The Atlanta Sedition Orchestra is one of the southeast's only radical marching bands. The group was founded in late 2007 by Phil Andrews and Rebecca Miriam with the goal to "serve radical and progressive organizations by providing a booty-shaking soundtrack." The band ranges from 15 to 20 members at a given time, and has played at a variety of protests and benefits since its inception. They're constantly recruiting new members, regardless of musical ability.

The group is playing Sopo Bicycle Cooperative's annual Broken Hearts and Bicycle Parts benfit 06 March at Lenny's Bar. In the meantime, read the interview by Pine correspondent Ben Grad, who recently spoke with Phil (trombone) and Rebecca (sousaphone) about terrible band music, the trials of Southern activism and being kicked out of the Hilton.

Ben Grad/Pine Magazine: You’ve both been involved with radical marching bands for a while, right?

Phil Andrews/Atlanta Sedition Orchestra: Yeah - interestingly enough, we met because of a radical marching band. We got involved in [the Rude Mechanical Orchestra] in New York about four years ago. They had formed to protest the Republican national convention in New York, so we met a few months after that happened, when they were going down to DC to protest Bush’s inauguration.

Rebecca Miriam/Atlanta Sedition Orchestra:I was in a different radical marching band before that, The Infernal Noise Brigade, which formed in Seattle in 1999 to protest the WTO.

BG: That must have been one of the first radical marching bands.

Both:One of the originals.

RM:A seminal band in the radical world.

BG: What was it like, leaving the Rude Mechanical Orchestra in New York to come here and start a band?

PA: When we first started talking about Atlanta, we knew there wasn’t a band like this. There are weird brass bands all over the place, like the Seed and Feed [based out of Atlanta’s Little Five Points], or the Hungry Marching Band in New York, but I think it’s fair to say that these bands didn’t start out for political reasons.

One of the members of Rude Mechanical Orchestra had come down here and met with Seed and Feed, and told us that they were a great group, but not exactly a radical marching band. So, when we got down there the first thing I did was start going to their practices – they’re explicitly non-political, they won’t do anything like a protest, even if they all agree on an issue. So I talked with a lot of their members, and I set out to start a more politically focused band. To start, I just wrote an email – a manifesto – and sent it out there.

BG: What do you mean when you say “sent it out there?”

PA: I joined every listserv I could. I joined queer-progressive Atlanta, I joined the anarchist group, I joined the activist group, and I met a few people at SOPO. We put up fliers in a bunch of spaces, and sent this email around. We got a good response and started having practices in our living room - sometimes we get five people, sometimes we’d get six or seven or eight. Rebecca was learning the sousaphone at the time, and we didn’t have drums so we just used an upside-down trashcan.

BG: It sounds like you didn’t have much trouble getting people to join the ASO (Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which has a “core” group that ranges between 15 and 20 performers).

PA: I was surprised. I think there’s a real need for this. There are a lot of these radical marching bands in the Northeast and the Northwest, and there’s a few scattered around the Midwest. In the South, there’s a really fantastic band out of Greensboro called Cakalak Thunder doing great work.

RM: They’re a samba band – fantastic.

PA: People here really needed this. It’s almost like people were sitting around with their instruments, just waiting. They wanted to play music that was interesting, play with a non-traditional band.

BG: How would you describe the standard style for radical marching bands?

RM: I don’t know if there’s a mainstream for radical marching bands, but I’d say there’s definitely a lot of influence from Balkan brass bands. The Balkan influence started coming over in ’88, ’89.

PA: There was a lot of amazing music being made behind the iron curtain – it was almost like incubation – really amazing brass music that was influenced by gypsy music, with more Eastern scales… Serbian influenced, Turkish influenced… pretty much all the Balkans.

RM: These people were really superstars, but the rest of the world hadn’t heard of them until the Eastern Bloc collapsed. You’ll even hear it in more mainstream groups now, like Beirut.

But I think you’ll see street bands and radical marching bands drawing on musical cultures from all over the world. I don’t think it’s limited at all. There’s a great culture of resistance from Brazil, Calypso was resistance music at its inception. And New Orleans is the absolute center of brass band music in the US.

Most people’s idea of a marching band is John Phillip Sousa marches and rearrangements of terrible pop songs, and the things we play are entirely different.

BG: What sort of musical backgrounds did you both have when you started playing in radical bands?

PA: I had a terrible time in my high school marching band. There was this one guy, and he controlled everything. High school marching bands are as close to fascism as you can get. Literally, you can’t deviate one step outside the program. I just couldn’t handle it anymore, I quit. By that time I’d also learned to hate the trombone, so I picked up the guitar, joined a punk band – I was in a lot of punk/metal/thrash metal bands. 8 years later I hadn’t touched my trombone at all, and then I saw the Rude Mechanical Orchestra once, the last day of the Republican National Convention, just after they’d all gotten out of jail. This girl walked by me just blasting on the trombone, and I thought, “you know what, I could do that.” It was exactly what I was looking for. I never wanted to be in a rock band again, it just seemed so lame.

RM: That’s the story of a lot of people, word for word, “oh I played in high school, I dropped out, then I saw this band and I called my mom for my clarinet/saxophone/trumpet/whatever it is.

PA: Sometimes I even say we’re looking for people who quit their high school marching bands out of disgust and joined a punk band.

BG: You started performing for the public in the fall of 2007, right?

PA: I think our first official show was with Prevention Justice [a group which protested an abstinence focused AIDS conference]. We were playing on the escalator in the Hilton downtown.

BG: Wow, that’s great.

PA: Security showed up immediately, and they said, “Stop playing those drums.” At that point we weren’t even playing music; we were just banging our instruments, making noise. It was a good trial by fire – the next time we marched with a black lesbian group and Youth Pride during the MLK protest. Then the next protest we played, we were part of a car caravan, playing on the back of a flatbed truck. It was really strange for Rebecca and I, because we were coming from New York, where everything’s either on foot or by bicycle.

BG: What other differences have you noticed between the New York and Atlanta activist scenes?

RM: Not as many activists here.

PA: And the activists are less radical.

BG: What’s less radical?

PA: In two ways; culturally, I think you’d say that Atlanta activists are more mainstream in their culture and their personal lives. Second, in Atlanta, you’re fighting for progress, but you’re mostly fighting to stop the really nasty republicans in the state house from doing worse things to you. Like the gay movement here – the statewide legislative agenda is to prevent the passage of anti-adoption laws targeting gay couples. In New York, they’re pushing for gay marriage.

BG: So in the South, in Georgia, we haven’t even gotten as far as step one.

PA: Well, everything is steps; on every agenda you could name, gay rights, defense attorneys for death penalty people, immigrant rights, women’s’ rights.

RM: Yeah, the pro-choice movement, their last victory was tabling a bill that declared that life began at conception.

BG: And the movement in New York’s made a lot more progress in women’s’ rights?

PA: Basically, the movement here is either 10 to 15 years behind on those issues, or we’re entirely on the defense.

BG: Where would you say the Atlanta Sedition Orchestra falls, politically?

PA: To the far left.

RM: [laughing] Are we extremists? Are we the crazy fringe?

PA: We’ll support as far left as Atlanta will let us go. We have yet to find an event that’s too extreme. So far, we’ve been with a bicycle co-op, some queer groups, the Grandmothers for Peace who got arrested recently.

There’s certainly a range of politics within the band. You’re not going to find any radical marching band who’s like, “we’re a Trotskyite group,” or “We’re anarcho-socialists,” you can’t really pin it down. We’re just generally on the left of things.

BG: Is there much discussion of social issues within the ASO, or is it more like: “these people suck, let’s play music at them?

RM: Actually, my experienced in both bands is that there’s no discussion of the politics of the events. The event is proposed, and people say if they can make it or not. That’s pretty much it.

PA: If you have a group like this, you have a shared goal by default. I mean, we’re all starting from a certain understanding. We’re all on board with this mission.