Mind Invaders

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Vibrations and hums the quantum sum where we're from
felt in strings spread in rings spinning clouds eve Atom

Particle dust to dust clung now balls of fire conspire
Stars spit the molecules lit panspermigration comets

Sui generus in space amino acids in place
Cooling planets await fate until life shows its face

Double helix the code from which flowed the chromosome
Left hand supports life to divide and provide

We're starting to book our SXSW experience. If you are throwing a party, get in touch with David at vibrationandhum @ hotmail.com

Speaking of David, he recently sat down (not literally) with the fine people at Jagged Visions fanzine, from Amsterdam. You can read more about it here. Look out for that issue, which will also feature Whitehouse, and hondenkoekesfabriek. David is also about to publish his third novel (not under his real name) - look for it to be hidden inside a bmp on this website in the next few days.

You are mainly known as the manager of Fucked Up. The band describe you as their main inspiration. How would you describe yourself?
I'm just a normal guy who takes abnormal interests.

I would like to get to know David Eliade, the person, a bit better. Can you tell something about your daily routine? Where do you live? What music do you listen to?
Well, I have a full time job, and that keeps me quite busy at home. I do that and enjoy it. I won't say what I do, but I can say that I work in film, under my real name. These days I have a fairly conventional lifestyle. I enjoy drinking - I collect wines, like drinking chocolate the old way. I'm one of those old hapless grown up hippies from a bygone age still trying to make the new age happen, but now it's by inserting things subtly into my work, and trying to control punk bands! I try to listen to "Ascension" by Coltrane once a week.

Are you related to the Romanian philosopher and writer Mircea Eliade?
Well, the "Eliade" part of my name is a pseudonym, and absolutely it's taken from Mircea. The plan with Fucked Up has never been to waste words - we try to pill as many meanings into each word as we can, so that no word on the paper is wasted. It's also the rule to use fake names as much as possible, partly for the same reason, but also for anonymity, so we can walk away from it when we are finished without the residue.

When was the first time you came in contact with FU and how did the collaboration develop?
I don't have a lot of time to spread myself around, but I have people planted in various places to keep and eye on things for me. Octavio hangs out in the underbelly and caught the band at a show in New York a few years ago. I believe he was breaking up a fight that had started while they were playing. We sat down together that night at my apartment and things just developed from there, we understood each other and wanted to move towards the same sort of future. They kept calling me Bruce Wayne!

Given that the band has a DIY punk background, do you ever have arguments with the band members about the musical and commercial directions the band should take?
At first we argued. I tried to explain their greater influence and potential. This is how it has been before - artists often need to be shown the way and have their art put in a greater context. I try not to interfere to much in the musical aspects of the group because that isn't my strong point, but I do show them things there too. I mean I try not to be too heavy handed in any aspect of the group because I want them to be able to stand behind everything they've done as their own, but I am a part of the group and do have an influence.

What is Wilsim Publogy?
Wilsim Publogy was an offshoot of Romanian Manicheanism, and the whole Gnosticism trip. It sees cosmology in the same way as the Gnostics, in that the universe, or the being, or whatever, is split into these two forces, "light" and "dark", or what have you, but differs in that Publogy doesn't see the forces as neccesarily opposite, but the same. It's more into dualism, more along the lines of Vedantic Hinduism, who thought in terms of the "non duality of duality". The whole Kabbalist "two poles" idea where the opposing forces are actually just different expressions of the same thing. We tried to be influenced by this when we were making Hidden World, and it shows up in songs like Triumph of Life, and Two Snakes and was the inspiration for the cover art. Actually, that's another way Mircae comes back in, the quote we used from him in the record; "to be no longer conditions by a pair of opposites results in absolute freedom". Especially in the world now where you've got your two political ideas, everyone has these strong feelings of wrong and right - we're living in an age where the multitude has been slashed into these singular opposites where life is a series of choices between two opposites, and there are really only two ways of existing, you know "right" or "left". It's important I think to try and pull the crate back open, try to release these other ways of existing. And to do that we try to just take away the divisions and the opposites and just shine through Wilsim Publogy.

Do you see Fucked Up as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" or just a band? And in what extent do you see them as a contemporary manifestation of Dada or neo-Dada movements?
Well we're starting to work on the David Comes to Life LP, which will try to incorporate more than just music into the presentation. We want to package it as a memory stick so that it can incorporate an albums worth of music, the play, the documentary, the musical, the movie, you know the whole deal. Soon I think media will be presented more along the lines of size rather than style - instead of buying an LPs worth of music from your
favourite band, you'll buy a gigabyte's worth, so we're trying to get with that. It's the whole indie-vertical-integration American Apparel style that is really taking off, now you've got record companies that are getting into publishing and management, it's like this disaster style economics where everyone is sensing this forbboding doom and trying to scoop up as much as they can before the bottom falls out.
But ultimately Fucked Up is just a band. We tried to reference surrealism with Baiting the Public, but none of that kind of art really matters anymore, things are too reversed to be able to make any sort of meaningful impact.

In the inlay of the Hidden World booklet is a text about the origin and harmony of the world: "Vibrations and hums the quantum sum where we're from" . You do not have to explain quantum physics, but can you explain your general idea of balance in the cosmos?
Well its the Wilsim Publogy trip again - we just feel the constant hum of unification throughout the cosmos. That piece ("Looking for Life") is about seeing the cosmos as one massive conduit for creating life. One of the quantum realities deals with the idea that maybe when you turn your back there's nothing behind it, that the physical reality we're surrounded by is manifested inside our heads, rather than outside it. So if there is no human consciousness, who manifests the universe? It's this nice one-sided romanticized view we decided
to run with - there is a picture by Kubin we used on the Year of the Dog 12" that shows satan ejaculating humanity onto the earth, and it's sort of the same view - the 14 billion years of space was the preparation for the consciousness that would be able to bask in the glory. That text is trying to follow the evolution of life through time and into the future. We like to see the balance in the cosmos as just that, a cradle for life. How there is the pattern of self-replication, at every level, that manage this constant reclycing of materials to keep pushing life and existence into the future.

Are there any final misunderstandings about David Eliade you want to eliminiate?
That I don't exist!