Eric Wood From Man Is The Bastard

It’s hard to imagine how a band making songs played at either hyper or glacial speeds (never midtempo) with two basses and song titles like “Screwdriver in the Urethra of Thomas Lenz,” all played through speakers made out of salvaged junk, ever failed to be anything other than huge in the early 1990s. What else was everyone listening to? Pearl Jam? Technotronic? Fuck.

Eric Wood’s work in a bunch of bands from Pillsbury Hardcore and Pissed Happy Children through to Man Is the Bastard and Bastard Noise helped define hardcore punk music’s most extreme shapeshift over the last, say, 15 years. The West Coast-centric powerviolence movement changed everything, and Wood was a big part of it.

Backed by the totally never-heard-that-anywhere-before weird noises spilling out of Henry Barnes’s homemade speakers, Bastard Noise projects always stood apart from their contemporaries. With a brutally simple aesthetic and politicized sloganeering, Wood’s projects maintained a tireless work ethic that allowed them to stride along for years while their contemporaries gurgled and quit. Like Crass before them, Eric’s bands offered a self-sustaining alternative to a modern world gone to shit. Maybe in 50 years time in an alternate dimension they will be granted their dues. For now they can remain the most important band that way too many people have never heard.

Vice: There is a constant sense of intense brutality in everything that you have done. Why so angry?

Eric Wood:

How’d you end up playing in Neanderthal with Matt Domino from Infest?

Is it true that you guys actually coined the term “powerviolence”?

At the time was there a sense of the whole thing becoming a big movement?

The most obvious thing that set Man Is the Bastard apart from your supposed contemporaries was simply not sounding like any of them.

How did you meet Henry?

What was the first thing you heard through the boxes?

How did you come up with the stark imagery that gave the Bastard Noise projects such a distinct identity?

Your discography is like the ultimate collector’s nightmare. What inspired that work ethic and level of output?

and

through

Your projects have consistently been preoccupied with man being the vilest, most fucked-up animal on the planet.

You had a lot of similarly named projects running simultaneously. Were you just trying to confuse people?

Why did Man Is the Bastard quit?

What’s the scoop?

No Man’s Slave

So Man Is the Bastard has been born again through the Bastard Noise?

Hail!

Now that you've caught up with Eric, how about watching this episode of Practice Space with fellow Man Is the Bastard veteran Henry Barnes?