The Emma Goldman Bust-Out Brigade - The Emma Goldman Bust-Out Brigade (2021)

The Emma Goldman Bust Out Brigade was born out of conversations that started several years ago between Mike Watt and Devin Hoff. After a Dos (Watt and Kira Roessler’s two bass band) show in Oakland that Devin opened for playing Solo Bass, he handed Watt a copy Paul Avrich’s Anarchist Voices’ with an image of Emma Goldman on the cover. “EG was way cool,” Watt said through the driver side window, which launched he and Hoff into a conversation of the finer points of Red Emma’s theories of the reciprocal nature of social harmony and individual sovereignty. Kira laughed at their nerdiness, and the punk bass legends headed out to the highway.

Since then, Watt and Hoff have referred to each other as Comrade (without irony). The first time the Emma Goldman Bust Out Brigade was
used as a moniker was at a benefit for Leonard Peltier that Watt and Hoff played at together, which eventually led to the recording session for this record. Watt organized the session and brought in the fabulous drummer Joe Berardi, and Hoff made the trek from L.A. to Pedro on the Red Line, his buddy Rusty’s vintage Ampeg Baby Bass in tow.

The music itself consists of improvisations based on bass lines by Watt and Hoff. The point was for the three to build non-idiomatic drums and bass-based improvised music, to hopefully enact in music some of EG’s words on the relationship of the individual to the collective. Watt found phrases in Goldman’s writing to name the songs after. The tracks are mostly instrumental, with the exception of the one word chant Atamansha that Hoff and comrade Tivona sang, a reference to early 20th century revolutionary Maria Nikiforova. The music is both free-improvisation― inspired by the revolutionary avant-garde musicians of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Julius Hemphill, Alice Coltrane, etc.,―and also very much punk rock in its ethos of DIY egalitarianism.
To paraphrase D. Boon: Punk is whatever we make it to be. Or as E.G. said:" I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."