn't silence their rage and resentment the way white America wants you to, expects you to, in order to be more socially graceful.

My music is my experience and so is being a Mexican-born American. At first I was attracted to the avant-garde because I thought I would find some freedom from my own culture (that would include suburban/rural America) and its limitations. As well, in the avant-garde community I hoped to find a freedom of expression and freedom from dogma. But I see that I was wrong. Another new canon quickly re-creates itself. So, in other words, freedom isn't a constant. I think being Chicano prepares me for this. We think we have "freedom" in the United States, but we're often still picking the lettuce, painting the houses, washing dishes in restaurants, and by and large working our asses off with no health benefits at minimum wage or below. As well, we have to endure xenophobic polemics about "the immigrant problem" with the full knowledge that the land we live on first belonged to us, indigenous people. It has only been about two hundred years that we've been dividing it up into rectangular boxes. A relatively small time compared to Judeo-Christian history. But our schools still teach the most diluted acknowledgement, if anything at all, to the Native Americans. A statue of Columbus stands in San Francisco. It is sickening. And most sickening because the European ideology we have adopted and hug so tightly is absolutely not sustainable. A tightly wound, hierarchical, profit-driven mentality that is burning holes in the earth and sky.

I'll try to restrain myself from going on and on, but I'd like to add that practically every piece of fruit that we put in our mouths has exploitation attached to it. It's a modern day Grapes of Wrath. This isn't a sexy topic. It is a depressing topic. But the exploitation goes on and on and on... And this isn't exploitation that we exported to Indonesia or Korea. This is something going on in California's backyard. My hometown Salinas, California, was the epicenter of some of the uprisings led by Cesar Chavez. Compared to this type of oppression and exploitation, I'm aware that my problems of racism and marginization are relative. I'm not a field worker or a woman in the MiddleEast or struggling for non-contaminated food and water, etc., etc., etc... For this, I feel blessed. Truly. And with that I said, I'm also aware that during my whole educational process at UC Santa Barbara and California Institute of the Arts I rarely saw another Chicano except for the ones making my burritos. And that can start to mess with your head. Like, why do I deserve to be studying and they don't? Our eyes would meet as I ordered, and I'd make sure to clean up my table as I left. My white friends and people in my classes openly resented the fact that I was Chicano, claiming that I was going to scoop up all of the grants. My ass! If I was waiting for that to happen, I'd have done zilch. Anyway, needless to say at this point, being Chicano and an empathetic person has been emotionally complicated for me.

R.E.P. - The political status of your musical activity goes further the opposition to the American racist culture. Your songs are anti-capitalist and anti-"corporate fascism" and you also speak on behalf of women and gay people. I've been saying that the notion by Stravinsky that "music only expresses it's own sounds" isn't true and music must assume it's social and political nature, not necessarily meaning that it has to be propagandistic or a sort of "protest" art form...

E.D.-I. - Being a Chicano has taught me to think against the grain, and I feel a natural alliance with freaks, women, gays, blacks, Jews, and the list goes on. Basically, the United States was founded by straight white male landowners, and that's who it still best protects. With that said, I see, like many people do, that the larger problem has now expanded in scope beyond the power of the United States, and into the hands of multinational corporations. Profit-driven ideologies that lack all humanity and ecological caution and protection. It saddens me, and when contemplated fully, the powerlessness can be overwhelming. At times my music is an outlet for these feelings/ideas. That is common in folk music, but less so in the avant-garde.

When I read something like "music ONLY expresses it's own sounds," I instantly feel restricted and want to smash it like any dogma. Music is art, and art is life, and life is most certainly political. I don't see art (or science) living in its own moral universe (smells like Nazism), but Stravinsky being Russian probably had his own reasons for coming to this conclusion. On a most basic level, choosing to live a creative life is political. I live quite minimalistically compared to most Americans. I have no car. Old equipment. I work fifteen hours a week at the public library. It's a risk of your comfort zone, particularly now in this climate of "security". Even if you weren't an outsider or marginalized from birth, in time your passion for art and where it drives you can make you one. The lifestyle of the artist becomes political (from what I've seen, a lot of musicians aren't keeping up with their share of shopping which is the heart of modern American culture). And in regards to improvisational music, its essence is spontaneity. Something that there is seeming conspiracy to collapse because it isn't fearful enough. As well, even after years of dedication, like poets and cartoonists, you don't find too many rich experimental musicians. Money is the “real world”.

But besides all of that, sound and vibration effect us directly and indirectly, quite similarly to an expansive drug. As it is now, most music and sound are corporately controlled into neat three minutes packages or advertising jingles. Most people take this for granted. The effects of this on our psyches aren't something quantifiable, but they're real. The struggle for sonic freedom is synonymous with the struggle for psychic freedom. I think a lot of the experimental musicians in the 60's understood this. They knew they were breaking open a box and letting it all fly out. Nowadays, there are lots of musicians who like cool electronic toys that make sounds. At first, they could be playing a video game for all it is worth. They're making noise or whatever. They're having fun, messing around. I'm not sure they see themselves in any political context, in fact I'm sure many don't, but I think the sonic exploration, if they stick with it, can lead to something expansive nevertheless.

R.E.P. - As I can hear, the political dimension of your music isn’t only implicit...

E.D.-I. - Lately, I have felt a greater and greater need to express myself with lyrics that are blatantly political. After a while talking with musicians, hearing where they toured and gigged, music "shop talk," feels equivalent to meeting up with travelers who only want to discuss where the good restaurants are. It just gets boring. One dimensional. I know I fall into it, too. That is the American culture, "the land of the self". But I don't want to be abstract or silent during this moment in history. I'm not sure who is listening or who cares, and

I'm not sure if I’m "changing minds" or if I'm just "reinforcing values". Whatever it is, it seems necessary because we have Bush and Cheney running our country. I'm surprised more artists don't feel a similar urgency.

R.E.P. - Do you think that what compells you to see the world in a certain way (with a perspective far away from the mainstream ideologies) is what explains also your preference for certain kinds of "alternative" music and art? That's another subject that interests me very much: what makes a musician to want to play experimental? What makes someone to like avant-garde, new music? You already defined your music as "nihilistic", "a celebration of life and death"...

E.D.-I. - My first CDs were all solo piano (Itz'at, Tepeu, Solus, and Ucross Journal). At the time, I was aiming to reach utopia and transcendence with my music. But then I was constantly being reminded that I'm not living in one. I'd return from my eternal, timeless escape back to America and a lot of bullshit. So my music started visiting more nihilistic places. I didn't want to make happy music that was listenable and soothing. It felt like we're on the eve of an apocalypse with America running unchecked and rampant. Thirteen year old girls in sweatshops who are controlled by corporate fascism, etc., etc. I didn't want to make music that numbed-out consumers could toast their glasses to. Then I met up with my girlfriend, Marjorie Sturm, and our minds and creativity met up on a lot of levels. She had all these poems laying around that really spoke to me. I started putting them to music and singing them. The Bitter Undiscovered Alienated (male) Genius Club, Christian Bush, The Thread, No More Loans, Take Yourself Seriously, So Others Take You Seriously, Complacency, The New Ritual are some of the outcomes. So they're not folk or rock, but they have lyrics (she loves Leonard Cohen) and are what could be considered a song. I had always wanted to have a lover that I collaborated with, and for whatever reason it didn't work out until I met Marjorie, who is primarily a filmmaker and plays flute as well. There's an edgy but sensible fearlessness to our world.The direction I'd like to head next is a merging of these two worlds (the cosmic transcendental and the earthbound nihilism). Not sure what that exactly looks like but “the truth" seems to encompass both of these.

R.E.P. - Tell me about your punk influences. You told that you want "to maintain the fuck-you of punk rock in a dark, thought-provoking way". How do you mix that with the musical references you point out, like Morton Feldman and John Cage, or with what Wadada Leo Smith teached you when you were a music student?

E.D.-I. - While growing up in 80's Reagan years, I craved all forms of non-mainstream music. Everything I could get my hands on while living in a culturally deprived rural/suburban community. Mostly punk, new wave, heavy metal. I was quite the angst-ridden suicidal teenager. Playing guitar, keyboards, and writing songs became an escape on my 4-track. I identified with the "fuck-you" of the punk rock anti-establishment. My connection with punk is more emotional and ideological than musical. Even as a young person I knew things were fucked up with the world. On a personal level I had rocks being thrown at me as I walked to school etc., etc. Those experiences have marked me to this day and are the base of my "anger issues". Nowadays, wow! If one is a thinking person in the United States, there's a lot to be outraged about. Bush and his band of corporate warmongers are evil. And that's not an adjective I throw around lightly. I've got to blow-off some steam. That's why I gravitated to dissonant forms of music. CDs like Crashing The Russian The Renaissance, All The States Between, Wires and Wooden Boxes, Ars Vivende have the punk roots that I'm describing.

Composers like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Wadada Leo Smith represent for me that rebellion more on an intellectual level. They go against the grain, challenge systems of thought/dogmas, while synthesizing and creating something unique. Fantastic, no? One of the things I admired about John Cage, besides his music, was his commitment to freedom of expression. His own and other artists. I think I went on to channel my organizational and activist skills that I learned at M.E.Ch.A (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, a Chicano student group dedicated to community service, education and exploring/celebrating Latino Culture) into avant-garde music. The Luggage Store Gallery from 2000-02, the Big Sur Music Festival since 99, San Francisco Alternative Music Festival, and Pax Recordings are my attempts to advocate for freedom of expression and sonic exploration. Cage notoriously supported and encouraged others artists who he felt a kinship with. I see this music as an underground momentum and current, worms in the unconscious.

When I first heard Morton Feldmans's music at Cal Arts, it was like taking LSD. Feldman's style of austere delicate minimalism and refined large-scale compositional forms felt like a new religion to me, food for my soul. It's amazing that he was composing all this in a Serialist tradition climate-going against the grain. And his interest in different mediums of arts and artists, painters, writers inspired me to dialogue beyond music. And Wadada Leo Smith was a familiar energy, and his music aesthetics were awesome to be around, fresh air. I had been studying with Stephen L. Mosko, a great composer and conductor, from 94-96. He suggested that I study composition with Leo Smith because he knew Leo and I had similar personal backgrounds, as well as an interest in composition and improvisation. From the first meeting/lesson I was blown away. Leo had come up with his own music notational language and had spent years in dedicated research with an aim towards merging composition and improvisation with the inner journey. It was a high to be around him, almost guru cult-like. Liberating beyond belief. He inspired me to take the leap into myself, and let my music unravel from there.

Lastly, I owe a lot of my early music development to Dr. Margaret Mayer, a wonderful composer, musician, and author who saved me from dropping out of academia. She taught composition at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where I received my BFA. She was a rebel in her own right. Not too many women have the guts to break into the old boys' network of composers. Margaret Mayer took me under her wing and taught me the foundation blocks of composition as well as exposed me to performance art, Gamelan, film music, improvisation, Dadaism, and the blues. It was a special time for me trying to survive and excel in an academic environment that seemed over my head and not what I had envisioned for my life (none of my immediate family has completed college). I drank up these ideas and influences because I had been searching for them my entire life. I felt like an alien coming home to my family and friends. So there you have it.

R.E.P. - Your music deals with several music families, classical contemporary, sound art, jazz, rock and folk, and I suppose I can tell that you're mainly an improviser, even if composition interests you in a particular way. But it isn't fusion, like the jazz-rock played in the 70’s and it's not collage, in the John Zorn way. What is, then, your relation with all those idiomatic materials?

E.D.-I. - I'm interested in the “in-between-states” between genres and the beyond genre (non-classifiable states). That is what comes most naturally to me. I'm an absolute voracious listener of music, and when I like something I often listen to it over and over and over. It gets a bit koo-koo. But I compose mostly with the back of my brain. I think about the form, but I have to cut loose from it in order to make anything. I surprise myself. I believe in the spontaneous moment a lot more than the calculation.

R.E.P. - I had this on-line discussion in a chat list with a musician you use to play with, Damon Smith, during which this double bass player defended free improvisation like something that lives apart. I suppose, from what I hear in your records, that's not your case. What's your conception of improvisation (be it free or not free)? Do you make any distinctions between practices of improv, like: now I'm doing it and now I don't, now I'm being free and now I don't? And, for you, are there any differences between doing improvisation and playing improvised music?

E.D.-I. - I have no idea what Damon Smith is talking about in this case. For me, music is both a mental and an emotional journey. When I'm composing, if I loose enough my unconscious catches a natural composition that seemingly already exists (often with a beginning, middle, and end). It's hard to do and not always possible, and harder to do as a collective. There are moments where the spirit takes over the constrictions of the belittling mind, and some sensation of freedom occurs. That is not to say that sculpting/crafting and being present mentally is mutually exclusive from that other state. But it all merges together. I live in both a free and structured improvisation. I'm not as interested in algorithmic improvisation. I'm more interested in the metaphysics and psychic communication that occurs when people collaborate through improvisation. That's a real rush for me, when people are open together and there is a synchronicity that occurs. It's these moments that make me feel that I'm living my life correctly.

R.E.P. - By the way: what are your composicional strategies? Different if you're composing a chamber piece or a song? Curious thing: now that you live a special, quiet, phase in your life, with a newborn son, a love story, you're dedicating yourself more to composition (and I knew you stopped doing gigs). Can I conclude that your improvisation activity were connected with your "war" years? Improvisation meaning "action" and composition meaning "time to think about things"?

E.D.-I. - I've been improvising all my life and probably will for the rest of it. As much as I wanted to stop gigging (playing live), I found it harder to get away from than I thought it would be. Kind of like a cult that seems to follow me around. But I've finally done it as of late. No gigs. No obligations or recordings. I'm getting to relax and focus on my strumming. I've been doing sunset sessions. My girlfriend's apartment, which I now live in, has an amazing view into the Pacific Ocean. And yeah, I think you're right. The composing does mean, "time to think about things". With so much gigging and running around and minutia, it's hard to find the space I need to be in to move forward musically. After awhile, it's hard to be around so many voices that are looking for the flaws in things. I love composing music and it takes me slowing down, doing less, in order to live in a ruminative world where your senses are alive. Where it is possible to feel your thoughts and then translate it into vibration.

R.E.P. - You're a multi-instrumentalist: acoustic guitar, piano, electronics, vocals (surprising, the "mumble singing"), violin, accordion, turntables, field recordings and so on. Why the necessity to change colors and pitches? You use different instruments like you use different stylistic materials? It's the same motive that makes you look for diversity?

E.D.-I. - Yeah, my mumbling singing is one of my recent explorations ("march", The Long Await Between Collapsed Lungs, s/t, Ars Vivende, Next Door To The Jefferson Airplane, Muck, Novo Navigatio and my numerous collaborations with Dick Metcalf, aka Rotcod Zzaj). I'm captivated by the vocal styles of Leonard Cohen, Nico, Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, Jandek, Tim Buckley, Stuart Staples, Billie Holiday, and others. I was inspired to express myself with voice and words because it felt like a more concrete, direct, and emotional form of communication, as opposed to playing instruments.

When I'm recording my compositions, I sometimes play other instruments for orchestration reasons. I like to have the option to extend the sonic palette and set a different dynamics to a piece I'm sculpting. My solo self-titled CD is probably the best example of this. Why the necessity to change colors and pitches? Because I'm a composer and that's the composition. When not improvising with any other musicians, I'm challenged to create my own sonic landscape. I was trained and studied contemporary composition so that's the way I think, whether I'm playing by myself or with others, or composing for others. In the past, I made large pieces that CalArts New Century Players and The California Ear Unit performed. But when you're outside of the academic system, you have less and less access to those resources and musicians. I have had to become self-reliant. I still have a couple of boxes in my studio of notated music compositions that haven't been read or performed. Improvisation is only one aspect of my work.

Now that I have a son, I've had to shift things, and I'm glad because it makes me feel a bit less weird. I'm distracted from myself because I love and care about him so much. So maybe I will start to make less music? I hope to have a sense of well being. That is what is most important. I guess the question makes me defensive because I'm aware that my number of releases is usually interpreted in a competitive manner. Like who had the most homeruns, touchdowns, or the biggest cock. Other musicians have mentioned their resentment to me and have wondered if I'm a trustafarian or come from a lineage of Spanish aristocracy (seriously!). This isn't the case at all, and even if it was, I'd say people should spend a lot less time pointing fingers at others who are supposedly more "privileged" and get on with making music, if that is what they want to do.

I live in a minimalist way that takes some discipline, but keeps me focused on my music. It is about prioritizing (the Berlin improvisors are quite inspiring in regards to this!). At the moment, I'm on food stamps and we do our best to live off the obscene amount of material excess that surrounds us. Often I don't know how I'm pulling it off, but it just seems to keep coming together. I hope it continues to. . . but I know for sure that I wouldn't be making this much music if I just kept thinking about all the reasons that are against me. In that way, I identify with the Jews. They get struck down, but they come back more lucid than ever. I've heard friends describe Jews as "over-achievers." Over-achieving compared to what standard? Someone who hasn't been traumatized? It is a strange irony that historical trauma can at times overlap with conventional ideas of success.

Nietzsche said “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger”. I'm not sure if that is always the case, but in mine I think it applies. After getting out of Cal Arts, I knew I wasn't going to be satisfied with "breaking the glass ceiling". I needed to smash it. Annihilate it for myself on my own terms. And for the most part, I think I have done that. That's why this period of my life has a sense of calm and grace to it besides the birth of my son. I've made a shitload of music that I feel great about. I've worked so hard to do it, along with the job of freeing myself from typical American lifestyle expectations. Becoming another drone of the “work-produce-consume” ethos. There's a lot to sort out in order to sculpt a lifestyle that provides for musical inspiration. And music is my purpose in life even if no one is listening, but quite frankly I'm appreciative of the international, experimental music ghettoes. It feels good to be understood and appreciated. Due to the personal eccentric form of my music, I have no illusion or delusion that it is going to be populist.

R.E.P. - Playing fingerpicking in a John Fahey, Robbie Basho way, and after that an electronic piece with synthesizer makes you think you're using different "persona", or are these different aspects of the same thing? Is music for you a "representation" act, a sort of a "sound theater" (I remember Jello Biafra, from Dead Kennedys, saying to a conflitual crowd, "take it easy, guys, rock 'n' roll is only theater"), or you're simply doing what you feel like to do? In other words, what I want to know is if that diversity is a natural thing or a conceptual decision, a program?

E.D.-I. - Yeah, one of my earliest childhood memories was an acoustic guitar that I found in the closet. I remember strumming the guitar and being fascinated with the resonating strings. I thought it was magic. I grew up hearing, watching, and playing acoustic guitar in church and at family gatherings. I bought my first guitar in Mexico when I was 14 and I was immediately drawn to fingerpicking. I learned Jorma Kaukonen's Embryonic Journey and grew up listening to lots of Carlos Santana (my father was big on Santana, they were from the same town in Mexico). Later, I got into Fahey in college. I still dig acoustic playing, everything from Robbie Basho, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Leo Brouwer, Elizabeth Cotton, to Ostad Elahi. So the fingerpicking is a form that has held my interest from the start.

But I love most forms of music, and appreciate a lot of music that I wouldn't be interested in making. For instance, folk. (as is stated...before known) is a tribute to my love of folk guitar, and a detour from my own guitar playing. The fact that "consistency" is considered a virtue seems to me another part of our repressive culture. It is like our personalities. Society forces us to choose one persona that we must live by to demonstrate our sanity and mediocrity. But I think the truth is that most of us are a lot more dimensional than that. So, I'd say it is a natural thing. Like a writer who creates novels may later create poems and even theatrical monologues or film scripts. My interest in music leads me a lot of places.

R.E.P. - Why did you start the label Pax Recordings? Just because of practical reasons, considering that's difficult to have your music released in record by other labels, or you decided to do it as an economic/political gesture, refusing the established industrial/commercial music circuits and inventing a way to deal with it?

E.D.-I. - My father (who was born in El Grullo, Jalisco, Mexico) became an inventor of agricultural machinery, and was all about the American Dream. Four years ago he passed away. Dole, a multinational corporation, owns all the patents to his inventions and continues to capitalize on them. Meanwhile, my mother lives on a minimum social security income. I don't know I could've been given a more immediate lesson in regard to protecting one's creations and intellectual property.

In America, "identity politics" are no longer hip. There's a risk in expressing that I started Pax because I didn't want white people to have power over me. But that's the truth. Now I feel great that Pax is supporting other talented and interesting musicians (recent artists such as 99 Hooker, Ian Yeager, mJane, miba, and Marina Lazzara). I hope that Pax Recordings can continue to be a "music laboratory". A place to realize ideas and bring them to fruition through documentation. The synergistic process of this is quite the buzz, and reminds me of my readings about the Beats and how they were supportive and encouraging of one another's art. That really stuck with me, and I always wanted to do this. Now I am and it feels awesome.

R.E.P. - I notice that you have an enormous quantity of free MP3s to downlowd in your site (I downlowed it very largely myself, thanks!). Promotion objectives? The idea that music has to circulate as freely as possible?

E.D.-I. - In the Mayan language, Pax means the power of music. That's what it is about for me. Music is my religion. Opening sonically is a form of travelling. Music has never been about profiteering for me. If music leads me to a fully lived life and an open, free existence, I'll be more than happy. Sharing my MP3s is the way I converse with many musicians and listeners globally on the Internet. The fact that I share so many, you could say "I'm talkative" (much more so than interpersonally). Communicating with music is the essence of all of this madness. Give with no limits. Receive with no limits.