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[audio:http://vicerecords.com/download/01RainbowBrite.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/02_Purify_America.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/04_Theme_Song.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/05_AntiSlantize.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/06_Lesbionic_Plague.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/07_I_Have_A_Dream.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/08_U_Want_To_Die.mp3, httpdocs/download/09_Round_U_Up.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/10_Bizmark.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/11_Cops.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/12_Farley.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/13_U_Should_Be_Dead.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/14_We_Know_Y'Gay.mp3, http://vicerecords.com/download/15_Giuliana_(Bring_Me_The_Head_Of).mp3]Vice: Tell me about getting banned from CBGBs.
Dylan: We played CBGB's a few times and they initially seemed ambivalent about the actual music, since, like most venues, they only really paid attention to you if you either made them a lot of money or destroyed their property.The first conflict was between us and their in-house live sound man one night. Live sound guys in rock venues have this fun thing they occasionally like to do where, if you are not a well-known or respectable act, they will talk to you over the PA in the middle of your song, notifying you (and everyone else) when they think your set is over. Our response to this interruption was to sieg heil the sound guy, then continue playing. This tactic caused Mr. Sound Man to begin cursing and threatening us over the music, which actually fit perfectly, so we thanked him with another seig heil. I don't think he appreciated that. Since almost all our music came out of the PA (even Alex's guitar was running through a SansAmp) we were pretty easy to unplug, which was what happened.
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Dylan: My parents didn't really know much about the Rykies. They mostly just rolled their eyes, probably thinking it was only a matter of time before I just got it out of my system.Alex: My cousin, who heard the demo at random, initially thought it was some crazy british punk band. I think he liked it, but he also said that we weren't being straight-up about having a fetish for fascism. Like, "Just admit it, you think fascism is sexy." I believe he now thinks it's one of the stronger projects I've worked on.
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Dylan: Well me and Alex have played together off and on since 1993. The first show we ever played was a talent show in Buck's Rock summer camp when we were 14 or 15. We went on to do a lot stuff together--probably the most well known band would be Zeehas; 12 Wait, which was in some ways a natural extension of the Rykies, though less structurally dubious. So, we've played hundreds of shows together, though as the Rykies I think we only played a dozen or so times before we got tired of it.Why did you record this whole album and then not release it? How many people have heard this thing?
Dylan: It was just something we did to amuse ourselves. We just grew out of it. I think we had trouble justifying some of it as pure parody, and even if we disregarded criticism (there was a lot, even from peers) I think, as Alex pointed out, without the visual aspect of seeing an "interracial" Nazi band, the concept fell flat and all you were left with was cartoon Nazi-rock. We also noticed some of the more lunkheaded around us who actually seemed to be getting off on the "hate" aspects of the music, including even some of the other band members, which wasn't our intent. We were and still are quite egalitarian at heart and I have never believed in the concept of race, though I think back then, this band was my adolescent of way of coming to grips with the very real social weight of "isms". By embodying and caricaturing some of the things we (as upper west side non-Aryans) hated the most, we in some sense sought to understand a bit more. I think we did gain understanding, however circuitously.
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Alex: I was listening to a lot Laibach, Mr. Bungle, Bjork, Aqua, Noise stuff.. Enya, Sex Pistols, Oingo Boingo, Kurt Weill, and Marc Ribot.Dylan: I don't know what "made" us make this record, but yeah, I would point to Laibach first. And we also listened to this Christian children's record from the 80s called Kids' Praise! Psalty's Camping Adventure a lot. Also, I think the song "Someone's Gonna Die" by Blitz inspired us at the time. And Kubrick. And the Mad Gear gang from Final Fight. And Enya.Can you name where all the samples came from?
Alex: For Rainbow Brite, I sampled the 5/4 beat from NIN's "March of The Pigs" and made it 4/4. For the intro, we sampled Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade.Dylan used to collect cassette tapes he'd find on the street, and that's where we got the sample for the opening of "UCP."For our theme song we sampled Tchaicovsky's Violin Concerto as the intro and as the basis for the chord progression during the verse.
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Alex: Me too.
Dylan: Try singing it in front of a large group of people with a straight face. I did a "remix" CD of the entire Rykies album under the name Printheth a few years later (released on the now-defunct x.died.enroute.y label in Michigan) and added a treated sample from the Beach Boys song "A Thing or Two" where Brian says "When I see my baby/ when I see my little girl." Due to the way he's enunciating the last phrase, "little girl" sounded like the N-bomb to me the first time I heard it. I actually had to go back and listen multiple times to confirm he wasn't saying "when I see my nigger girl." I laughed at myself for being possibly the only person who would instinctively mentally twist such an innocent lyric into something appropriate for a Rykies remix. We had a lot of songs making fun of being paranoid. For example the song "We Know Y'Gay" tries to bash gays, but the song itself is so loaded with homoerotic aesthetics that it kind of ends up fisting itself.

