Forthcoming interview and Lithuanian translation by Gabriele Labanauskaite. This is a fragment. The full interview will be available shortly.
GL: Where does the inspiration comes from?
DB:.The world is increasingly full of music-makers and creators. I sometimes see this as an unconscious attempt to re-take cultural reality on a mass scale and make it something that has personal meaning and is smaller and truer to the experiences of people than the concept of the world belched out by corporations.
But when I am confronted with an excess of feeling, a complete overwhelm, which happens often, performing and composing are ways of dealing with it, ways of being in it. Personal crisis feels collective for me. I think about how personal experiences, lost love or other kinds of grief for instance, take their shape from social experience. I believe that the social experience of personal life is the same context that has also permitted dark prisons and black sites, the tearing apart of communities, spying, negligence of human need (housing, health, food and so on.) The kinds of casual violence that people wreak on each other is not separate from what the corporate state causes us to constantly experience because we have so few other reference points or because those points of reference are difficult to remember or access or create. When I'm trying to understand my own unmanageable moods and feelings, my experience of precariousness in the world, I can't help but understand them in a collective sense, and in terms of socialized and institutionalized punishment and torture and suffering. Capitalism has always made people disposable, but more recently institutional reality, particularly in the United States (but not only there), has also begun a widespread process that I would call Abu Graihbization. An entire context, the suffering or ignoring of war or the military state, privation on mass scales and in places where it goes unrecognized, as well as the disposability of people and other effects of capitalism, all contribute to a state of reality, emotional dispositions, the way people become used to seeing and understanding each other. These casual things that we do to each other are not natural but socialized. The corporate state might be committing violence for reasons of power and money, but the social fabric this creates makes it difficult to imagine that other people are not objects of possession, association or disassociation. It's not that my suffering is similar or comparable to others, but that there is a possibility of solidarity in it that I accept, though definitely NOT because it makes me feel "better." In fact, it contributes to the overwhelm. These kinds of intersections are what come out of me when I play. It might not be quite right to call this inspiration because it's not divine and it's not a muse, but it does describe something about the inner life that ends up writing or performing.
(February 2009)
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