On-site audio recorded April 21, 2001 in Quebec City, Canada by C.W.C. agent C.K. during the people’s resistance to the “Free” Trade Area of the Americas summit. Piano recorded May 30, 2001 at the Soundlab studio in Greensboro, North Carolina. Additional instruments recorded June 3-10, 2001, at Mars studio, by Bill Korecky. Mastered June 13, 2001 at the Kitchen in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

a - percussion
stef and the mattrix - string section
sammi curr - four more strings
b - megalomaniacal eschatology

This is a blessing, a sanctification of every extreme human beings have gone to to stay alive inside, to push back on the world that presses down so hard. Not to suggest that the young woman who burns down a posh resort acts more nobly than the one who spends her years in libraries—but nor is she any less noble, so long as she acts to nurture what is beautiful within herself and find common cause with others. We’re not in the least afraid of ruins, nor of making them, living, as we do, in them—as they do within us. Until we have cleared these away—as the woman who burns down the resort does—so the seeds in the soil beneath can germinate again, uproar can be our only music.

We lose everything, you know, piece by piece or all at once. If I am to lose this voice I treasure so much, better I lose it in song. If our wrists are to bear scars—as far too many of them already do—let them be from the handcuffs we wear in wars against everything that is senseless and destructive. Dreams hold each other’s hands and form a chain out into the darkness, brush up against secret futures, longed-for solutions and resolutions, points of departure for journeys to other lands. The nihilism of our contemporaries could be the dryness in the brush before a prairie fire, and this the antechamber of upheaval and rebirth. Action, simple action, anything to see if those fires can indeed be ignited, is holy if anything is. Come with us into the new world.

With our lives in our hands and weapons if need be—Catharsis, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective