A: Are you still screening Instrument ?
I: Sure, if you wanna show it.

A: Was it difficult for you as a band to work with an outside party, even a close friend like (film maker) Jem Cohen?
I: Well, I went to high school with Jem. He's been a really close friend of ours for years. I mean, there's footage in there of us playing in a basement before Guy was even really in the band. Jem is deepÉhe goes back with us. So, ordinarily, yes it would be difficult, but with Jem it wasn't.

A: How much influence did the band have over the film's final cut? It must have been difficult to balance the friendship with the vision you were all trying to achieve.
I: Yeah, there was a lot of wrestling. It got pretty crazy, but basically, Guy and I handle most of that work. Towards the end, it was mainly Guy and Jem. But we would screen it for ourselves, and then go back to Jem with the things that we weren't comfortable with including. It wasn't a big deal until we got to the final edits and had to cut it down to two hours. After many, many cuts we had only managed to get it down to a three and a half hour version. That's when the blood started dripping on the floor. (laughs) So we would come up with a list of things we wanted to cut, and Jem would make his own list, and they were usually two very different lists some of the stuff we wanted to cut for time reasons, but some we just thought was inappropriate. And the same could be said for Jem's list.

A: Was it strange doing a soundtrack?
I: No, because virtually all of that music had been recorded over the past 13-14 years. I have miles and miles of tape of practices, and those were just things that we had recorded that we thought were sonically interesting or significant. Things that we liked, that never seemed to have a place in one of our releases. When we started working on the movie, I was really psyched that we could use all of this older material. In some ways, it was easier than a "regular" album. For me, it's the most listenable of our catalog, because those songs were all off the cuff and I don't have any deep attachment to them. Of course, I don't listen to any of the Fugazi albums, so take that with a grain of salt. (laughs)

A: Your label Dischord is pretty well known as a D.C. representative. Have you ever gone through a dry spell where there just didn't seem to be anything happening around that geographic area to release?
I: Yeah, all the time. There have been a lot of eras that have waxed and waned. I assume that like all living things, Dischord will eventually die. There will be a time when what we are compelled to document will have withered. In the community we feel connected to people are getting older, and less people are doing bands. There will always be young people starting new projects, but we may not feel connected to them and they may not feel connected to us. It was never supposed to be an ongoing, perpetual arrangement. It was supposed to be a reflection of an actual existing community. If the community dims, then so will the label, and if it goes out completely, then so will the label. And I'm totally fine with that. I'm not making a prediction of our imminent death or anything in terms of the timeframe, it could be a year from now or it could be twenty. If you asked me twenty years ago if I thought I'd be speaking to you know, I would have had no idea. The label exists as a medium to document bands that we feel some kind of kinship with here in Washington. We don't mean to suggest that we're documenting everything that comes out of Washington. We're just trying to say that if you pick up something on Dischord, then you can be assured that it comes from Washington. Another main point of the label was to encourage other people to start their own labels, to document their own towns. A lot of the work we do, that I think a lot of people aren't aware of, is distribution. We opened Dischord Direct about eleven years ago, which is a distribution company for all of the D.C. related bands, labels or whatever. We distribute about three hundred D.C. related things. I like to think that Dischord is kind of like a gyroscope, it's a ball of energy that other people can get some spin off of. Even for people whose main energy is going contrary to us, at least we gave them something to do.

A: (laughs) Doing a completely DIY magazine like Altercation, I've found that many people have a hard time conceptualizing the actual amount of work that needs to be done to pull it off. A lot of people assume that it's all just a fun afterthought to be done in your spare time. Since you're in Fugazi, do people often pose that assumption towards you in terms of Dischord? What do you feel is the biggest misconception the public may hold about the label?
I: (long pause) Hmm. Probably that we're very business-like. I don't know, it's hard to say. I would say that this label is, and is run, in a much more organic fashion than most people could possibly believe. I think people assume that if you call yourself a label, then you must do things the way other labels do things. We actually, as a label, do not use contracts. We do not use lawyers or agents. We're just people. We were kids who started a label, we didn't have any template to follow. We didn't care for the way the industry was set up, so we decided to do it the punk way. One of the aspects of going the punk way, that people seem to overlook, is that you don't grow out of it. What's punk is to keep on doing it, so we've just kept on doing it. We've just never changed. I'm close to forty now. This label has been around for twenty-some years, so I would certainly call it established by now. This label is run a fuck of a lot more punk than a lot of the so-called "punk" labels that are out there today.

Continued