Daniel Kilburn used to be a drill sergeant in the U.S. Army, but has since retired, and now tries to help people not die in his job as a “disaster preparedness strategist.”

He dispensed his wisdom to VICE on the condition we mention the company he founded—Emergency Action Planning, LLC—just in case anyone reading this somehow finds themselves in a position where they are responsible for other people’s lives.

Elevator Crash

What people think works: Jump at the last second before impact, like Neo from The Matrix.

What actually happens: You’re not Neo from The Matrix. You’ll mistime it, break your legs, or crush your head against steel walls in mid-air. This would be bad news for your brain.

What to do instead: Lay down flat on your back to spread the impact across your body. Or squat with your knees bent, back to the wall, arms overhead. Your legs are your shock absorbers. Don’t lock your joints unless you want them snapped like twigs.

Jumping From a Building 

Spoiler alert: There is no good way to jump off a building.

The better (still bad) option: Aim for anything not concrete: dumpsters, bushes, awnings, parked cars. Keep your body loose. ‘Rigid’ means snapped bones. ‘Loose’ means maybe still breathing. Land feet-first, knees bent, then roll—like you’re trying to electric boogaloo. Use your legs as your shock absorbers. Even 20 feet could be fatal depending on how you land.

Indoor Fire

First mistake: Standing up and breathing yourself to death. Hot smoke kills way before flames do.

Your move: Hit the floor: the air’s cleaner down there. Touch doors with the back of your hand—that way, if it’s hot, you won’t instantly burn your palms, and you will likely need those if you want to survive. If you’re trapped, seal the door, wave your shirt out the window, and take calm breaths. Panic = hyperventilation = die fast.

Tornado

The rookie move: Dumbly recording it on your iPhone from your porch. 

Reality check: If you can see the funnel, it can already eat your house.

What saves you: If you can, get underground. If you’re stuck in traffic, abandon your car. If you’re outside, find a ditch, lie flat, and cover up.

Avoid: Overpasses. They become wind tunnels. You’ll get sucked out the sides like an ant in a hoover.

VICE: Why a ditch?
Daniel Kilburn: They’re below the Earth’s surface, which gives you a greater opportunity not to get picked up. A tornado is like a big suction cloud so you don’t want to be standing up. Things are flying about, right? You don’t want to be hit by that cow that’s swinging around out there.

Home Invasion

The myth: “I’ll fight back and be the hero.”

What’s smarter: Live to tell the story.

Best plays: Escape—through a window, a back door, however you can. Can’t run? Hide in a lockable room, turn off the lights, and pipe down. Remember: one stray fart could kill you. If confrontation is unavoidable and you’re trained, act fast and decisively to subdue the fucker(s).

Mass Shooting

Natural hope: The police will handle it.

In reality: Kick into gear as soon as you hear shots.

The key: Know where the exits are ahead of time.

VICE: That sounds quite boring but it’s important, isn’t it?
Daniel Kilburn: You should do it when you go into any building: find the exits. If you’re in a restaurant, escaping through the kitchen is actually what I teach my kids to do. I usually try to sit close to an exit looking at the front door, but hey, that’s me—‘Drill Sergeant Dad!’

Crowd Crush

People think: I can squeeze my way through. Everybody else is just going for the wrong gap!

Think instead: Can I get to the side?

What to do: Get to the periphery. Back out of the crowd. If you’re in the throng and everyone starts falling, try to fall on your side so your diaphragm can expand, and you can breathe.

This handy guide is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.

The post How to Survive Various Catastrophes appeared first on VICE.

But the looming possibility of a no-deal Brexit has turned some into “Brexit preppers” — Brits who are preparing for the possibility of losing access to their favorite products, food and even medicine.

On Wednesday, European leaders granted the U.K. a six-month Brexit extension until Oct. 31, but ”Brexit preppers” aren’t taking any chances. They’re preparing for the worst.

Peter — who asked not to reveal his last name — is one of these preppers. He’s packed supplies to survive a full-scale descent into chaos, in his suburban home. He’s not even an outlier. So many people are freaking out about Brexit that helping them prep has become a cottage industry.

For James Blake, founder of “Emergency Food Storage.co.UK,” Brexit should be big business. The price of his infamous “Brexit breakfast box” is roughly $400, and he says he’s sold upwards of 600 of them to Brits already.

But Brexit also poses some problems for his business model: Almost 40 percent of his business is reliant on clients in the EU, a market he could soon lose out on.

“Brexit is a terrible idea for our business because we operate within the U.K. and Europe. We sell our products from all over Europe,” Blake told VICE News. “That being said, I did vote for Brexit, and I would do it again.”

This segment originally aired April 10, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

The post Brexit is freaking people out so much they’re turning into preppers appeared first on VICE.

The Cyborg is apparently the hardest man to find in a jungle. His job? He trains elite Southeast Asian military regiments by being routinely dropped into the Filipino jungle as a “bunny” for trainees to capture. And in four years of doing this, he’s never once been caught.

Over sushi, The Cyborg (we’re not allowed to use his real name) talked wilderness survival tips, evasion tactics, and the strange role that Christianity plays in his hard-nut life.

VICE: Let’s start with the name. Where’d that come from?
The Cyborg: Yeah I don’t know about the cyborg thing. I’m just a regular American guy who loves drinking Bud while watching the football. I’m always calling Mum to send over boxes of Reese’s. My parents are really blue collar. I’m definitely the black sheep but my mission is still my family, and to spread the ideals that have worked for the West. I joined the military because I was a patriot and I wanted my children to have the same freedoms I’ve lived with.

So why did you go rogue?
It wasn’t bad blood with the military, I just wanted the freedom to travel and explore the world. That’s how I ended up undertaking training and private security advisory roles here in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

Image via

Let’s talk about this bunny training exercise. How do you avoid being caught?
It broadly comes down to four rules. One: at night the light doesn’t lie. Any light pinpoints not only your location but also the enemy’s. Two: move only at night, and spend the daylight hours observing foreign units, remembering their routines and planning. Three: travel alone, even though it’s more desirable to travel in small groups. Also, if you ever find yourself trapped, use a different route to backtrack.

Another thing is the more you stress out, the more tired you’ll get. You need to know about how your mental state affects the way you cope with pain, injury, hunger, and fatigue. This is most important in military situations in big cities where, if you’re lost or separated from your unit, the confusion of the city heightens your stress because there is so much to look at. If your eyes dart the wrong way it can cost you an arm or a leg.

In the end, the problem with all these tips is that they require training. I could spend hours talking about each of the points I just ran through in a matter of minutes. This stuff requires rigorous training in different conditions, countryside, cities, and forests. You can’t be lazy; you need to educate yourself about the land you’re working in.

It sounds like a large degree of not getting caught is about mental control.
Someone once told me that if freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower. I later found out it was a Hitler quote, but it’s pretty relevant and I think about it a lot when I’m alone in the jungle. The limits of your mind are your greatest barrier. Once you think you’ve found your threshold, you’ve still got another 30 percent left in the tank. You are you’re own worst enemy. That’s what needs to stay in your mind throughout any struggle. It’s your doubts, fears, and insecurities that force you into stupid mistakes. You really need to be in tuned with surviving in your head, that’s the majority of the work right there, everything else will fall into place as long as your will remains intact.

Image via

Ok, let’s say you’ve got the mental control bit sorted. How do you survive in the jungle?
After willpower, the second most important thing is navigation. If you’ve lost your gear and been stripped of your watch—and most tyrants and terrorists love fancy watches by the way—an important and simple technique is to use the sun to find true north. As long as the sun is bright enough, you can use a branch and a few stones to work out how to face north. It’s worth YouTubing.

The next thing is to learn about water, edible plants, and hunting. You won’t live long without water, especially if you’re carrying gear and sweating. You’ll most likely be drinking from lakes and rivers, so be wary of flooding, roads, and construction that can contaminate water. You can also learn to filter water from mud.

You also should have a basic understanding of fire building and shelter techniques. When you’re thinking about shelter you need to ensure you’re protected from the sun, insects, animals, rain, and the enemy. For this last bit you need to make sure your body is completely absorbed by your surrounding, by smothering your face with mud and your body in the fauna of your surroundings.

But again, this all takes practice. How many weekends have you got left? Don’t waste them at the same shitty bar, listening to the same music. Head out there and spend some time alone. It sounds lame and cliché but it’s actually way more badass then sipping cocktails. It’s only out there that you will realise that you can live on your own and be self sufficient amongst the earth.

On the subject of self-sufficiency, what’s the worst thing you’ve eaten?
I don’t really think about my tastebuds when I’m trying to survive dude. When you’re desperate you don’t care, your mind works differently. You’re thinking in carbs, vitamins and nutrients. Also the only time I’ve ever been sick was in a restaurant in Hanoi because I did the typical tourist thing and ate a cobra’s heart while it was still beating. I didn’t get off the toilet for a week. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn.

Image via

Take us through “The Cyborgs” daily routine?
I start the day with 300 burpees when I wake up, followed by jiu-jitsu. Then it’s hand to hand combat in the afternoon, and kickboxing in the evening. It’s all high interval training, cross-fit style stuff. It keeps me active and I find it therapeutic. I spend the rest of my time studying theology online.

Yes, tell me about your relationship with religion. It seems a pretty interesting part of your character.
In my own personal experience, I have come within inches of death and its always this feeling I get, some call it instincts but it feels the spiritual to me. Pacing around villages in northern Afghanistan just before an attack, I can feel the ambience turn sour, like the timing of the wind misses a beat. So I duck and shots whistle past.

In war it’s all about timing. For me, prayer has an ability to light up my senses to the rhythms of war. I’ve ran across fields and seen my brothers’ limbs get blown apart. Why do I choose certain steps? Why are my instincts inclined to move a certain way? I don’t know.

What if it’s just luck?
After so many tours you learn that there’s no such thing as luck. It’s faith, determination, and hard work. Do great musicians get lucky when they strum the right chords? I don’t think so. It’s everything they’ve lived and thought that led them to those certain arrangements. I think the same way about triggers and fire fights.

Have you ever been in any incidents that have made you question your faith?
I questioned my faith when I was a teenager. I joined the military because I believed religion destroyed culture. Back then I saw religion as a way of controlling the masses, like an experiment that had gone wrong. But when you get to war you find God in places you don’t expect. It’s not out of desperation like a lot of people think, I think it’s revealed and made transparent when you’re at your worst. You’re thinking differently when the stakes are high. Some think faith is a sign of weakness, but I think it takes a great deal of courage to really immerse yourself in something that’s out of your hands. But like everything we’ve talked about, it’s just part of conviction.

Follow Mahmood on Twitter and Instagram

The post A Special Forces Mercenary Explains How to Survive in the Jungle appeared first on VICE.

Much like economist George Taylor’s “hemline theory,” which claims that miniskirts mean positive things for a country’s financial health, general consumer statistics on the sale of things like luxury goods, alcohol and even porn can provide a good read of the general social climate. Four-inch heels apparently mean an economic downturn, and kinky porn habits can offer commentary on social oppression.

In uncertain times, it seems normal for citizens to cut spending or seek creature comforts.

The popularity of survivalist merchandise—gear used to prepare for a cataclysm or the end of times— offers interesting insight into people’s anxieties concerning natural disasters, political situations or even technological development. For instance, a recent report states that rich Silicon Valley innovators are building shelters to hide from the popular revolt that will occur when robots steal all of our jobs, which is very reassuring.

We wanted to learn more about these types of trends, so we contacted survivalist stores in Canada, France and the US to find out what has been driving their clientele’s purchases.

Pascal Lemieux
Owner, Boutique Militaire, Quebec, QC

VICE: So your store sells army surplus and survivalist stuff?
Pascal Lemieux: Yeah, we’ve been around for 25 years and we started as an army surplus store. But I developped a survivalist section after September 11 because there was a demand, people were suddenly conscious stuff like that could happen in America.

Our sales depend on what’s happening on the planet. There are peaks during political conflicts, US and Russia stuff, or natural disasters. Like Fukushima in Japan, that was a peak in sales. During the next year or so, people were buying anti-radiation stuff, gas masks, chemical protection suits, you know those one pieces with a hood and a mask.

But the Fukushima disaster is pretty far from Quebec, no?
Radiation has no boundaries, never forget that.

Did you notice any particular trends in the last year, with the Trump election?
No, not really. I think that’s more affected the immigration side of things. Where we see changes is really during like political stuff of cold war type situations, that’s when people feel like something could happen. Or when there are attacks, like what happened in Boston.

It’s tough to tell though, because often people buy stuff without telling you what it’s for.

Do you know if people are building bunkers?
I don’t know, but you’re not supposed to talk about that. What I can tell you is that more and more families are getting prepared.

Image via flickr user Fuzzy Gerdes

Neal Crasnow
Owner, Al’s Army Navy, Orlando, Florida

VICE: How long have you been doing this?
Neal Crasnow: I’ve been in Army Navy business for 35 years. This store has been here in central Florida for 60 years.

Is it a big business out in Florida?
I think there are all sorts of people that collect all sorts of different things. Whether they’re preppers or survivalists, that’s a good question, and what they’re actually waiting for is an even better question. So I don’t know if it’s the zombie apocalypse or any number of other things.

They come in and look for different things. I sell all kinds of fire starting equipment, water purification equipment, backpacks and firearms and all kinds of things like that.

Do you see any patterns, are there items that sell more during certain periods?
Well for the US, when there is a chance that a Democrat will get elected to office, then firearms sell better. If you remember the whole thing about the year 2000, the computers, there was a whole group of people that was worried about that, so they would go out and they were buying those [survivalist] things.

When people are worried, they make arrangements. I sell a lot during hurricane season. I do think the firearms thing is tied to politics but the rest is tied to people’s angst and feelings.

What happened during the most recent election?
Prior to election, people were concerned that a Democrat would be elected so firearms sold better. Although during the Obama administration, firearms sold as well as they ever had.

Do people inquire about bunkers? Are more people setting up bunkers?
I think there was a series of things that happened even a few years ago that led people in that direction more than now. I think there are people that are preppers and that’s a continual audience gaining speed. I mean I couldn’t answer as to what they’re preparing for.

I think there are always more preppers. I’m not unhappy that it’s always growing because I base a lot of my business on it, but I don’t think it’s indication of something.

Everyone needs a good bunker. Image via Flickr user brian donovan

Joël Grimaldier
Manager, Randonneurs online store, France

VICE: Who are your customers?
Joël Grimaldier: In France, we’re leaders in the sale of survival materials and have been for the last 10 years. Our clientele is linked to bushcraft and hiking, but our competitive edge is survivalism.

I’m also trying to develop the “pure” survivalist sector, and I’m attracting more and more francophone clients (from France, Belgium and Switzerland) who are interested in this stuff. Even though survivalists tend to be discrete about their lifestyles and don’t directly admit their interests, we can determine their habits through their purchases.

We’ve had a lot of competitors spring up in the last three or four years, who often do this to complement a main business like hunting or fishing.

Do you notice changes based on political climate? Do you sell more of certain products after certain events or elections?
Yes, for the last 10 years I’ve seen the survival market evolve. Initially, this was launched by shows like Bear Grylls, but this whole “surviving in nature” period transformed into a more survivalist trend.

This practice isn’t as developed in Europe as it is in North America, but it’s starting to take off here. Some clients, without calling themselves survivalists, are still getting preparing for a variety of possible risks.

France is more and more affected by climate-related phenomena, and people are getting ready for that. The attacks we’ve seen in the last two years have also affected people’s mentalities and pushed them towards preparation.

While political risks seem increasingly obvious in these parts, they’re not considered “major” risks by the general population. Germany and Switzerland are encouraging their populations to set aside rations of food, but that’s not a thing in France, at least not really.

The current electoral period hasn’t affected sales here, at least not yet. And the growing tensions between Europe, the US and Russia haven’t yet had an impact on the “base” population.

Since I refuse to buy weapons, my clients generally buy long-term food rations and stock up on all the essentials they need in case of an evacuation.

Niels Baartman
Co-owner, Total Prepare in Victoria, BC

VICE: How long have you been in business?
Niels Baartman: This is my sixth year in the business.


What kind of consumer trends have you seen in the past few years?
I’d say American politics influence us a lot more than Canadian politics. American politics are way more world-changing than Canadian politics will ever be so I feel people tend to gravitate towards looking at the U.S. policies that might dictate what might come down the pipe.

[During those periods] people will buy larger food packages, perhaps water containers, big tanks for emergency water. The food servings can be anywhere from one month to six months of supplies.

I think there’s a greater awareness that being prepared is a wise thing to do and I would say the key is finding good quality products that people can rely on.

What are people preparing for though?
Everything under the sun. Natural disaster, some are for political reasons, road trips, ice storms, I would say it’s all over the horizon, there is no specific reason.

What do you mean, political reasons?
Whether it’s foreign policy, or perhaps an economic meltdown or whatever people in the prepper community are concerned about, a lot of it revolves around political decisions or the direction politics might be going. So, many of them prepare for inevitable reasons that there might be a shortage of food or that something might affect the availability of funds or whatever the case may be.

What did you notice before and after Trump was elected?
We definitely had a relatively strong reaction to preppers buying before Trump was elected, but after he was elected that quieted down dramatically. People were feeling a sense of relief that the election was over, but also I think those who feared economic problems felt Trump might be beneficial. A lot of the prepper community has a more right-wing viewpoints and so they thought Hillary would be disastrous.

What were they buying?
Food. Our experience is that whenever there is something fearful out there, clients buy food because that’s their main concern. Most preppers don’t need other supplies because they’re already stocked.

Do you sell bunkers, do people ask about bunkers?
No, and I don’t find that has come up often in Canada. At least I haven’t come across it much. But most people don’t mention they’re stocking a bunker, they’d rather keep that quiet.

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.

The post The Survivalist Economy: Are People Gearing Up for the End of the World? appeared first on VICE.

It’s now been roughly a year since Noisey last spoke to the ever-prolific musician Mat McNerney about the demise of his explosively popular Finnish death rock outfit, Beastmilk. Its next reincarnation, Grave Pleasures, sprang fully-formed from the ashes of its predecessor, and McNerney seemed nothing less than relieved to be distancing himself from the chaos, major label interest, and hype that had turned Beastmilk from a joke into a ticking time bomb of frustration and ill will. Thenew band’s debut, Dreamcrash,​ was released by Nuclear Blast in late 2015, and now, McNerney and his fellows—which currently include co-founder and bassist Valtteri Arino, Oranssi Pazuzu guitarist Juho Vanhanen, Kohu 63 guitarist Aleksi Kiiskilä, and former Shining drummer Rainer Tuomikanto; The Oath guitarist Linnéa Olsson appears to have exited the building—are poised to release a new seven-inch, entitled Funeral Party (which will be released via McNerney’s own Secret Trees​ record label on November 18, 2016).

The seven-inch’s two songs serve up icy, dancey goth-tinged death rock, and temper it with an ominous apocalyptic obsession—the video for “Deadenders” is a vintage nuclear nightmare, and McNerney’s own interest in the end of days foes far deeper than a few song titles. When I first touch base with him to schedule a phone chat, he’s on his way out the door to play a gig in Greece with his other band, forest folk godheads Hexvessel (about which we interviewed him again earlier this year). By the time he gets home to Finland, the clock is ticking, and we agree to have me send my questions by email. Usually, emailers turn out dry and boring—but there’s no danger of that with McNerney. His responses are lengthy, and considered; he’s clearly a person who never stops thinking, analyzing, and observing his surroundings. He’s a sensitive soul, and one that seems demonically blessed with an endless wellspring of creativity besides. 

That passion for life and curiosity about its processes is nakedly apparent, whether he’s discussing dystopian literature, his survivalist impulses, or the role of masculinity in metal culture. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity, and we’ve got Funeral Party on blast below. Get ready to dance with death.

Noisey: Last time you spoke to Noisey, Beastmilk had just transitioned into Grave Pleasures. To make sure I’ve got it all straight—who is currently in the band now, and how did they get there?
Mat McNerney: Since the split as Beastmilk to the recent lineup changes, it was me and Valtteri Arino [the original and co-founding bass player of Beastmilk] that kept flying the black banner of this band. We were the ones that kept it going and have kept playing those songs live and kept the original spirit of the band going. Long after our original guitarist wanted to bury the band, to people coming and going, we’ve been the lynchpins of the original sound ideas and concept. Juho Vanhanen (from Oranssi Pazuzu) was always part of Grave Pleasures in reality. Though credited only as session, he played every live show with the band and was in every way our lead guitarist and co-songwriter on Dreamcrash. I always knew that if we had more time to create songs together we were capable of much better things than that album. Being already a major part of the band for a long time, he now joined me in co-songwriting and arranging the music for this new 7″ and the next, forthcoming album. It’s down to him that the songs on fire again.

More importantly, we’re back to a Finnish lineup. We’re a real band that rehearses regularly and lives in the same place. It’s organic and punk. The way it is meant to be. We only ended up with an international lineup because things fell apart so quickly with our original Beastmilk guitarist, right before we were supposed to record an album. He left us in the shit, and we’ve had some struggles but we moved on and never looked back. We will never give up, it was never an option for us! Aleksi Kiiskilä, who has been playing with Finnish punk legends Kohu 63, joined us on second guitar after applying for the position in the local musician’s website. We’re lucky to have found him and it feels very natural to play with him. There’s a real excitement to play with fresh blood in the band and it brings a wild hunger to the live shows too. 

Our new drummer Rainer Tuomikanto who has previously been playing with Shining from Sweden, and many other well known Finnish bands, joined us after declaring some time ago to our drummer Uno that he wanted his job! Rainer is the drummer that this band always needed. He has that 80s goth dance beat down perfectly but he also grew up in black metal and heavy music, so he has this innate chemistry with the rest of us. I think, for a while, we had kind of overlooked the fact that where we came from as a band with Beastmilk, the drums were such an integral and important factor of the band. That surf rhythm and 80s punk bunker thundering, has to be there. Band chemistry is everything. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter if you’re Uli Roth or Dave Lombardo, you won’t necessarily make a good band together on talent alone. I think we have found that now with this lineup though. It’s got spark. It’s real, perhaps for the first time with this band.

There’s been this real push in metal, especially underground metal, towards both goth rock and 80s synthwave (sometimes both on the same record!). GP feels more gothy to me, but regardless, metal seems to, well…want to dance again. Why do you think bands are reaching towards these other influences? Why are metalheads dancing their asses off to Perturbator right after watching One Tail One Head?
It’s like that Ultravox song, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes”—it’s painful, you know? It’s not like dancing to some euphoric happy tune. I think it’s much more about a state of mind and way of the world than about just getting your kicks or being happy for the sake of satisfying your basic desires. For me, I feel that something deeper is happening.  It’s a natural reaction to show a smile to death. The feeling when everything is against you, the most defiant feeling is to not give in to despair and sadness but to want to dance. It’s the most punk thing you can do in the face of adversity. 

If you look at cultures at war, dance became an important symbol of freedom and hope. It’s their last brave physical reaction to an impossible situation and a way to liberate their soul. In WWII, there was the Lindy Hop and the Charleston and all these very intense dance styles that were all the rage. If you watch people dancing, you’d think of anything but war times. I believe what is happening in darker music scenes now is about people celebrating their nihilism. We all know we’re fucked. We’re doomed. We’re dancing with tears in our eyes because there is nothing left. It’s also reclaiming the ability to dance and to move. I don’t think times are so generous any more. People aren’t inclined to stand with their arms folded at shows anymore because the music scene has left a very large gap between what is going on in the world and how people feel. That’s the lyrics to this latest song, “Deadenders”—”Dance with the skeletons, there’s nothing left, dance with the skeletons, gasp for breath, raised up by the end, generation death, we’re dead ends, we’re dead ends.” It’s about that dance of death that unites us all. We’re all going down with this sinking ship, so let’s play out until the last note, until the last breath.

Do you think it’s got anything to do with the “brutal” or hypermasculine image that so many metalheads seem to subscribe to (or be pushed towards)? 
Saul Williams said that “vulnerability is power,” and I subscribe to that. I haven’t thought of our music as a reaction to a brutal or masculine image in metal, though. Even at the most brutal part of my deep black metal years, you would find lines like “tears fall as I think of you” by Fenriz on “Natasja In Eternal Sleep,” for example which would emphasize for me a more vulnerable side. I was very much of the mind that, as Fenriz said, “black metal is 50 percent lyrics and 50 percent music.” So for me this poetic part, this unabashed sensitivity, felt that it went hand in hand with the scene and the meaning behind it. I suppose that this is the “gothic” element which characterized a lot of the early 90s black metal, but also the music was beautiful, pretty and often ornate. The melodies were very contrary to a lot of the “brutal” death metal tropes and archetypes. That’s what attracted me in many ways into black metal from goth rock as a pre-teen and teenager. But I don’t see those masculine aspects in metal really in that negative way, either. I think that a lot of those aspects—that, taken out of context, might appear to be problematic—actually are simply part of a really healthy and thriving music scene. You would find them elsewhere in any scene. It’s not to excuse it but to understand it, is to understand metal. To oppose those flaws is to oppose reality, or the reality of the way the world is right now. 

You know, if you compare it with hip hop, a lot of the imagery is about over-masculinity, gangsterism, guns and violence and drugs, but on a deeper level, those young kids are learning to express themselves and to get out some of their dark energy, and as a result they become poets, writers, critics and even politicians. That’s the good role that hip hop plays in their lives. It’s about using that language and symbolism to open a door for people that might never have that opportunity. It’s a road to elevate young men and women out of their lot in life. I believe that metal does the same for our culture, too. It’s base on the outside, but it can be very profound if you dig beneath the surface.

In my opinion, the road to wisdom through metal is greater than the road to depravity or misogyny. I know so many people who have expanded and elevated themselves mentally, through reading and experience, because of metal, than I do people who are somehow backwards in their treatment of women because of it.  I often think it’s sad that people don’t talk about the really good things that metal has done for a whole generation of young men. Much more so than with the “bitch” and “ho” culture that came along with rap music and into pop culture now. That doesn’t excuse the over-masculine posturing, but you have to see it for what it is. I happen to feel that the way metal treats women and deals with women is really positive, most of the time. Importantly for me, I think that there are, especially recently, a lot of very strong and powerful role models for young women in the metal scene to relate to. Most of the women I know in metal are way more extreme than the guys, and without mercy. My wife, for, example has always been into more extreme and obscure black metal than me. There are very tough girls out there in that world who will kick your ass! 

I think to put boundaries on what metal should be would be to tame it and reduce its capacity to shock and be extreme. It would then lose the potency and ability to be of any use to youth culture. Rebellion is important. A lot of that brutality and masculinity is still there, but I think it’s an important aspect of the scene. I’m not talking about any kind of chauvinism or mistreatment of women, but more that it’s a necessary aspect that young men are allowed to let go and to act out and to react. It’s not as if modern society and pop music culture reflects a more decent and healthy image of women than in metal. In that way I admire the witchy attributes and evil devil-woman image that rock ‘n’ roll and metal bestows on women. It’s another more adulatory role. There at least woman as a figure and an icon, is powerful and godly. And rightly so. There are no princesses but song titles like “Woman of Dark Desire,” as the Bathory song tells you, elevates women to the role of the ultimate powerful villain. Something to be feared and worshipped. Or think of song titles like “Goddess of Doom” by Reverend Bizarre. Metal lyrics are steeped in admiration for woman as the ultimate figure of worship.

Are you relieved that Beastmilk is dead? It seemed like it got so big so quickly that the model was just unsustainable (and you seem so much more energized now, talking about GP!). 
I never got the Beastmilk hype. I always thought it was the industry jumping on a bandwagon and wanting it to be something it wasn’t. It’s why a lot of people imagined I somehow wasn’t into doing Beastmilk or had no interest in it. I loved the band, but hated the hype. I wanted to do it my own way, and not be what others expected us to be. I was very committed to the band in actual fact and put a lot of my time and energy into making the artistic and professional side of my work in it the best that it could be. Unfortunately, there was an aspect of it when we formed the band that felt like it was a kind of joke, and the way the lineup chemistry made us feel very disconnected. I thought the hype, together with that band tension, was a cruel twist of fate that was stopping the band from progressing naturally. I enjoy Climax as a record, but it’s not the best record I have written or made. I thought we had more to offer and I still do, but the lineup had some ill chemistry. The change of name had to happen. It was one of the things i just thought could be better.From there to the media hype, which felt very forced, I was a bit bewildered and ultimately felt a bit creatively stifled. I am not really used to being an insider or one of the gang by the media. I am used to being an outsider artist and one on the fringes. The awards and poll success and 5 star reviews and constant ass kissing was too over the top. It didn’t reflect the sales of the record and it certainly didn’t reflect the mood of the band at the time. We were going to hell in a hand-basket and by the end of it, me and our other co-founding guitarist, simply couldn’t stand each other anymore. 

The name began to signify more than a joke, it started to stand for everything I loathed about doing music.We carried on the band, and changed the name—I think it was the best decision we ever made. Since then, we have had great experiences and it has developed finally now into a real organic band again. It just took us a long time after the breakup to pick up the pieces. Dreamcrash was made through a lot of turmoil and there were still unfounded legal threats being made by our ex-guitarist that made it all very painful. It’s in many ways a breakup record.The new material now is the sound of a band that is firing on all cylinders again. We’ve rediscovered lost spirits and have improved on where we started. That’s something people who like this band should know. Grave Pleasures is the band I always wanted to create when I founded Beastmilk. I am certain, without any grain of doubt, that it is.

What do you think musicians and bands owe their audience, if anything? There’s obviously a sense of gratitude for their support, but at the end of the day, are you looking to make music that resonates with other people, or satisfies your own sensibilities?
I don’t believe I owe anyone anything other than gratitude for their support. I’m always exhausted and fed up when people want an artist to create the same album over and over again. I love seeing an artist I like shift, change and grow; even if I don’t like everything they do, they have my respect if they follow their own will. The unfortunate side of the internet dialogue between fans and bands is that people want to be obnoxious without any implications. People expect more and more that, as the fan community is so much more visible and established even with underground artists, they somehow own the way that artist should work. If you like one record, that’s your own preference. You don’t control the artist after that, and you can’t expect to direct his or her work with your wallet. Some people are happy to keep making the same record of course, as long as it sells. I am into music because of the artistic enjoyment I get from creating and writing, but it is personal before it is public and it doesn’t have a price tag on it as it’s being written. 

I need challenges and I like to be eclectic.  Often it can be touching when a person really connects with your music—that’s when you know that what you wrote, that was for you in the beginning, has developed into something that lives a life of its own.  When you write in the right way, it’s an alchemical, magical thing. You give life to a story or a mood or feeling that can live on and travel and affect someone’s life on the other side of the planet. All my heroes when I was young were poor and struggling—poets like Rimbaud, or writers like Lovecraft. Ambition for me is about art. It’s not a crime to write for money or with money and album sales in mind, but it is a crime to cheat on your music. You need to be true to your music before it can become real. The Swedish band First Aid Kit said it really well recently when discussing Leonard Cohen’s death: “Songs are bigger than that, they have no ego. They travel without borders at their will.” Cohen is a good example of a songwriter who was also a magician. 

To shift focus a bit: you’re big on apocalyptic imagery, and now, the world is closer to the end than we’ve been since the Cold War. I know from your Hexvessel interview with Louise Brown that you’re very much interested in self-sufficiency. Do you have a survival plan for if and when the bombs fall? 
My family is somewhat prepared for when things go down. We have a survival kit and a stockpile and a plan. We have also formulated and discussed our plan, and, while it’s a constant work in progress, we both believe, my wife and I, that it’s an important part of life. It should be a way of life, to survive and be self-sufficient. You shouldn’t rely on the state to save you. Human life is not that important to governments and states. You can see that in any given humanitarian crisis. People have to know how to fend for themselves. It’s about way more than being prepared for shit hitting the fan. We believe in getting back to a way of life which is not going to bring about the destruction of life on the planet. I want real true civilization, which the modern way of living has completely destroyed, with over-population and the needs of modern comfort that go with it. Human being were survivors first and foremost, but we’ve let ourselves become completely addicted and reliant on a way of living which is not sustainable. Global warming is an indication of that. It’s backed up by scientific fact. If you ignore that, then you’re the tin-foil hat wearing fool.  

Having a border to Russia, and given the history of Finland there are other, perhaps more realistic situations where society could break down before nuclear war starts. Look at Ukraine to see how that goes. The financial situation today in Finland is bad, as it is in the rest of Europe. So it’s not hard to see where things might go when the banks collapse. I really don’t understand why a sustainable way for human beings to live, one where the outcome of any given situation is that we survive, is not a priority to us as a species.You have one life. If you adore it and treasure it, and believe that mankind can accomplish great things and great civilizations (look at space exploration or breakthroughs in particle physics as modern examples of that), then you will want to preserve it. It’s amusing to me that my inner-city dwelling friends back in London or Berlin or Paris, who love disposable culture, will find my survivalist instincts dangerous or frightening. They imagine that I’m going to stockpile guns, build a fence around my property, and have a shoot out with the police. Their over-reliance on a destructive lifestyle (both to themselves and to the planet) makes me think of them as the dangerous and suicidal ones. The culture they advocate is one of death. There are those who say they cannot live without meaningless modern culture, food and convenience. They can’t see the irony of it. They are already dead.   

What’ll you be reading down in the bunker? I’m a massive fan of post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature (even as we rapidly inch closer to living within one) and would love to know what’s on your bookshelf. 
I would probably not be reading dystopian literature down in the bunker! I would probably opt for something far more optimistic or practical to our survival once we have come out of it! Some of the books like Patterson’s Field Guide Of Wild Edible Plants or The Forager’s Harvest (we have versions of these kind of things in Finnish that would be more use to us, but maybe not to most of your readers) or an enjoyable read, with some factual good like Natural Navigator or The Walker’s Guide To Outdoor Clues And Signs by Tristan Gooley.For dystopian literature though I am fond of JG Ballard, John Wyndham and HG Wells. A great book is Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (which was made into a movie called Soylent Green) or one called Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. There’s also a really obscure old book called After London by Richard Jeffries which I can recommend, which was written in 1885! It was really ahead of its time, but deals with England after a catastrophe and the whole country has reverted to wild nature again. Like us, Jeffries was a wild idealist who had a lot of anger about the changes taking place to the land by human beings and how the countryside was becoming lost. If you read George Monbiot’s book Feral (which I also recommend; [it] deals with man’s effects on nature and re-wilding the land), then you will really know how ahead of his time Jeffries was. 

What can we do to avert the apocalypse? Is humanity even worth saving?
The Finnish writer Pentti Linkola has a quote, “What to do when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to overload it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.” The earth is overpopulated. What can be done about that would be rapid depopulation and fast. It’s hard, because in any given nuclear or war scenario, it would still not reduce the population of this planet significantly enough to reduce the damage we are doing to it. That’s a sad fact for the more extreme environmentalists. You would have to have a more holistic approach where you combine depopulation practices (one-child families etc) with a very drastic an extreme environmental policy to re-wild the land. Monbiot talks about it in “Feral” too. “Progress is measured at the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.” 

I think there are many things that make human beings worthy of life on this planet. Our advances in space travel and our enterprising spirit of exploration in that way elevates us from primates. We also have art. It is that ability to witness and understand our planet and also our capability to destroy it, which sets us apart from any other species. We could be the greatest of stewards and wonderful custodians of our planet, or we could be, as Oppenheimer, said, “Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Kim Kelly is dancing with death on Twitter​.

The post Grave Pleasures’s ‘Funeral Party’ Will Have You Dancing with Tears in Your Eyes appeared first on VICE.

I’m here because it’s the US presidential election next week, and Trump could win. As Clinton’s campaign continues to be plagued by issues regarding her use of a private email server, Trump is making gains: One recent poll gives Clinton a mere one-point lead.

In that context, going on a survival course in preparation for a Trump presidency looks more and more like an extremely chill and rational thing to do. The Republican presidential hopeful has shown himself to have poor impulse control. When reaching for the nuclear launch button, who knows what else he might accidentally grab?

To use a sex analogy, Trump is that creepy guy you’re fucking who’s probably shooting blanks, but you stick a condom on just in case.

Plus, I’m not the type to fare well in a post-apocalyptic scenario. I have no expertise with a deadly weapon, and cannot run far or fast. Being a woman of Middle Eastern descent, I’m also the wrong ethnicity and gender—Trump’s policies aren’t exactly known to favor women or Muslims. I don’t know how to forage for food or fight off a mob of Twinks for Trumps. Coming on this survival course snaps a metaphoric prophylactic around the Trump presidency and says, “Fuck it, unending nuclear winter—I’m ready for you.”

Read more: Learning How to Orgasm Without Any Touching

Assisting me in my attempts to avoid capture is Gary Johnston, who’s leading my survival training. Johnston is the founder of Jack Raven Bushcraft, which runs immersive bushcraft courses in the Kent countryside.

The Kent countryside, where we did our survival training. All photos by Alice Zoo.

Usually, survivalists—my research indicates—present as misogynistic types who like to collect pocket knives and masturbate into condoms, according to this fun survival thread. Not all survivalists, I learn. Johnston is a legend. He has kind eyes like a wise owl and is sexy in the way that only truly practical men can be sexy. I’m inclined to trust him because he has crumpled up hands, like empty crisp packets. You should never trust a man with tiny, plump little hands.

Most importantly, though, Johnston is a reality TV fan. “You watch all these survival shows and the boys always end up doing worse than the girls,” he opines. “Have you seen that show Naked and Afraid? Well the bloke in that got sunstroke and the girl looks after him.” Most things, I learn, can be related back to Naked and Afraid.

Gary Johnston of Jack Raven Bushcraft.

Johnstone collects my photographer and I in an SUV at a rural railway station in the Kent countryside and drives us across a field full of squabbling pheasants. Deep in woodland, it’s time to begin training. Incredibly, it turns out I’ve been training for a post-apocalyptic nuclear world my whole life, without even realizing. “If you look at the statistics, in a survival situation you’ll typically have three days before you die or get caught,” Johnston explains. “Anything you can do to conserve energy will help you prolong that time. So it’s about thinking of the easiest or laziest way of doing things.” Being a corner-cutting lazy slob is actually an asset for my survival CV.

First, we learn about grab bags. Any good survivalist has one ready to go in case of emergency: They’re filled with all the basic essentials you need to survive on the run, but light enough to carry.

In the woods with Johnston.

It’s important your grab bag is unobtrusive: “It’s a bit like Fight Club,” Johnston advises. “You don’t talk about your grab bag. This is not the time to advertise you’ve got useful things on you. You want to be a gray woman, just blending into the background.” He recommends getting something cheap looking: This Ivanka Trump backpack should do the job.

Here are the things you need to put in your grab bag: Medical kit, a fire-starting kit (more on this later), a pen knife and a bigger, carbonized steel knife, food, string, a stove and a metal pot to boil water in, a compass and map, head torch, a waterproof poncho, binoculars, water purification tablets, an emergency bag, a tarpaulin, and super-strong weed to take the edge off the stress of the apocalypse (kidding, the smell would attract attention).

The contents of Johnston’s grab bag.

Counterintuitively, you don’t want to fill your grab bag with food. “You can go three weeks without food. It’s not something you really need to worry about.” Any food you take needs to be high energy: chocolate bars, nuts, and oatcakes.

“A knife is probably going to be your most useful tool,” Johnston advises. “Me, I’d prefer an axe, but I’m used to them. Don’t tie your knife to a stick like you see in movies, that’s just dumb. If you want to attack someone just sharpen the stick and use that instead.”

Johnston showing us which plants are good for kindling.

By this point I feel like I may be a little in love with Johnston, so I do what I normally do when I’m testing men I like: I bring up the topic of menstruation.

Johnston is unfazed.

“You’d probably want to put some tampons in the bag, otherwise there’s a moss called Sphagnum cymbifolium, or blood moss, which is absorbent and has antibacterial properties,” he responds matter-of-factly.

Rubbing two sticks together is an amateur move.

Once you’ve got your grab bag ready, you need to have a plan in place for when everything turns to shit. If you’re reading this to the whistle of air raid sirens with news of the Orange One’s presidency securely broadcasting from the basement of Trump Towers, you’re fucked.

“If shit happens and you think, ‘What do I do?’ It’s already too late,” Johnston warns. “Have a plan in place. Get out of built-up areas, and get away from people. That’s where the carnage will be initially. Bear in mind that lots of other people will have the same idea, so you can bet the entire transport infrastructure will be blocked up.”

Remember the scene in Deep Impact where Elijah Wood overtakes all the people who will shortly die stuck in traffic on his nifty moped and manages to get to high ground? Let that be your guide.

Preparation over, it’s time to go foraging for food. At this point I wrote down a list of herbs and plants you’re able to eat, but you don’t care about that really, do you? Basically avoid mushrooms and red berries and you’ll be okay, until you starve to death, when you won’t be.

Here’s a picture of Willow, Johnston’s adorable Labrador instead.

Willow the dog.

“There’s an acronym: protection, location, acquisition, and navigation,” Johnston explains. “Protection could be physical protection—getting away from a built up area. Or it could be protecting yourself against the elements by putting on a waterproof coat. But the most important thing is normally to get a fire lit.”

Starting and maintaining a fire will mostly stop you dying a cold, damp, miserable death. Apparently, rubbing two sticks is an amateur move best left to the bros on Naked and Afraid. The stuff in Johnston’s fire starter kit is mostly crap you have in your handbag anyway: Cotton wool, Vaseline, or anti-bacterial hand gel, lighters, and matches.

The correct way to light a match.

Like rolling the perfect joint, building fires takes practice. “I always say, ‘Don’t let the first time you try something be the time your life depends on it,'” Johnston intones seriously, wad of cotton wool in hand. “Practice in advance.” In order to build a fire, you need to collect a fuck-ton of wood (“three times as much as you think you need, then more if it’s wet”), as well as kindling (little dried out twigs, basically).

Arrange your wood in size order from smallest to biggest. Lay down a bed of medium sized twigs (It’s important to have your wood off the ground), then form a “V” shape on top with two overlapping, slightly bigger logs. Put kindling across the “V” shape. Now, get your cotton wool and smear it with Vaseline or anti-bacterial gel (they make the cotton wool more flammable.) Poke the cotton wool into the middle of the “V” shape, light it on fire and—hopefully—the flames should go up. Once the fire’s burning, pile the biggest logs on top of it.

Word of warning: My fire looked massive and only burned for about 15 minutes. You’re going to need a lot of wood.

Lighting my fire.

The main thing I learn in the course of my day with Johnston is that survival is fucking hard. That’s not intended to sound trite: Working as an individual, rather than in a unit, makes everything infinitely more time-consuming and difficult.

“If you can have your escape plan in conjunction with other people—ideally ten to 15—that’s optimal,” Johnston advises. “This lone wolf survival thing isn’t going to pay off. There’s the physical element of it—as in there’s lots to do—so having someone to share the workload with is going to help. But it’s the emotional and mental side of it as well, having that support network.”

Finally, Johnston and I make a shelter. We unpack the tarpaulin, find two sturdy trees and tie it between. Pegging the base of the tarpaulin to the ground with two bits of wood, I tape the reflective blanket to the back of the tarp (to reflect heat off the fire) and sit on an unfurled emergency bag.

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It’s okay, with the fire on my face and Willow for company—until the fire dies out and I’m cold and achy again. Clearly, life on the run is not a sustainable option, although I’d still rather take my chances in a post-apocalyptic world with a pointy stick than hole up in a bunker with senior Republicans.

I resolve to encourage all my US-based friends to vote Clinton.

Safely ensconced on the train back to London, I reflect on something Johnston said. “The more time I spend out in the woods, the more I realize that you just can’t do these things alone. You have to be part of a community.”

In a post-Brexit, Trump-dominated political landscape, it’s easy to feel like we’re all moving further apart. Isolationism, suspicion, and distrust of our neighbors are the guiding principles of our modern world order. But, as a species and as a nation, we’re only truly great when we work collectively. Like coming together on November 8 to use pen and paper—not fire and pointy stick—to defeat an orange-hued malevolent force once and for all.

The post Preparing for a Potential Trump Presidency with an Extreme Survivalist Course appeared first on VICE.

The client said, “Sounds good, bro.”

We were off to the races.

It was 2009, and a surprisingly high number of people thought society might collapse in 2012, on or around December 21, in accordance with a supposed doomsday prediction in the Mayan long count calendar. (Unsurprisingly, this was not a view held by many scholars of Mesoamerican culture.) The film 2012, which concerns itself with the same subject matter, came out the same year. This was to be the basis for our apocalypse guide, my first. I’d just quit my full-time job and wanted to try my hand at ghostwriting, and this particular job listing was right at the top of the search results on a freelancing website. It certainly sounded more entertaining than most of the other job listings.

I didn’t know anything about the client, let’s call him Dimitri, other than that he lived in Florida, and that he had about $600 for me if I could pump out 100 pages on how to survive the end of the world. The only way to make a living on writing projects at these prices is to do them quickly. In some cases, freelancers are asked to “spin” extant books—that is, to essentially copy the structure and content of those books but to make them new enough to reasonably (and legally) market them as new products. This is related to, but still distinct from the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional “new” articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)

I had no particular survival expertise, but I could regurgitate reliable reference materials as well as anyone else.

I set to work. My plan was to keep the fringe thinking to a minimum and just provide basic entry-level survival information: ways to purify and store water, what foods worked well for stockpiling, signaling and first aid techniques, methods of cooking without electricity, and so forth. I had no particular survival expertise, but I could regurgitate reliable reference materials as well as anyone else.

Ultimately, with that first guide as well as future guides, I was always asked to include more extreme material. “That’s what the audience really wants,” I was told by another client.

But you don’t generally thread it throughout the entire guide. In the case of the 2012 guide, for example, I was eventually asked to explain the Nibiru cataclysm theory but to avoid addressing it until the last chapter. That’s because when the world didn’t end in 2012—and at least part of Dimitri knew it wouldn’t—you’d be able to easily take out the section on Nibiru theory and insert a new chapter about whatever the hot new doomsday theory is, which these days appears to be the threat of an electromagnetic pulse.

*

The first book went off without a hitch. After that, it became easy enough to get additional projects. I wrote seven over the course of about six months, and my name appears on none of them.

For a while they became my primary source of income, and every single time I was hired by a company that catered to the survivalist market, not a traditional publisher. Each time, the company’s name would be listed instead of an author. There are thousands of prepping guides available on Amazon right now— 2,849 in the “Survival and Preparedness” category alone and 4,214 matches for the keyword “prepper” across categories—and only a small percentage are produced by dedicated book publishers. Companies that sell survivalist products and services produce the lion’s share, and on any given day, if you peek at freelancing sites like Upwork, you’ll see at least a couple of ghostwriting projects dedicated to survivalism being advertised.

Recent prepper guide writing gigs listed on Upwork.

While these guides may be made available through Print on Demand services, they’re just as likely to be distributed primarily as direct PDF downloads. These get passed around forums, reviewed on survivalist blog networks, and included on “USB survival libraries”—normal USB drives loaded with PDFs of survival books and reference materials. When the guides are being sold directly from the producers, you’ll often see them bundled with a few bonus guides (maybe only 15 to 25 pages) with clickbait-flavored listicle-type titles: The 25 Biggest Mistakes That Will Get You Killed When the Shit Hits the Fan. 10 Must-Have Bug-Out Pack Items. The 15 Best Survival Guns for Stockpiling. That sort of thing.

Do people buy them? Sure they do. Sales aren’t the goal, though. The idea here is to induct people into a lifestyle, because these same people sell things like wilderness survival courses, subscriptions to survival food delivery services, tools and weapons, and vitamins. Prepping is big business, with Yahoo! Finance reporting that as many as 3.7 million Americans identified themselves as “preppers” in 2013, fueling demand for a multi-billion dollar industry.

Still, there’s a grassroots aspect to it. Big corporations like Walmart and Costco may sell products like the Chef’s Banquet Food Readiness Kit, which contains 390 servings of dehydrated meals, but there are scores of online retailers aimed specifically at the prepper demographic: Doomsday Prep, Practical Preppers, Wise Company, and The Ready Store, to name only a few. Notably, the majority of online stores like these either sell their own branded guides or offer them for free.

By and large, all of my clients seemed like nice, normal people, at least via e-mail and on the phone—I never met a single one in person. But in the end, the longer we worked together, the more comfortable the clients tended to become in expressing their more extreme opinions, as if they’d been holding them in. Often, professional decorum (and with it, sometimes basic grammar and spelling) degraded as time went on.

“Honestly this 2012 stuff is addicting,” reads the last e-mail I ever received from Dimitri, sent at 4:05 AM in October 2009. “I can’t stop researching it lol. Like there are 800 concentration camps right here in the US with ovens, cofins, and all. No prisoners just guards.”

Covers from several survival and prep guides available on Amazon.

This is, of course, nonsense. But it demonstrates the uncharitable view of humanity that is integral to the worldview of many doomsday preppers, a profoundly bizarre audience to write for.

These are people who believe a thousand-year-old prophecy is about to come true. People who believe most of their loved ones will be dead within a year. People who are preparing for the possibility of killing their neighbors, who presumably will become feral and desperate. People who just might buy 3D printers and extra fancy new UV handheld water purifiers to help ride out the collapse of civilization, but who are probably more likely to spend $10 on PDF downloads of guides with names like Urban Chicken Farming After the Dollar Collapses. These are people who expect they themselves may only have a year left on this planet.

And then I find myself asking the logical next question: Do they really believe that? I don’t think that they do. But they’re hedging their bets anyway.

*

It’s easy to pigeonhole the prepping hobby—and that’s mostly what it is, a hobby—as the province of paranoid knuckle-draggers, the kind of people who proudly fly “Don’t Tread on Me” flags over their trailers. Who refuse to pay taxes as a matter of principle but complain about perceived wastes of taxpayer money; who anticipate a future race war with what seems frighteningly close to glee; who distrust the president, FEMA, the lamestream media, doctors, and almost anyone else of authority. These people exist.

While lurking on a prepper discussion thread on Tea Party Community, a social network marketed as a conservative alternative to Facebook, I once saw a rousing discussion about navigating the tricky business of armed combat while confined to a mobility scooter. In that particular hypothetical scenario, individuals were discussing the best ways to kill NATO peacekeeping forces. These are real people, and they live in your city. You’ve seen them around, buying groceries or waiting in line at the DMV—just doing regular old human activities. The only difference is that these people look at society and see the death throes of something grotesque, and they imagine that it is likely enough that they will find themselves thrown into a new mode of living, something primal and vicious and, let’s face it, potentially invigorating.

However, I submit that disaster preparedness is not inherently a fool’s game and that the kind of prepper described I just described is not the definitive picture. The Red Cross, for example, sells bug-out bags, a staple of any prepper’s gear. How crazy is it to follow the Red Cross’s preparedness advice? Not very. And so much about doomsday prepping is about just having a plan, something most people don’t have.

People do fall through the cracks, and working out ways to take your fate into your own hands is a useful exercise in self-reliance.

Catastrophes do occur with regularity—think Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Sandy, to name a few—and when they do, there’s much to be said for having your own preparations in place as opposed to relying completely on government intervention and large-scale relief efforts. People do fall through the cracks, and working out ways to take your fate into your own hands is a useful exercise in self-reliance.

But there’s a fine line between being prepared and being paranoid, and when The Shit Hits the Fan, we’ll all be better off if we’re a little more prepared and a lot less paranoid. It’s not always easy to tell the difference.

As for Dimitri? When the world didn’t end in 2012, he didn’t miss a beat: He produced more e-book guides on becoming a pick-up artist, dominating the competition in Farmville and World of Warcraft, and dealing with problem children. Now, he runs a company that trains and sells attack dogs—and they’re guaranteed to protect you, should the world go to pieces.

I won’t be writing the training manuals.

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And so it comes to pass that a tree-hugging, psychedelic rock band are signed to heavy metal stable Century Media, home to grinding godfathers Napalm Death and rabid Satanists Watain. Formed in the wilderness just beyond Tampere, the cultural capital of Finland, Hexvessel are wyrd folk, the outsiders of society, of music and of this world. Having already found an outlet for his artistic catharsis in avant garde black metal outlets in Great Britain, where he was born and raised, and again in his adopted Norwegian homeland, Mat “Kvhost” McNerney found his “kin” in the land of the midnight sun.

Once he moved to Finland, he challenged his very British sensibilities and was soon embracing the gnostic saunas and woodland rituals that paved the way for a musical project that was as in touch with the earth beneath him as the cosmos above. Weaving English folk, lilting Americana, and mushroom-induced psychedelia, Hexvessel are The Doors misplaced and found wandering the vast forests of Finland. Similarly to Sabbath Assembly—perhaps one of their foremost contemporaries—Hexvessel have taken a path away from creating pure ritual music, and added more rock to their role as high priests and priestesses of the terra firma temple. However, with McNerney also holding court in his Sony-signed, 80s-excess-tinged gothic pop combo Grave Pleasures (formerly known as Beastmilk), Hexvessel has become its antithesis—a complete lack of arrogance and rock star bravado. Hexvessel is the id to Grave Pleasure’s ego.

Noisey met with McNerney as he returned from spending Christmas in England with his wife and Hevessel collaborator, Marja Konttinen, and the couple’s newborn son. They live in the middle of nowhere in a house he has painstakingly renovated, where he and Marja grow their own food and have learned the skills of foraging and woodland survival, able to cut themselves off completely from the stresses of modern life. Knowing the difference between which mushrooms go nicely on a slice of toast and which go nice as part of a moonlight adventure with friends or making a pot roast from produce from your own garden is hardly sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, is it?

McNerney disagrees. “That’s why so many idolized Lemmy,” he says, himself an obvious admirer of the Born To Lose, Live To Win legend. Motörhead’s MO is at the very heart of Grave Pleasures’ DNA, after all. “He really did live it, against all the odds. He never gave up. He died in front of his favourite pinball machine. But then I do think it’s sad, in a way. It’s sad thing to die with your manager.”

As he prepares for Hexvessel’s upcoming new album, When We Are Death(out January 29 on Century Media), and describes himself as a father, a husband and a nature mystic before a musician, is rock’n’roll a faded dream for Mat McNerney?

Noisey: It seems apt in the wake of Lemmy’s passing to talk about how rock’n’roll is defined by his lifestyle. With raising a child, growing your own vegetables and playing in a “forest folk” band, have you put your days of rock’n’roll exploits behind you?
McNerney: [laughs]It’s really hard because there’s so many sides to doing a band. You’re not doing it all the time these days, I think that’s the difference with how it used to be and how it is now. A band was a band, they’d be hanging out together, living in a shared flat, it’s so different now. You have people who have this life, even if you’re doing a band full-time, most people are doing a band as a side thing and then their life at home with their family is their main thing. So, how do you be “rock’n’roll”? What is rock’n’roll anymore? It’s weird.

You started off as the vocalist for UK-based death metal band Vomitorium in 1994, and then fronted late-’90s black thrash band, Scythe before forming avant black metal project . Your love of Dødheimsgard's bonkers black metal saw you do a Tim "Ripper" Owens when you became their vocalist in 2005, putting you in the same orbit as extreme metal musicians you'd admired as a teenager like Fenriz, Vicotnik and Czral. Were those days perhaps the height of your rock'n'roll excess?
I think that was me trying to be rock’n’roll. I tried really hard at one point, but unless you’re gonna go all the way… I don’t think I’ve ever been that. I’m quite comfortable being who I am and I think within that you can get to some kind of rock’n’roll place just by being honest. I sat down for the first time this Christmas and told my parents what being on tour was like, and I realized I had never done that before. I’d never told my parents what happens when you’re in a band, and they were in hysterics. My mum was crying with laughter at people not being able to walk into the toilet on the tour bus—having to stand at the door and pee at a certain angle so it would land in the toilet because the toilet is an inch of urine spilling out of it. They didn’t realize that was what it was like even for a band like us, who are playing music that they can actually listen to these days.

It’s not like were going to be suddenly able to afford to live how we would like to, you know. We don’t drive around with a forest in our tour bus. It’s always going to be rock’n’roll in some way and you have to embrace it. You can’t craft your own world, all bands who go on the road experience the same shit.

You’re also in Grave Pleasures, who are about to go on tour with your labelmates Tribulation and Vampire—is that where you can live out your rock’n’roll fantasies in a way you can’t with Hexvessel?
It’s really similar to Hexvessel as far as the lifestyle’s concerned with the rock and the rolling, but as far as being on stage, I think what Grave Pleasures does appeals to that more classic sense of what rock’n’roll is. In Hexvessel, it’s more about a performance and getting into the atmosphere. It’s a different agenda as far as what were doing with the music conceptually.

But because the Hexvessel guys are from a more isolated place in Finland there’s a little bit more “guys abroad'” vibe going on, because they don’t get on the road that much, and the Grave Pleasures guys are much tour-ready. They know what to do on a tour, whereas the Hexvessel guys, every time we tour, it’s like their first time they’ve toured in their lives. They’re a little bit off the wall, which is maybe not what you’d expect from listening to our music but our violin player is always getting naked and playing his violin while sitting on people. It’s very funny.

Oh, the Finns; they love being naked as much as they love being absolutely drunk out of their minds. How does a nice English boy like you cope?
They love it. And there’s nothing like touring with an English band where those cultures really clash, because English people don’t like being naked and can’t stand it if other people are naked around them. It’s like, “Oh my god, it’s so awkward, where do I look?'” That’s part of what makes it so funny, I think.

I had a trial by fire when I moved here as the first party, literally the first weekend I was here, everyone was going to the sauna. It was all my wife’s friends, mixed boys and girls, and I was like, “Oh fuck, what am I gonna do? How am I going to cope with this?” It’s just a bit odd, but that thing is a good microcosm of what it’s like on tour with Finns. We’re constantly looking at things from a different angle. It’s probably why we’re such an anomaly in a good way, Hexvessel doesn’t really fit into any mold. It’s probably largely due to the fact that everything we’re approaching musically is a culture clash in itself.

Getting your kit off is perhaps the ultimate rock’n’roll experience—you have these photos doing the rounds of Lemmy, arms around some topless models, and that is what’s viewed as rock’n’roll, but it’s a very sexualized kind of rock’n’roll. The Finns lietrally strip that sexuality away. Nudity is natural and therefore the ultimate rebellion, do you think?
Yes. One of the first things I heard when I met my wife was about these guys that do gnostic saunas, getting together in the evening to practise occult magick while having a sauna and getting together to jam. For me, that was such a taboo that it became occult in the sense that it’s something we just don’t know about in England and I found it so rebellious in a way, this idea you would do that with your friends.

For some reason, getting naked with strangers isn’t half as embarrassing as getting naked with people you know. The idea of going to school and getting naked is terrible, but when you think about the Finnish people, they’ve been naked with their school teacher, and that’s weird. In England that would be an immediate arrest. It’s a different way of looking at it, and when you ask what rock’n’roll is— a band that drink a load of Jack Daniels and pass out and puke or whatever their imagination of rock’n’roll is, if they can’t get naked together, then I would say they’re not really rock’n’roll.

So, what do you think the ultimate rock’n’roll is?
I’m really into survivalism, I follow all the prepping shows and I had a conversation with some friends recently and they asked, “Well, where is all this leading to? Are you going to hide out in a cabin with a bunch of machine guns?” No, but I wouldn’t let these situations fuck with me. I’m not going to allow a power cut to mean that I’m not going to survive. I’m a die-hard survivor and for me, that feels very rock’n’roll, but for them it’s not rock’n’roll because you can’t live the cliche lifestyle. You can’t go to a bar and listen to Slayer on a jukebox, because the world has come to an end. I’m more into the idea of saying, “Fuck that,” and let’s go into the forest and make our own way of living. I think that’s the ultimate way of rebelling against society. It always more my way, like when I joined the Scouts when I was a kid. That was the place I got into heavy metal, so for me, outdoor living and rock’n’roll are fused because it was freedom.

And that is where Darkthrone helped when I got into black metal because they were always championing the forest. They had forest pictures on their album covers, and you meet Fenriz and he just wants to go on a forest walk, you know. I thought that was so cool, way cooler that the Dimmu Borgir guys who were just drinking beer and had no interest in the nature around Oslo. I don’t see it as a contrary lifestyle, I see it as part and parcel of the whole feeling, whatever that feeling is. People start to describe that feeling they get from Hexvessel in exactly the same terms as I do when I’m describing the black metal feeling. People say black metal has to be Satanic or it’s not black metal, but for me, the black metal feeling doesn’t come without there being some pine trees.

HEXVESSEL live:

10.26 Leipzig – UT Connewitz * – https://www.facebook.com/events/410626352478712

10.27 Dortmund – FZW (Leafmeal Festival) – https://www.facebook.com/leafmealfestival –

10.29 Berlin – Urban Spree ** – https://www.facebook.com/events/153726504966780 –

* with UR

** with (DOLCH)

Louise Brown is dreaming of saunas on Twitter.

The post Hexvessel’s Mat McNerney Talks Lemmy, Survivalism, and Getting Naked for Rock’n’Roll appeared first on VICE.

Among a roster of 30 or so international artists who teamed up to critically and creatively analyze and discuss contemporary questions, Los Angeles-based new media artist Sterling Crispin dug in and came up with N.A.N.O. , B.I.O. , I.N.F.O. , C.O.G.N.O., a brand new four-part installation that not only literally catches the eye but fits perfectly within the exhibition’s themes. “Sterling’s new work for Now? Now! makes visible, in a very physical and quite eerie way, the various forces that lie in the background of the present,” Lauren A. Wright, Artistic Director and Curator of the Biennial of the Americas tells The Creators Project. “His little army embodies the forces that are ready, perhaps, to undermine the facade of stability that I think we all secretly know might be cracking.”

The “army” she’s referring to is comprised of sci-fi-inspired totemic sculptures made up of various items including an aluminum server rack, a Raspberry device, ethernet cables, emergency food rations, and even shares in publicly traded companies. They’re full-on survivalist sculptures.

While living in California, Crispin witnessed the contradictory and illogical narratives regarding vital questions about the future of mankind. “Farms are drying up, and swimming pools are full. Meanwhile, startups and tech giants see a bright future of technology fueled liberation, driverless cars, AI, robotics—transcendental technology,” Crispin explains to The Creators Project. “Greenpeace and Google seem to have mutually exclusive predictions of the future, and I’m on the middle path.”

Thus, Crispin’s work confronts viewers with a subtle, speculative fiction survival-kit that anticipates a chaotic and unstable future. “An apocalypse, a technological Singularity, a collapse, a rebirth. Something will happen. When a virus grows, either its host fights it back, or the host and the virus reach an equilibrium, or the host dies,” Crispin says. “I imagine the future to be some middle path between the Peak Oil collapse and Kurzweil’s Singularity—with a healthy dose of extreme global warming, endless cyber warfare, governmental plutocracy, revolution, and lots and lots of artificial intelligence and autonomous robots.” 

Thankfully, with a subtle nod to his sculptures, Crispin was kind enough to give us a secret survival trick: “If you’re really worried about survival, I would check out Lifesaver’s ‘Life Straw‘ for $20. You can turn dirty water into drinkable water for two years with a device that fits in your pocket,” he says. “Also, stop eating beef. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to make 1 lb of beef. We need to tread lightly on earth if we are to survive,” he concludes.

N.A.N.O. , B.I.O. , I.N.F.O. , C.O.G.N.O. and Now? Now! will be on view in Denver until August 30. Now? NOW! is curated by Lauren A. Wright, Artistic Director and Curator, Biennial of the Americas, with Anya Pantuyeva, Curatorial Assistant. Click here for more info. 

Credits:

N.A.N.O. , B.I.O. , I.N.F.O. , C.O.G.N.O.

Aluminum Server Rack, Cat 6 Ethernet Cables, Zip Ties, Laser Cut Acrylic, Raspberry Pi MicroComputer and Keyboard, Emergency Food Rations, Lifesaver Jerry Can with 2 Year Nanoscale Water Filter, 100 Shares of Publicly Traded Companies ( N.A.N.O.: Altair Nanotech Inc., B.I.O.: Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc, I.N.F.O.: RIT Technologies LTD, C.O.G.N.O.: Intellect Neurosciences Inc). 40 x 98 x 25 in each. 2015.

Related:

Facial Recognition Sees You as a Pattern, Not a Person

Sterling Crispin Weaves Virtual Algorithmic Landscapes

Artist Dances With Drone And Turns The Interaction Into A 3D Printed Sculpture

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