Straw Man Army’s new record, called “SOS,” is out today! SMA is Owen and Sean
Straw Man Army’s new record, called “SOS,” is out today! SMA is Owen and Sean. I asked em a couple Q’s I was curious about.Can you talk a little bit of why and who you’re giving your portion of the profits from your new record to?Owen: The profits from this record will be donated to the Friendly Commissary Fund via Roots Unbound (NYC). The money supports people and their families impacted by incarceration, on the inside and out, because no one should live in cages. For us, Straw Man Army is like a research project. We read the world and try to make sense of it with the music. It gives form and function to our feelings of bewilderment that make life seem so precarious in 2022. It only feels natural to find causes that have been central to our conception of the lyrics, and direct the profits we’ve made there. In the end, this process allows us to think through the LP as a “concept,” from the writing stage to the final product.Sean: A lot of SMA’s subject matter concerns stories and struggles that don’t really belong to us and this is another reason we feel compelled to donate our profits. It’s a matter of reading the conditions and responding in alignment with them. We see nothing wrong with pocketing funds that one’s art produces, but in our case, that wasn’t a path we felt aligned with.What are the non-music inspirations for your new record? What kinds of issues and ideas are you singing about?S: We wrote in the record insert that SOS is a kind of exasperated prayer, and in the mutterings of this prayer you’ll find talk of technology and its nauseating acceleration, the idiocy of the alt-right’s Millenarian fantasies, all the ways covid demonstrated to us how disposable individual lives are to the state, and its total disregard for sacred lands and sacred sites, whether in the form of an oil pipeline or an overseas military base, etc.O: We’re singing about the shrinking of the future, and the haunting expansion of the past that has warped our sense of time, and thrown our collective understanding of historical scale into crisis.Buy the new Small Man Army record at d4mtlabsinc.bandcamp.com and https://www.lavidaesunmus.com/ -- source link