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An Interview with V. Vale of RE/Search Publications
Posted: Saturday, December 23, 2006
By: Andrew Lyman
writer.artist.musician.prankster

For over 30 years, V. Vale of RE/Search Publications has been collecting and documenting the genuinely subversive currents in modern culture. A pivotal figure in the fledgling days of punk in San Francisco as the founder of Search and Destroy Magazine (subsequently RE/Search), Vale was also a champion of industrial music, which was rearing its ugly head at the same moment punk was beginning to snarl. A lifelong student of Surrealism, Vale spent a summer with Burroughs, introduced America to Ballard, and has brought two generations of disenchanted youths in touch with the concept of the surrealist prank.

With the recent release of Pranks 2 and the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Industrial Culture Handbook on the way, RE/Search has done anything but grow old gracefully. Vale continues to self-publish from his book and record-littered apartment office on Romolo, just across the street from the legendary City Lights Bookshop where he, as a former employee, was given $200 by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to start publishing back in 1977. Vale and his gang (a ragtag group of revolving door college-age volunteer interns) along with his partner Marian Wallace and their 10-year-old daughter Valentine live a quiet domestic existence with pictures of Jello Biafra, the Screamers, and Burroughs covering the walls, videos by SPK lining their shelves, and records by Lard and Martin Denny covering every other available space. Vale spoke to ReGen recently about the popularization of noise, Surrealist cinema, and dangerous music.

You were such a pivotal figure in bringing that first wave of industrial into focus, you even kind of strayed away from punk to really see something in industrial music. Could you kind of illuminate what it was about that initial spate of industrial music that so grabbed you and was such an original and interesting thing?

Vale: Well, I made up this quote: 'Punk and industrial are intertwined like the strands of a rope.' In the very beginning of punk, there were several bands that were doing more or less industrial from the get-go, including Throbbing Gristle, and remember their very first album: they boasted that they did the first punk album, and that came out in '77 back in the days when everyone was still, for the most part, doing 45s. And industrial to me meant you weren't using the clichéd formula of lead singer, guitarist, bass player, and drums. As a start, you were already trying to use these new—and they were rather expensive then—these new synthesizers and synthetic drums, and even more than that, if you were like Boyd Rice, you were using just tape recorders as instruments. In other words, you'd sample a rhythm or you'd record before sampling. You'd record, say, the rhythm of a jackhammer or a bus driving by. You'd use that as a rhythm track, then you'd overlay on top of that, you'd make another recording of some weird high-pitched sounds of machinery or something, and then over that maybe include some part of some really weird news broadcast you'd heard or an excerpt from a horror movie or something, and then over that you might record whatever your message was, if you had one; that is, if you wanted to even have a verbal message. And this kind of thing was happening from day one in punk. I mean, The Screamers, of course, were very well-known for not having guitars, but then there was a band called No Mercy quite early in San Francisco that was two women: a woman playing an early synth and then accompanied by drums. Z'ev, of course, wasn't doing anything but using his percussion that he made himself, and Mark Pauline even did an early show at the Blue Eye Gardens where he just set off a bunch of explosives. [Laughs].

In other words, punk was really a rebellion based upon a few simple principles: do it yourself, anyone can do it, and an easy way to raise your intelligence and ask: 'Is it against the status quo?' They were trying to do everything against the status quo. I call it the 'international cultural revolution,' because it was trying to destabilize and question and be creative against all the dumb aesthetics all over the world; which people don't think of as the control process, but they are. And the whole movement was a war against the control process as Burroughs talked about. That's why Burroughs is so important to punk. Just think about all the ways you might be controlled and forced to do anything, think anything, feel anything that's not really your own, that's not authentic to yourself, that doesn't spring from inside yourself. Just think about that, and then attack it. That's sort of like the modus operandi of a lot of punk and industrial. Industrial, though, was kind of a further refinement. The cover of The Industrial Culture Handbook has all this information which most people don't even bother to read, but I was trying to summarize the whole variety of thought and ideas and topics and subjects and examples which might possibly fall under the rubric of industrial culture. If you read the back cover, all these words are there to kind of spark thought and give you a section of what industrial culture might be about. And to me it was also a complete questioning of the notion of crime and criminality, creativity, originality, and what is taboo, what is forbidden. You're questioning all these things. You're questioning every aspect of control, and authority, and the almost totalitarian society as we have it now with the perfection of the right wing media control apparatus.

That was the whole appeal of Pranks as well, wasn't it? Just the complete questioning of everything that was taboo and off-limits?

Vale: Well, one of the only ways you can fight it is with a prank. And the prank is performance. And in fact, you could say that all punk shows were kind of pranks on the audience. [Laughs]

So punk and industrial are really one and the same, but industrial is different for one main reason: it doesn't use that formula of vocalist, guitarist, bass, drums, and melodic, short songs.

So it's even a further extension of that same rebellion, then?

Vale: Well, it's different. What it's doing is mining different territory. It's refusing those two formulas: the formula of the short, catchy, kind of technical, melodic type songs. It's refusing that formula, and it's also refusing the technical formula of guitar, bass, vocals, and drums. And it was also embracing noise a little more, trying to somehow integrate noise with music more. The question with music is at what point does noise become music and music become noise? At what point is a performance so extreme? I think that's what GG Allin did. In a way that's one of the ultimate taboos, taking a poop and then throwing it on other people. I certainly don't want that happening to me, but it was all about questioning taboos and authority. And you know, it's obviously something you can do for the rest of your life. There's an infinite amount of territory to analyze and attack.

You brought up the point of embracing noise. Noise, at the moment, is very en vogue, and unlike punk, it took almost two or three decades for that to be subsumed into more mainstream culture. Do you think there's anything analogous to the initial spirit of punk and industrial happening today? Do you think there's any merit to the 'new noise,' as it were?

Vale: I think everything has to be reinvented all the time, and just because someone else did something doesn't mean you can't reinvent it yourself, because when someone else did something, let's say like a noise band, all you're really getting is a highly reductionized recording or a video tape which is also kind of reductionized. But it's not the same as being in the same room as someone doing an intense performance live. Analog is much richer, you know, than digital, and our senses are analog. In other words, if you make a loud sound banging on metal and I'm like ten feet away from you at the Blue Eye Gardens or something, it's way more powerful than any recording or even videotape could ever be. And I think our senses are crying out for a full analog spectrum of sound because, well, you know how a videotape works, I hope. It's a sampling. It breaks everything up into these sort of stair-step waves and then it samples one out of every ten. With a cassette, less than 10 percent of the real sound ever really hits your ears, but enough of it hits your ears that your brain does a reconstruction of the sound to make it seem full to you, but you're really just getting little bits of a stair-step, chopped out and fed to you in a digital recording. There are even paranoid theories about how this causes brain cancer, because your brain is overtaxed trying to fill in these missing bits.

From digital recordings?

Vale: Yeah, that's one of the first things I read about digital sound technology when it was first starting to be deployed, when the CD came out. We were always complaining about the early CDs like, the bass is tremendous, and there's no hiss or wow and flutter like there can be in an analog recording, and the highs are really high, but there seems to be a lot missing somehow in between. And that was one explanation I read in some technical magazine.

I had read that you use 60 to 70 percent less of your brain watching a digital projection because it doesn't have that slight jitter that film does, which is kind of a similar thing in operation.

Vale: Well, film is kind of a sampling too, in that your brain then fills in the missing things. Your brain supplies the continuity where, as you know, you're watching something at 24 frames per second or maybe 16 or 18. I don't know, I wouldn't know how to ascribe any percentage to this. Film is a little bit of a different medium, but I'm happy with digital MiniDV. They're on tapes still, although I see there's a switch to hard drives going on, but we still use a MiniDV camera to record our TV show, The CounterCulture Hour, and they seem amazingly cheap and all that, but there's something about even Super 8 film, like if you get an old camera at a thrift store and make a film, there's a really beautiful quality about that. I don't know, maybe you can get that in Photoshop or some add-on or something, but there's something about Super 8 and real film that I still really love.

Do you think that the initial vitality of industrial and punk has been transferred to anything that is currently going on? What do you see as being the new cultural destructor, as it were, that's really kind of pushing the boundaries?

Vale: Well, I think that can go on in kind of a niche way, but you have to remember that we were kind of lucky in that things were just starting out, and it wasn't so alienated. In other words, for a while there was, at least in San Francisco, you had an audience. You had a pretty large little niche society that knew what you were doing, and were plotting, and you knew a bunch of people. It was probably just a few hundred people, but a few hundred people is better than a dozen or two dozen; there's a little more richness possible, and there is that Ballardian thing that really a society can't be much bigger than a few hundred people, because then it just starts to become kind of more irresponsible, because people can do stuff and you don't know who that person was. If there are just a few hundred people in a punk scene or industrial scene, you can pretty much know almost everyone there, but there's enough variety, so you can get a pretty complex, and unexpected, and talented, and challenging, and deeper social matrix for creativity. In other words, you don't create in a vacuum. All art is done in a social context, and if you're really just less than a dozen people in a smaller town trying to recreate that, well, you can try, but it's going to be a lot harder. Do you see what I mean?

Absolutely. It seems a lot more fractured now.

Vale: You need the support. And usually these people are all really smart, these several hundred people, because they've already rejected all that normal stuff out there: the corporate media, pop music, and TV productions and all that. They're already way away from that, and everyone's trying to be creative and slightly one-up each other, but it's stimulating.

Is there a reason for re-releasing The Industrial Culture Handbook now? Do you see that there's kind of a growing or resurging interest in that type of subject matter and music?

Vale: I can't travel all over and see personally all these little industrial scenes. You have to do what you do with what you've got, all the resources you have at hand, and it's better than caving in and becoming part of the so-called status quo. When the Surrealists started doing films, you really just had a small group of people, just a few dozen really. When Bunuel and Dali—that's when Dali kind of had some integrity before he met that evil Galla—but when Bunuel and Dali first met they made two films together that were just amazing. I mean, they made Un Chien Andelou with the help of just a few dozen friends, a very small group, and that film is still inspiring past the test of time. It's still just an absolutely amazing film, and I think you can still do amazing work, even with a small support group.

As far as The Industrial Culture Handbook reprinting goes, that's on a slightly different level. The two favorite books I've ever done out of 30 years of publishing are that and Pranks. Those are the two favorites. And that book was very personal to me. I hated when it went out of print, and the only reason it's coming back is because of this person Ethan, of the Mobilization.org Web site, who is another mover and shaker here. He is the one who is co-funding it. I could not have done it without his real financial support. It would have been impossible. So that's partly why it's coming out. And a very small edition, but we think enough copies to last me, at least until I'm dead. After I'm dead I won't care. [Laughs.]

You mentioned Un Chien Andelou and the early Surrealists, and those are the kind of things that are shown in Film History classes now and art schools, and at the time they were just in these obscure niches of society and culture. Do you think stuff like that, the outer fringe extremes of culture, tends to appreciate over time as perhaps industrial music is doing at the moment, with this kind of popularity, interest, and resurgence in noise? What are your opinions on all that?

Vale: Well, I think there's always going to be people coming up who want to do stuff for themselves. And even if someone else did noise and did all these experiments of thwarting and combating taboos, there's still going to be people that want to do that for themselves again. Each generation has to go through all the stages. There's some evolutionary principle here that's bigger than all of us. Something you learn in Biology 101 is allegedly, to become human, we go through all the earlier stages of evolution of all the other creatures. And I think this has to happen with almost every artist who's born. You almost have to go through yourself all these other stages on some level to then try and break through into somewhere else. And most changes in society are brought about by technology, not by any enlightened abstract social theory. You know, Marx tried to do that, or Lenin. It was the first Marxist International that came up with the saying, 'Workers of the world unite,' and what that did was this simple little virus phrase created kind of a social class that hadn't existed before: workers. You know, workers had no self-consciousness before that. They were just people; just humans. And the phrase, 'Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains,' you know, 'In unity there is strength,' that kind of thinking, that's the only power you have as a worker. If you unite or refuse to work, then all these rich people who have the armies and the police on their side, what are they going to do? They can't function without you. You're the one that creates. It's the workers that create everything: make computers, fix the cars, build the houses, do all the real work. These rich people are all parasites, and the human race has had rich people ruling them from day one. We can't seem to get rid of these parasites who do nothing, but yet have all the money and the police and the armies behind them and tell everyone else what to do. It's such a weird structure, and we still have it. [Laughs.]

Do you see any hope or potential of one day breaking from that completely?

Vale: Yeah, all the time. I wouldn't be publishing without hope. You have to kind of insulate yourself a bit from the harsh realities of what the world really is. We're all in a position where we have to get money any way we can, and just buy a little time and just sit in our rooms and think, or just start making noise in our rooms, and then maybe think of some composition or video ideas or whatever, something creative. But anytime we don't have to work for someone else, that's the only free time we get. That's why they call it 'free time.' Get it? And you just have to do something every day, or try to, that's in that direction. If we didn't have hope, we'd be nothing.

It seems like we're kind of teetering on a point here culturally these days. It seems like it could fall off either way. It seems like the overbearing powers that be are trying to muster force, and on the other end, we're making absolute leaps and bounds as far as openness to information and technology and open source and all this, and it's alternately really positive and really negative. As far as the climate right before punk and industrial initially broke, does it feel that something is about to change in a really big way, and do you see something on the verge of breaking?

Vale: Well, it's so hard to predict that. If I knew a way to predict that, I guess I could make money right? [Laughs.]

That's how everybody makes money, allegedly, is by predicting the future, just slightly at least, and figuring out a way to capitalize on it. And we're in such a strange time right now. There is so much content, but it's free on YouTube, and on the Internet you can still download more music for free than you could ever have all the time to listen to and analyze properly. It's still out there, despite all the attempts to control it. You could spend the rest of your life watching YouTube videos that little humans have made and put up for free. So we're in the 'too much information age.' I didn't coin that phrase; I read it in the Wall Street Journal, and I said, that's it, the 'too much information age.' And it's hard for me to see how someone like J.G. Ballard or Survival Research Labs or even myself—I don't know what we have that's special, if anything. But that's why I do like the Pranks books. In one book, there isn't one bit of what I call compromised information. I try to keep anything that might be off the mark out. Everything there is kind of pure inspiration of what I would like to think of as the right kind of future of dissent, because I do want people to dissent from mainstream culture production.

That's what I've always seen as the main push of RE/Search. You've always had this kind of almost inspirational bent to it. After putting one of your books down, I always feel inspired to action, which is one of the strongest things you've done as RE/Search.

Vale: Well, you know, we try, and the very fact that you still find inspiration in these books is amazing to me. It really is. And let's face it; you're not like everyone else either. For everyone of you there must be a thousand kids in the high schools who are just more normal or something if you follow me. Are they less questioning? I don't know. I don't like to put down anyone, really, because you never know when people can change on you. Someone who seems to be quiet can suddenly blossom at a certain point in life and becomes rebellious, creative, and inspiring themselves. I do believe that all creativity is an act of rebellion, the creativity that I think is important at least.