I first stumbled upon Ekumen when I read about a band combining hardcore with Science fiction references. Two things I dearly love, so fair to say my interest was piqued. It turns out the music they make is super cool and has a message I can get behind. So I decided to reach out to them to find out more. Here is an interview with AL (vocals), K (Guitar) and J (Bass) of Ekumen.

Ekumen is a band of which the band members want to stay anonymous. Is there a special reason for that? I would guess it has to do with not getting burdened with an ex member stamp. But I assume you all have been in bands before. How much of those bands can we still hear in Ekumen?

J: I took to the anonymity because in my mind it made the band feel cohesive, less of a few acquaintances getting together and banging out some songs and more of a feeling of something that is more or less fully realized when you get to hear it. It’s also a way to separate our everyday life from this project and allow us to fully commit to it without the self-deprecation accompanying a lot of our previous projects.

AL: I think it’s nice to be able to create something while operating under a certain degree of anonymity.  Kind of takes the pressure off, you know?  As far as our previous work, we’ve all been in bands before this one and while they’ve all been different musically from each other/this one I think it’s unavoidable that we bring bits and pieces with us to this band from them.  Hopefully good bits, though.

What made you decide to start a punkrock/ hardcore band as adults? Isn’t punkrock a young person gig? Do you feel you bring something different to punkrock because of an older/ adult perspective?

K: I wanted to start another punk band because the best punk shows I was going to at the time were old folks playing punk. Like Napalm Death. The world changed for the worst and I thought I still had it in me.

J:There hasn’t been much of a time in my life when I didn’t feel too old for what I was doing.  I cut my teeth playing music in a college town that was at the time very transient and I remember knowing I had to get out of there when someone clowned on me for being 22 and at a backyard party.  That being said I still don’t feel that much different than when I was 22 as far as still being an angsty little piece of shit who knows that playing music really loudly about it is one of the only things that helps me. It’s just now the problems we address in our music are more far reaching than what I used to play when I was complaining that I was broke because I had spent all my money on beer the night before.  I hope so at least.

AL: Coming up most of the friends/influences I had were a good 5+ years older than me, so I feel like my punk/HC experience has always been one that wasn’t entirely youth-focused.  Although it’s definitely strange sometimes being the old guys at the show.  We’ve played with bands whose members weren’t old enough to go to shows when I was playing in their hometowns a decade-plus ago and that’s felt………..a little weird.  I guess I never thought about being on the old side of things.  In my mind I’m still that 15 year old losing my shit over the Acrid/Left For Dead split. But punk is also something I’ve been involved with for a good 2/3rds of my life at this point so it also feels like the same thing I’ve always done.  Just maybe with some grey hairs and more of a desire to get a decent night’s sleep now. 

You are named after a coalition of planets in Ursula K le Guin’s Hainish cycle books. On your full length all songs also have titles related to that SF saga?  What made you pick this? Do you feel there is a message in these books that need to be said?

J: We mostly just thought that it would help with the unity of the project if we could get behind something that we all enjoyed and in a nerdy way it was a cool idea to encapsulate the idea of us all coming from different places and having vastly different experiences to try to accomplish a common goal.

AL: Personally, I’ve always loved her ability to recognize and be critical of injustices within our current social/political/cultural systems and the way she’d interpret better, more egalitarian versions of all of that in her books.   I also feel she makes radicalism of thought and action far more accessible compared to a lot of other more outspoken radical writers and thinkers.

Plus maybe a casual observer would see the name and think we’re a Swedish d-beat band?  We could do a lot worse.

Based on the Ursula K le Guin references I’m assuming you have a healthy interest in SF and books. Any recent books you want to recommend and why should people read these?

J: I just finished Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, it really captures a lot of the creepy foreboding of living on the Gulf Coast and I am a huge sucker for possibly unreliable narrators.

K: I love the “Remembrance of Earth Past” trilogy by Liu Cixin, and I also then  “Southern Reach” trilogy by VanderMeer. I also love ”Ancillary Justice” by Leckie and “Closed and Common Orbit” by Chambers.

The Remembrance trilogy has a pretty good rebuttal to the Fermi paradox, which is cool as it’s written from a non western perspective. Ancillary Justice and Closed and Common Orbit are just really good modern takes on human rights, or non human rights.

AL: backing that VanderMeer sentiment, hard – I’m currently rereading his Borne and it’s so weird and great.  George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides is a big one for me, and I’ve yet to read anything by Octavia Butler or Margaret Atwood that I haven’t liked.  Oh, and it’s more high fantasy than sci-fi but I’ve read Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story at least once a year since I was seven or eight.  It’s almost too good.

On your split with Heel turn you don’t have Hainish cycle references. Or at least not as openly that I can discover them. What made you abandon that concept. Is Ekumen a concept album? Will other releases maybe draw inspiration from other books?

J: I would secretly love if the next one could have an Infinite Jest through line.   It’s going to be a hard sell but I think that “the howling fantods” would be a good song title.  That might be a hill I die on.

AL: I feel like calling the LP a concept album implies a degree of foresight which is definitely not what we had when we were writing all of the songs.  Thanks for thinking that’s something we’re capable of, though!  Maybe down the line but definitely not with that one. 

I think the Hainish titles were more of a “oh this could be a cool thing to do” idea than they were anything else. We’d probably keep that going but unfortunately that language has a limited scope so I’m not sure how much more we’d be able to glean from it.  I can’t say for certain whether or not future songs/releases will be inspired by other UKLG books because I have no goddamn idea where inspiration is ever going to come from.  Do any of us know?  How do other bands write songs? 

Watching the news lately the sentence “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” from Nearreal seems to resonate very strongly. We (as the punk community) have been trying to create a better, more inclusive society for years now but it seems like all our effort did not do any good. I see even more hate and fear for the unknown show up. It seems like several of your songs deal with this theme. (Nearreal, Ansible, odonianism,…)  Am I reading this right? Or did you have different topics in mind with those songs.

J: I think you can read it both on a wide scale and personal level.  A lot of this band to me in theory is about trying to become a better person and just how difficult that can be. We are not the sum total of our vices and emotional shortcomings, at least until we are again.

AL: I feel like it’s frustrating being able to see the problems and feel like I’m entirely unable to do much about them, realistically.  But the best I can do is try, and I have hope that there are enough people on the planet who feel the same way I do and who are also trying.  The last line of Odonianism is “love won’t lose” and most days I believe that. 

The song ShiftGrethor  seems like a very important song. Due to the title hinting on saving face and defending your reputation and the lyrics it seems like this song is the heartfelt outcry of every woman that had to deal with abuse of some kind and was not believed. Am I reading this correctly? Care to elaborate a bit about this? Is this a general song or is this inspired by some specific incident?

AL: You’re right on the mark with that, actually.  The song was inspired by a very specific incident – it was written as something of an open letter to the jury who unanimously acquitted my rapist back in 2009.  They were presented with literal factual evidence of a violent crime and chose not to believe any of it.  I’ve experienced first-hand what it means to not be believed, both via that and also after getting out of a relationship that was textbook domestic abuse.  It felt the same, in maybe too many ways.  Disbelief is trauma of its own, in a way.  It has lifelong repercussions – almost exclusively negative – not just for whoever’s at the center of it but also for whoever that person encounters, especially friends and loved ones.  It’s the ripple effect that I feel like most people don’t ever consider, and one that I’ve had to be incredibly conscious of. 

There are more songs dealing with this topic like Odianism and to some extent even Obvious/Oblivious. Is the topic of being heard and believed even if you are in a vulnerable group one of the main themes for Ekumen?

J: A huge part of why I got very energized about this project is the fact that for once the loud noises I make are not just conveying the (well-meaning) voices of a straight white dude.

AL: aw, bud. 

I don’t know that it’s entirely an intentional thing but by virtue of who some of us are it’s definitely an underlying theme of sorts.  Not all of us are straight. Not all of us are white.  Not all of us are dudes.  As a non-straight white dude I can say it gets exhausting having to constantly advocate for myself to be taken seriously in the same way men are.  Sometimes (though not often!) even within the context of this band. 

I know we’re all working on being better both as individuals and a society but that’s where it starts.  If the most vulnerable members of our community aren’t afforded the same considerations as the least vulnerable than there’s no hope for any of us.

On to a lighter subject: Lets imagine two different situations where you have to describe Ekumen, how it sounds and what the band stands for. Situation one: A coworker found out you have a band, and wants to know more. Second situation: You are describing your band to a punk festival promoter to convince him to book Ekumen.

J:  1) Oh man, this is one I run into a lot. Loud rock-n-roll usually suffices for coworkers who are older than me.  My peers ask more questions and it usually ends with my head in my hands saying something like “ok, but do you know about Black Flag?” just trying to find some common reference that is somewhat close.

2) Maybe I would just list all the  “crossed with” descriptions people have given us after shows: Sonic Youth/Appalachian Terror Unit, Hot Cross/Hot Snakes, Converge/Blood Brothers…

AL: 1) ugh so that’s already happened to me, and depending on the coworker’s age/work relation to me I’ll describe it as either “kind of like a metal band” or “kind of loud rock stuff?” and then change the subject as quickly as possible.  I work in a super corporate environment so having to explain the nuances and regional differences of 90’s hardcore as they’ve influenced us musically is a lost cause.  Most people with even a basic understanding of music will get that metal = loud and weird and abrasive so that’s usually enough.    

2)I’ve kept a list of bands people have compared to after shows (it’s more funny than not, most of the time) so all of the above but also “like Snapcase but less groovy”, “Assfactor 4 with an air of professionalism”, and “slowed down Converge” none of which I really agree with but cool. 

What made you decide to reuse all the demo songs for the full length?

J: We thought they were all pretty good and deserved to be on more than just a cassette.  But then we made a cassette of the album so…

AL:  …. Sometimes we do stuff that seems like a good idea at the time, and it generally is, but then occasionally later we’ll look back and go “why did we do that?”  No bad ideas, though.  Unless we’re in Murfreesboro, TN and the van door has fallen off, and will not completely go back on, and you still have two days left of tour, and it’s raining…………….. 

What is in the future for Ekumen?