Interview Alert: .gif from god - 'Dissimulation' conversation with Andrew Schwartz

Photo by Ruby Carmela. \m/

"Gif from god takes as a given the notion that in our society, the purpose of technology is to extract capital from the masses, not to benefit them." - Andrew Schwartz.

Virginia punk/screamo metallers .gif from god casually dropped an anvil on the head of the complacent scene this year with the unveiling of future classic Dissimulation. "Your Sorrows Pin You To This Place" bursts forth with deep screamed conviction like raw lost in the forest blues dreams hidden in the shy heart of a raging, dirging metallic thicket coated in feral punk blood. Pure volcanic feelings that have to get out. The six piece have sharpened their deep knowledge of sub genres without being snobby at the expense of the material, and suitably slay on every track without pretension while nonetheless proving they are on an elite level above most of their "peers". 

Kudos to Prosthetic for releasing this. Sure to rattle volatile simian nervous systems and fuck up faces.

Produced by the band, engineered and mixed by Matt Michel and mastered by mighty Brad Boatright at Audiosiege.

1. Great record. Have always enjoyed the band. Really love the "Turn From The Ruin" intro, almost like a subverted melodic metal riff that then fractures into like several micro genres. The overall mix on this is so cool, too. A great blend of harsh meets melody. What were you feeling at the start and completion of this batch of songs? How was the process?

Andrew: Thank you so much! Means a lot. Big thanks to Matt at Viva Studios for recording and mixing, Brad at Audiosiege for mastering, Dimir from Goetia ("Mortuary Cult" out now!!) for doing a guest dive bomb on "A Fucked Up Face." We definitely went into the studio very prepared, as we really wanted to take our time getting the record perfect as opposed to just laying down tracks. Similarly, we really took our time writing the songs - the first couple songs we wrote ("Dissimulation", "Life Like a Sickness") were done shortly after Digital Red came out in 2023, and we've been playing a lot of this record live for a couple years now. When it came time to record, we were already pretty tight, and we could spend our time really focusing on getting perfect takes.

Personally, at the start of the songwriting process I was in a state of complete despair. I hadn't held down a job in a couple years, was completely overwhelmed by the geopolitical nightmare we found ourselves in... and that was before Trump won again! My contribution to gif's lyrics has always been intensely political, this time around is no exception. I essentially just dumped what I was feeling at the time into a notes app and cut it down into something semi-legible.

2. I love that you keep it real like that. Some of this record reminds me a little of like a more modern Universal Order of Armageddon, while we are on the subject of great East coast noisy bands, lol. There is a real immediacy to this material. Your band has always felt frenetic to me, but this one feels like maybe the band unlocked some way to be even more dialed in together. Does that just come from time and familiarity and callouses on the fingertips?

That's high praise! I think that a large part of it is time and familiarity - we've been a band for 10 years and the lineup has stayed in place for the last 7 - but the longer writing process also certainly helped as well. We also tend to add new songs to the set list as soon as we feel comfortable playing them, which gives us a lot of time to get very comfortable playing them. It also gives us some immediate feedback to see if people fuck with the new tracks.

3. Line up stability that long in the underground is fucking impressive. How was your recent Gold Sounds show back in early April? I saw you played with Locked In A Vacancy, who I used to go see often. Any other shows coming up you are particularly excited about?

I wish I could tell you, I wasn't there! I was out of the country for that tour, Ian from Bacteria filled in for me. I have played with Locked In A Vacancy before though, they absolutely rip. We love Dyami, he always comes through for us in NYC and his shows are always killer. As far as upcoming shows are concerned, we're playing DC 8/8 with Bleached Cross which I'm sure will be tight, 8/17 with Bloom Dream in Richmond, and we have a handful of shows for the fall that have yet to be announced which I'm very excited for!

4. Sometimes as an artist if I explore more abstract themes I feel like, while important, that maybe I should be being more direct to comment on world affairs. That said, thinking about despair or analyzing the phobias of basic people or whatever usually circles back around to current events anyway, lol. Do you ever ponder this dilemma? The volatile simian nervous system is real! 

I do struggle with figuring out how direct I should be in my lyrics. I believe that hardcore/metal/punk is for everyone*, but I didn't spring into the world fully formed in my politics. In 50 years, the opinions I expressed on Dissimulation will probably be seen as reactionary in some way, who knows. There was a time in my life when I understood *that* things were Bad and Fucked Up, but I lacked the ability to communicate those feelings. I lacked a lens through which to view the world that could make what I saw make sense. I developed that lense and that language over time and by reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It took a decade and a half to get to where I am, and I'm still nowhere near the top of the Politics Understander leaderboard. All this said, I think the best thing I can do is try to reach the kids who are now in the same place I was then; who can sense the shape of the problems but not their texture. It's important to hear a voice that says "yes, you're right to feel this way. And it's landlords and executives and politicians and fascists who shape the world that inspires those fucked up feelings inside of you, and we can be rid of them for ever if we work together."

5. How did the title Dissimulation summarize how you are collectively feeling at this moment in time as a group? This record is so bad ass and feels like it was a big undertaking. One of the most impressive I have heard all year and sorely needed right now for my shot nerves. 

So for me, Approximation was about capturing a sense of fear and panic about the direction the world was heading in at the time. Digital Red turned that sense of fear into misery, rage, anger, and frustration regarding the fact that conditions had really only gotten worse in the years since our first LP. Dissimulation represents the last step in that journey: a fundamental collapse of basic function. A sort of paranoid, disturbed, sick feeling, and a lashing out at anyone and anything in this desperate attempt to regain function.

I try to tie these feelings to politics. Our material conditions affect our lives, the material is shaped by the political. Nobody wants data centers, yet they keep showing up. Gif from god takes as a given the notion that in our society, the purpose of technology is to extract capital from the masses, not to benefit them. That's the sort of ideological throughline in everything we've ever put out. Through that lens, everything clicks into place. AI is getting shoved into everything because it's a great way for the companies involved to artificially inflate their stock prices. Social media sucks now because the people at the helm figured out if they tune your algorithm just right, you'll go just insane enough to never log off. Your attention is the commodity. That's before touching on enshittification, climate change, or the genocide in Palestine that both political parties seem to be perfectly happy to continue to enable. What passes for the socialist left in this country is making gains, but far too slowly and always on the capitalist classes' terms. I hate to be a bummer, I really do, but we've been yelling about this (literally) since 2016 and things have only gotten worse.

6. No, I get it. I stay sane by trying to do activism, listening to random Swiz or Giant Sand records and dealing with being disabled between doom scrolling or reading Parenti for book club with Mallika from Emasculator. Humans who care do what we can while not ignoring harsh reality and try to stay sane. But on a PMA note...How has it felt sharing this new super potent material with people? How does it feel when people find a sense of hope or community in what you do? Be it your own local scene or on the road. 

It's felt so great! Like I mentioned, we've been playing some of these songs for a while now, but now kids are singing along and pitting like they know what's coming up. The reception has been really humbling. I know I've talked a lot about the political aspects of our songs, but there's also the deeply personal elements, and it's always really encouraging to feel less alone and like people out there get it. And while I was a bummer one paragraph ago, what *is* encouraging is that people really do get it. These feelings aren't weird or alien. People are fucked up and pissed! That's not nothing!

7. That's everything! Thanks for your time today. "Obliterated Serial Number" is a potent way to end the record. I have been thinking a lot about Joe Rogan inflating the number of trans shooters from 5 to "the majority of shooters" in the discourse of the right wing manosphere a lot and how demonic and evil that is to do to a marginalized group, especially when out of over 5000 recent mass shootings the bulk have been cis white dudes. But leftists or trans people of any stripes now are being pushed as not "sane" enough to own guns. Everything now is also fed into the AI slop surveillance machine capitalism end times we live in. Even discussing this could get Peter Thiel sweaty palmed thinking about the Anti Christ somewhere. And meanwhile the White House is making fake assassination attempts like every day. What a clusterfuckkk. 

When I wrote that song, I was thinking about the story of Khalil Abdul Rayyan. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he was a 21 year old pizza delivery driver from Michigan who was arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges. What's strange, depressing, and extremely emblematic of our time is that the basis of those charges were conversations Rayyan had with an FBI informant who had taken on the identity of a woman online, who Rayyan had fallen in love with. The story is really gut wrenching, Rayyan was this young guy who didn't really have the means to make something of his life. He was nervous and awkward and felt uncomfortable in his body and stuck in a dead end job, which are feelings I think we can all relate to, and the FBI used those feelings to try to create a mass shooter. It didn't work, and when it became clear that Rayyan was more likely to harm himself than innocents, the FBI stepped in to arrest him with what evidence they had created.

I bring this up as a sort of companion piece to your point about the right wing essentially inventing the "threat" of trans mass shooters, and how this fabrication (among others) is being used as a means of criminalizing the Left. Antifa as a "terrorist organization", etc. In the media the ruling class invents stories and statistics out of whole cloth to scare people, while behind closed doors they exploit the lonely and vulnerable to literally fabricate terrorist attacks.

I don't really know what to say about any of this. It's clear, especially under this administration, that "propaganda of the deed" doesn't seem to be the path forward. That, to me, leaves the only other path: building a strong, organized, capable revolutionary party. We've got far too many to choose from, but shit man, so did Russia in the 1910s. If they kicked out their bourgeoisie, we can too. It just might take a while longer.

LFG.