1. Ingrate
2. Habitats in the Wound
3. Holiday Song
4. Between the Chores
5. A Fathers Vision/Story of Knife
6. Mocking Faces/Wilderness Song
7. Against the Real

The Quag spent the last 2 years moving around. When we arrived in Oxford, we had enough material with James for another full-length release. But we felt unsure of it, the way you feel unsure of something you're too close to. We sent it around to some people that we didn't know and are a little further out of our community, and discovered that most people really don't have time to provide feedback.

V2 and I hated Oxford for different but overlapping reasons. It is a reality that is bounded by the most static and immovable concept of culture. No one there seems to believe that it is possible for art or music to count for anything after World War II. The language of "genius" is everywhere, but it always belongs to somewhere or someone else (usually a British dead white male.) In my experience, Oxford houses the most apolitical and anti-intellectual thought ever. Most of the town is associated with the University in some way. But the University itself is really a museum. You don't so much go to study there as you do to participate in the spectacle of being a student, which means that you must wear clothing appropriate to the student, and you must speak and joke like a student. Simon once compared Oxford to a tourist attraction "like the tower of London," and almost two years later, even the morbid undertones of that statement strike me with the depths of their appropriateness. In that context, you try to start a conversation about how the Oxford Reality acts upon its subjects in any non-laudatory way, and you are met with indifferent or fascinated stares. Criticism is out of the question: at worst, people seem to find Oxford "liberal" or "lonely" but never "violently deceptive" or just "violent," "broken," "hopelessly ahistorical," or "anti-intellectual." The people in professorial roles that I met were terribly concerned with policing their own status as intellectual commodities. This, I believe impeded the possibility for any thought beyond rigid disciplinary or overly iterated boundaries to take shape. Since creative and illegimate spaces are for me the most enabling sites for thinking, I could and can only experience this environment as one that is in every way geared towards the production of totally mechanistic and de-skilled trances that reproduce stasis and Sameness. For me, the experience felt like violence from every angle.

When I arrived I was mesmerized by prestige and architecture. But the hyper-professionals to which I was assigned had 5 seconds per year to give to "their" students, and complained even about that. In this advanced form of alienation, where eating and sleeping became a serious problem, I began to feel like a ghost silently haunting the stunning landscape. Thereafter the possibility for being in any other form was evacuated. I wrote Against The Real, A Father's Vision, Broadcast, and Wilderness Song, and a host of other 'father' songs about the power and patriarchy that seemed to mortar the medieval stones. We played the songs over and again along with about 15 others that never made it onto Habitats. Sometimes we played with Simon and sometimes with Sharron. We played at St. Barnabas church with Iditarod, and at a Winter solstice party given by the lovely hostess Meishe (who must have grown to resent us when V and I hit the depths of depression and failed to speak to anyone for many months.) Some of the other songs I can't bear to think about now are called Writing and Lying, The Sea/Asunder, and Broken Amethyst. If it weren't for Simon and Sharron, V2 and I would have completely lost it.

One of the ways I coped with this misery was by becoming addicted to a series of television shows that V2 had downloaded. Blake's 7 had aired in the UK during the years of 1977-1981. The show itself suggests a tenacious longing for an escape from the dictatorship of normalcy that polices life in the utterly repressive spheres of the wealthy and educated South of Britain. The series is about a group of ex-cons that break from a prison spacecraft upon discovering a high-tech ship floating in space. There is no sex in the show, but there's plenty of slasher fiction that's since been written about it. The release for me in watching it came in the form of these suggestive moments in which members of the crew would debate whether reform or revolution was better for their insurgent attempts at dismantling the galactic regime that uses a symbol similar to that of the Star Trek federation for its logo. I developed an infatuation with the dictatorial, hyper logical crew member Avon because his character was so deliberately rule-breaking with respect to how the show constructed the rebel (polite, honourable, noble and so forth.) My addictive response to watching Avon (which was so uncharacteristic for me) was a result of a general malaise, and the feeling of being completely impounded by regulations of the silent and silencing British atmosphere that refuses in fact to explain what the rules are (though makes little secret of enjoying punishment after transgression), in addition to an attendant authoritarian form of macho built into this context. If the general voice of Oxford always made me seem, appear or feel silly (as if art, social criticism, physical pain, psychological imbalances or discourses about abjection were chosen whimsicalities) with its masculine, logical and rational tones, Avon became the perfect protector who in a similar voice would produce legitimation, even if it meant undergoing extermination later. (And relatively speaking, legitimation from Avon seemed less violent than Oxford's, though certainly relevant to it, since it remains confined to a science fiction television show that hasn't seen much circulation since the 80s.) Anyway, it is not a far leap to plug death into patriarchy, and I think back on my 'enjoyment' with some regret as a sort of a twisted 'snuff' fantasy. In those months I thought endlessly about death. That, I guess, is what the first half of Against the Real is about.

June rolled around and we moved to Amsterdam. What a breath of fresh air. Our bodies started working again and we resolved never to go back to Oxford. I was still too paranoid to join V2 for a smoke. I went to the IVIR/Bumra-Stemra conference and watched the slick hip lawyers attempt to turn the attention given to musicians over copyright and digital rights management to their own ends. Of course, for them, the issues are "bigger" than music since they also involve academic articles that get posted on the internet. I was the only musician at the conference, and the only person, who was during the entire time, never granted a question. The free meal and witty repartee was a favour or a form of payment or something. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the company of Sabina, the person administrating the event.

Days later, we played a show in Groningen that was really interesting. I wish we had stayed there much longer, and learned more about the different squats, and some more about the issues people were talking about. But I was so tired, and I couldn't help but imagine that my fatigue was somehow contagious - that I was inflicting it on everyone we talked to.

Despite the fact that I reached the pinnacle of all sour and desperate moods by the time we played the Bureau de Ferme in July, the people there were awesome. It was the best part of the year really - if only I hadn't felt like my insides were splitting open. I wish my French were better so that I could understand the tensions between the Ferme and the municipality. Christophe exlained a little about the Ferme's opening up to the skater kids of Louvain-La-Neuve. Change is so much more easy than a million witholders of money and resources can ever admit. That was a great thought to take on the train. Things went up from there. We moved to the apartment of Ed Cleaner in Paris, and went on enormous walking tours with Cecile. Then we couldn't get jobs and were pretty well out of money. We left then a little bit earlier than anticipated to meet Sharron in Philly.

I feel very thankful for the existence of that wonderful group of people known as the Espers. They let us live in their house for weeks. We owe Meg our lives. I think my feeling of debt and gratitude can never be erased. Thanks to Brooke, we played at the Rocket Cat the night we landed. It was the greatest therapy in the world to play with Helena on cello and then watch/listen to the otherworldly freakout sounds of Scorces too. I still felt fucked up, but the signs of healing were unmistakeable.

Then the weather got really cold. We moved into a loft space with shitty heat and lots of noise. Some guy named Jimmy Satan listened to arena rock all night every night. We started playing with Helena more regularly. The Holiday Song and Mocking Faces appeared. (It really is too dangerous to admit too much during the consumerist holiday.) Still we didn't have jobs so we came back to DC where of course all of our old forms of work beckoned. It was freezing by then.

But on one fine weekend at the end of February, we went to Montreal to play at the 'What is Identity?' event. We stayed at the home of the beautiful Justin and Jacob. Montreal seems like such an incredible place. We had the fantastic privilege of sharing the performance space with Leon, Peter and Justin, and possibly one other person I don't think we got to talk to. I was so excited and overwhelmed about the way people discuss ideas and social reality in Montreal that I was a little delirious. Montreal seems like the greatest place on earth to me, the absolute anti-Oxford, where a substantial group of people are committed to re-thinking the limits of being together as a group or a structure. From that brief taste of talking to people like Maryse, things there seemed so utterly anti-elitest and participatory, and critical of the spectacular. I thought I could hear such conversations in the sounds of Cian'ethrie, and it was startling and delightful to hear myself sound comparatively reductive when I was talking to Will. On the way home, Justin stocked us with some gorgeous recordings, the Deathfuckers and Peter & Pieter, and the shapes of different moments.

In the spring, we started actually accepting the fact that we lived in DC again, and started contacting old friends like DJ Panic, Bob Massey and Bernie Wandel. We also met the awesome Scott Verrastro, and had great times at 611 Florida Ave. Ingrate and Habitats emerged with the name Axia Ghent (which will be me later.) We had to really pare down what would go on the record from literally hours of material. some of it was forgotten and lost, but much of it was difficult to let go of.