Tickets: emperorx.net/tix

The logo of El Salvador’s CECOT prison looks a lot like the ISIS logo.

This proves nothing, of course. But when I’m not wearing sight aids my mind has been trained over a lifetime to match low-info, blurry images to the closest matching sign in my inventory (everyone’s mind does this of course, but because of my low vision I suspect I do it faster and better than most.) Here’s what the two logos look like through a Photoshop filter I made to closely simulate my unaided sight:

Both logos have a white-on-black color scheme. Both feature a white circle with black markings. Both have similar ratios of circle-to-text. If I see one of these logos on a laptop screen and I can’t find my glasses, I have a hard time picking them apart on first glance. Global brand recognition of the ISIS flag is high and is in the Christian and secular west nearly universally associated with fear, and this seemingly-superficial similarity may at minimum count as a visual metaphor (Marlan, 2018) or even trademark dilution via associative cognition (Tushnet, 2007).

I found no evidence that this similarity is intentional. Even if it is, I doubt any such evidence will ever come to light; admitting inspiration came from an organization so universally loathed in the Christian and secular west would create unnecessary political risk for Nayib Bukele’s government and its Trumpist U.S. backers. But CECOT’s logo is part of a project of political branding much as the black-field-white circle banner was for ISIS (Bandopadhyaya, 2019), and the similarity of these projects is more than graphical. CECOT was built not just to incarcerate gangs but also to generate propaganda images that inspire fear among outsiders (Oette, 2024) and encourage public acceptance of violent and supposedly necessary measures towards achieving populist social change (Rosen et al., 2023). These are goals ISIS shared.

Whether CECOT’s logo was meant to subconsciously remind us of ISIS or not, the resemblance should prompt us to examine nominally-Christian western societies like El Salvador and the United States, their flagging commitment to the Christian values of forgiveness and redemption, and their drift towards glorification of violence.

Further Reading

Bandopadhyaya, S. (2019). Branding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Global Media and Communication, 15(3), 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766519874380

Marlan, D. (2018). Visual metaphor and trademark distinctiveness. Washington Law Review, 93(2), 767–826. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol93/iss2/5/

Oette, L. (2024). Degradation as salvation: Reflections on El Salvador’s punitive prison model. Torture Journal, 34(1), 143–147. https://doi.org/10.7146/torture.v34i1.144071

Rosen, J. D., Cutrona, S., & Lindquist, K. (2023). Gangs, violence, and fear: Punitive Darwinism in El Salvador. Crime, Law and Social Change, 79(2), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10040-3

Tushnet, R. (2007). Gone in sixty milliseconds: Trademark law and cognitive science. Texas Law Review, 86, 507–534. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/792/

50 limited-run lathe cuts of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” are available. They ran out fast last time, so if you want one get it here. Details below.

My friends at Bar/None and dreamsOfField and I produced another limited run of fifty 33.3-RPM lathe cuts for you.

This month’s offering is a weather-resistant, EMP-proof polycarbonate plate containing mono audio of my 2014 contribution to a 99 Percent Invisible episode on nuclear semiotics, “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty.)”

Each copy includes individually paw-printed art featuring the face of one of our family cats in the center of a radiation trefoil. (Her name is Trisha, she is a very proper lady, and I am happy to report that her eyes remain normal-colored and therefore that our current home is not located near a nuclear waste storage facility.)

As with all of these dub plate releases, I personally lathed each copy, signed each label, stamped and hand-numbered each jacket, and paw-printed each jacket back. We will not reprint this edition.

Purchase it here for shipping next week: http://www.bar-none.com/store/kitty
Want to know more about how this song came to be? Have a listen to the 99pi episode about it here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
…or watch a documentary which features it here, including an adorable scene in which Paolo Fabbri, the originator of the folk-song-and-bioengineered-cats idea, listens to my song:
https://vimeo.com/138843064

Emperor X at SXSW 2025

March 11 – 4pm – Speakeasy
European Union Music Mixer

March 12 – 8pm
SECRET LOCATION IN TEXAN SUBSPACE
SIGN UP HERE TO FIND OUT WHERE DAY-OF

March 13 – 6pm – Hilton Austin (2nd Floor Lounge)
SXSW 2025: 2nd Play Stage

March 14 – DJ set (all night) E.X mini-set (11pm)
SECRET LOCATION IN TEXAN SUBSPACE
SIGN UP HERE TO FIND OUT WHERE DAY-OF

March 15 – 11pm – Hotel Vegas (Inside Stage)
Bar/None Trash Casual Showcase

Here’s a video blog of my time in Lviv.

There’s a venue tour and some music clips, and you can find out more about the venue and musicians below:

Traven:
https://www.instagram.com/u_travni/
https://t.me/u_travni

miw:
https://soundcloud.com/miwmiwmiwmiw

Re-read:
https://re-read.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@re-read

Закрите Суспільство та його друзі (Closed Society and Its Friends):
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7iU0WFXShQgDwitqjNTixy
https://www.youtube.com/@zakryte_suspilstvo

The most important component of this video is the interview section. Several local musicians were generous enough to share their thoughts with me about what it’s like to participate in a music community during wartime. Some also had messages for those of us on the outside — some cheerful and courageous, some requests for empathy and aid, and some warnings that none of us in North America and Western/Central Europe are immune to the tough circumstances they’re living through.

The first interview subject is Artur. He’s involved in the Lviv community as a performer, but he also has experience with cultural scenes in other smaller towns in Ukraine’s east, closer to the line of contact between the AFU and Russian Federation troops. He says that young people tend to cluster in hub cities with good air defense like Kyiv and Lviv where niche communities enjoy relative stability and protection. This leaves scenesters stuck in the smaller towns isolated. “They want to feel alive, but…in Mikolaiv, no one smiles.”

Next, Katja describes one benefit of the war: people now tend to show more interest in Ukrainian bands than previously. This is unfortunately offset by how difficult organizing concerts — and even rehearsals — can be, especially for her band as Re-read’s pre-war drummer is now participating in forward operations against the RF. “It’s not a government fighting another government…it is, but it’s also normal people — the people who we know, our fathers, our friends, they are fighting for what they love.”

Towards the end of the video you will see an interview from Timothy, a punk musician who expresses traditionalist values that might surprise some of us on the left. We discuss the artistic identity crisis he faced at the start of the war. Along with Katja, we then briefly discuss the tension between punk and traditionalism, and how that tension changes when one’s society and culture face existential threats. “Europe faces the same problem [as Ukraine],” Timothy says, “but on an even bigger scale.”

Later this week I’ll upload footage and interviews from Kharkiv, and also start to dip back into analysis. What’s going on here? Alternative music communities are playing strange new roles in the larger picture of Ukraine’s war effort, and that war effort is also changing the views and functions of a cultural avant-garde that used to map neatly onto the left-right divide. For better and for worse, Ukraine’s music scene might be a glimpse of our subcultural future in North America and Western/Central Europe. Ignoring developments here would be very comfortable, but also very inhumane to Ukrainians and very irresponsible to ourselves.

(If you’d rather listen to me read this instead of reading it yourself, click here.)

This is a postcard to you, left-adjacent underground music friends. I’m one of you, and I think we’re making some world-historical mistakes right now. If you’re open to hearing me out, read on.

14 minutes after arriving in Lviv, two off-duty soldiers, “Saint Nick” (the hand with blue paint) and “Volodymyr” (the happy man singing and playing my guitar) clocked that I was an unusual foreign guy with a guitar. They joyfully ran up to me and asked to jam, which we did. Then, babushka-style, they gave me Roshen candy (Choco Lapki for those who know what’s up), and invited me to a party at 11am.

After we goofed around playing music by the streetcar tracks in the city center, they asked me why I was here. I told them that mainly I’m here for the same reason I go anywhere; to meet and perform for the micro-communities who respond to niche music like mine with openness and generous curiosity.

But I am in Ukraine specifically right now because I set myself a goal of using an Emperor X tour to explicitly (rather than implicitly, like last time) challenge fatalism and pacifism in the left-adjacent music scenes of North America and Western/Central Europe. To make sure we’re on the same page about what I mean by fatalism and pacifism, here are some examples, with the gist in italics.

A fatalist take:
“Liberal states can never make the world better, they just kick the can down the road at absolute best, and usually not even that. It is better to put energy into replacing them, rebuilding society from the ground up. Trump axing USAid seems sad on the surface, but who cares. USAid was really just a fig leaf to launder the CIA’s imperialist ambitions. Foreign aid can never do real good, because the whole liberal system it stems from is rotten. Trying to fix it, or save the so-called good parts, just wastes effort plugging a tiny leak in a sinking ship. I’d rather sink the ship faster so we can swim to shore and start fresh.”

A pacifist take:
“State-level violence is always immoral, even when one state is defending itself from an invader. The US and EU arming Ukraine against Russia, or the SDF against Turkey, or anyone against anyone, is always at root an attempt by a global hegemon to dominate the periphery. Sending weapons and troops does nothing but pour gasoline on the fire and prolong human suffering. It would be far better to focus on diplomacy that opens the door to a constructive, nonviolent path out of conflict. The most effective way to use weapons is to abstain from using them at all — or better yet, to never have them in the first place.“

Here’s one last colorful example for you, photographed yesterday on the streets in Kreuzberg, just to drive the point home:

If you run in the circles I do I’d wager you have seen many similar fatalistic or pacifistic sentiments, radically skeptical of liberal democratic capitalist society’s ability to use its industrial-strength power for good. You may agree with them, too. Or, maybe you hold what you see as a more moderate position, sympathetic to the terrible predicament Ukrainians are in but reluctant to add fuel that risks escalating an already-dangerous conflict with a nuclear-armed great power.

If so, you and I have so much in common, and you are the reason I am making a video blog series on the topic (the first of which you are reading now.) Maybe you’re a Christian; maybe you’re a socialist; maybe you loathe war and state violence and injustice against marginalized groups; maybe you are deeply suspicious of militaristic nationalism; maybe you are motivated by thrilling dreams of a humanist future without poverty, without war, without tanks and mines and thermonuclear ICMBs. I’m just like you in those ways, but I’d like to show you why I moved away from what I now regard as counter-productive reactionary anti-Westernism without shedding any of those commitments.

Towards that end, as I travel across Ukraine to sing this week, I will post a series of video blogs to present underground music scenes in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv which almost completely lack the fatalism and pacifism of Brooklyn and Berlin and Philadelphia and Portland, despite surviving nightly drone raids and the draft and losing hundreds of friends to missile strikes and artillery fire for three years and running. The art and music communities in these cities provide informal, organic examples of what I have come to think of as liberal civic mutualism, a uniquely-2020s hybrid sociopolitical position that blends some of the virtuous aspects of civic nationalism (self-sacrifice communitarian goals, belief in a meaningful collective narrative, neighborly social cohesion in response to pressure) with some of the virtuous aspects of liberalism (the primacy of individual rights, especially speech, concern for marginalized and/or disadvantaged groups) and progressivism (an intentionally optimistic belief in the possibility of a positively unpredictable future that is better than the present). I will say more about what I mean with the term liberal civic mutualism as the week goes on; for now it is enough to say that I think it, or something like it, can serve as an antidote to paralyzing fatalism and pacifism, and might even reinvigorate a sense of confidence on the left.

I doubt very much I will get all the political philosophy right; I dabble but I’m no scholar in the field. But getting things conceptually perfect is much less important than reasserting civic creativity during what increasingly seems to be a slow-motion but high-stakes global sociopolitical emergency. I’m a musician with first-hand experience playing all over Earth for many kinds of inventive people in many kinds of difficult circumstances. Liberal civic mutualism is a shape to pour thoughts into, and you can take it or leave it. All I want this blog series to convince you of is that we in Western Europe and North America have a lot to learn about creative resilience, hope, and moral agency from our music friends in Eastern Europe as they combat the explicitly patriarchal, hypercapitalist, antidemocratic Russian Federation. I also hope to convince you that our Eastern European friends might not be around to teach us anything at all if we, both as individuals and as citizens of powerful democracies, fail to help them rid their region of imperialism.

More from Lviv tomorrow — time to go sound check and sing.

I create in a lot of different ways, and get confused about what kind of work I’m doing. I write songs. I write philosophy. I write furtive polemical microposts on social media. I make music. I write lesson plans and slides. And I realized this morning that I don’t sufficiently distinguish between these drastically different modes of creation.

Aluminum came to mind. A 20 x 20 x 20 cm cube has 22 kg of mass. How we shape that raw cube depends on what its purpose will be. Some anchors are made out of aluminum; that 22 kg chunk ought to more than do the job for a small fishing boat if shaped well. Aircraft wings are also made out of aluminum, and the material in that anchor would be enough for the small stabilizer on the back of a Cessna. The same aluminum achieves opposite purposes through purposive shaping. A Cessna stabilizer need not — perhaps cannot — be a good anchor. Just so, a philosophical text need not — perhaps cannot — have the virtues of poetry, nor ought poetry justify itself as a legal argument would.

I found this aluminum metaphor freeing.

SURPRISE. Almost fourteen years later and ten years after their epoch-defining Rose, The Front Bottoms and I are on the road together again this May. I highly recommend you get tix FAST for these.

Th.09.May Portland, ME State Theatre
https://tinyurl.com/2mycrfeu

Fr.10.May Hampton Bch, ME HB Casino
https://tinyurl.com/yc4xs3mn

Mo.13.May Wilmington, DE The Queen
https://tinyurl.com/y49amhxd

We.15.May Buffalo, NY Riverworks
https://tinyurl.com/2rv5ke73

Fr.17.May New Haven, CT Coll. St. Music Hall
https://tinyurl.com/4bcs3bvm

Sa.18.May Bethlehem, PA Steelstacks
https://tinyurl.com/ywkts5cr

DOWN BY THE RIVER FESTIVAL — BERLIN – 1 JUNE 2024

TIX –> https://rausgegangen.de/en/events/down-by-the-river-festival-no13-0/

UUST ADDED — SPECIAL GUEST OF THE FRONT BOTTOMS, MAY 9-18

Th.09.May Portland, ME State Theatre
https://tinyurl.com/2mycrfeu

Fr.10.May Hampton Bch, ME HB Casino
https://tinyurl.com/yc4xs3mn

Mo.13.May Wilmington, DE The Queen
https://tinyurl.com/y49amhxd

We.15.May Buffalo, NY Riverworks
https://tinyurl.com/2rv5ke73

Fr.17.May New Haven, CT Coll. St. Music Hall
https://tinyurl.com/4bcs3bvm

Sa.18.May Bethlehem, PA Steelstacks
https://tinyurl.com/ywkts5cr

21.Mar East Haven, CT – Beeracks
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/4hjs5639

22.Mar Philadelphia, PA – Ukie Club *
TIX: https://shorturl.at/FRTZ1

23.Mar Washington, DC – Pie Shop *
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/yckuu64n

24.Mar Pittsburgh, PA – Spirit Hall*^
TIX: https://shorturl.at/fkmtX

26.Mar Columbus, OH – Ace of Cups
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/3p75rvwt

27.Mar Cleveland, OH – Mahall’s Apt.
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/375bhmta

29.Mar Ferndale, MI – PUG House
TIX: at door

30.Mar Chicago, IL – Subterannean
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/t8s66h7z

31.Mar Quad Cities, IL/IA – SECRET REVEALED SOON

01.Apr Milwaukee, WI – X-Ray Arcade
TIX: https://rb.gy/sjhcsy

02.Apr St. Louis, MO – Sinkhole
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/3bjthj9f

03.Apr Lawrence, KS – Replay Lounge
TIX: at door

04.Apr Salt Lake City, UT – The DLC
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/5v9783aj

05.Apr Boise, ID – Shrine Social Club
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/mrxmenx3

06.Apr Missoula, MT – VFW Post 209

TIX:

07.Apr Seattle, WA – Black Lodge
TIX: https://shorturl.at/ckFLW

10.Apr Reno, NV – Holland Project
TIX: https://shorturl.at/kluCL

11.Apr Los Angeles, CA – El Cid
TIX: https://www.elcidsunset.com/events

12.Apr Berkeley, CA – 924 Gilman
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/2cvmbjru

13.Apr San Diego, CA – 61st House

TIX: SOON

14.Apr Phoenix, AZ – Valley Bar
TIX: soon

16.Apr Austin, TX – Coral Snake
TIX: soon

17.Apr Denton, TX – Andy’s Bar
TIX: soon

18.Apr New Orleans, LA – Siberia
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/3rmjpcjj

19.Apr Birmingham, AL – The Firehouse
TIX: at door

21.Apr Nashville, TN – DRKMTTR
TIX: soon

23.Apr Atlanta, GA – 529
TIX: https://rb.gy/01dkhf

24.Apr Charlotte, NC – The Milestone

TIX: SOON

25.Apr Richmond, VA – The Camel
TIX: http://tinyurl.com/3pzsrvvw

26.Apr Asbury Park, NJ – Over the Moon

ASUBRY PARK TIX: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/emperor-x-w-have-a-good-season-fence-and-pillowinde-tickets-855596160147?aff=ebdsshios

27.Apr Brooklyn, NY – The Broadway
TIX: https://shorturl.at/etIWZ

28.Apr Providence, RI – Alchemy
TIX: https://shorturl.at/chBHJ

Booking: Tiny Box

Photo: Yuri Gryaznov

Get out the universal translator, captain. Platforma just posted a long read about the E.X shows last month in Lviv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Kremenchuk, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv. Слава Україні!

https://www.platfor.ma/topic/platskart-pes-patron-pidtrymka-yak-berlinskyj-muzykant-i-fan-ukrayiny-pryyihav-u-tur-popry-vijnu/