MatraK AttaKK 

Anarchacrustcore

Liege, Belgium

1- Can you give bio of your band ?BIOGRAPHY:

MatraK AttaKK 2015 - present. We are an anarchocrust/grind band based in liège, belgium.  We spread anarcha feminism, antipsychiatry, antispeciesm and everything concerning anarchy and queer culture.

We squat in liège, but none of us is from here, nobody is even from belgium. We belong to the DIY scene. The band splitted actually in begin february 2017 and me, Cristina (vocals), reformed it in Liege in one mounth, as we had a tour planned in April. After we made fully new songs but we kept the nale as we made a lot of new friends on this april tour.

We released 3 vinyl in 2019 and we played and toured in Scandinavia, Finland, Baltic countries, central and southern Europe, Switzerland, Balkans, and as our lives means touring, we lost more than 30 shows due to corona virus already, as we had to come back from our Spain and Portugal, and we lost a Czec Republic tour as well :(

We have a distro supporting benefits that we find necessary (mainly is 'Punks For Rojava, but I don't want you to have problems writing about this in Turkey, so I understand if you will skip this specification :) ) our distro works good with the principle of free contribution or low and non-commercial prices. We print our tshirts and gadget ourselfs as we can do DIY screen printing. Only the vinyls are printed elsewhere :D

2- How did you find your band's name ?

MatraK (really written 'matraque') is a french word for police baton and of course AttaKK means Attack, so it's a name denouncing police violence. It's a ex member thinking about this name, we kept is 

3- What are your favourite bands? Did you influenced from any of them?

We have different backgrounds, some of us don't really have favourite bands. 

Our gitarist likes more anarcho punk and crust, me I like dbeat/crust/punk with interesting singers, but my favourite band all times are The Plasmatics. Our drummer likes grind core and power violence...so we don't really took influence from what we like, except some unconscious influences for sure! :)

ZINES : I make our own ZINE called simply 'MatraK AttaKK', I am at the 5th issue. In our distro we also reproduce other people's fanzines, we like to read a lot about all different kind of feminism, anarchism, ecology, prisoners all over the world, exploited minorities, indigenous people rights. We'd like to read musical fanzines too, but there are not so many lately about crust/anarchopunk!

DEMOS :

Cristina : We are listening now to a japanese release of many years ago, the band was Soothe and there was the singer of Acute that I really loved!

Py likes 'fuckfinger demo' and A.P. likes 

BANDS : A.P. 'the old school stuff as old school Johnny Foxter, Antiproduct Nausea Aus Rotten Behind Enemy Lines, Assuck and Apolitical and Last Days of Humanity especially th album of 2006.

Cristina : The Plasmatics, Lost World, Bathory, Motorhead (but i dont like all the Motorhead clone bands) Acute, Patti Smith, 

PY : 80s and 90s bands on CRASS records, MORTARHATE records, and mostly anarcho/peace punk bands, and more stenchcore stuff, Deviated Instinct, Skaven, ... 

FILMS :

ahah we are watching to American horror story serie especially now that we are confined home and loving it! I liked Persepolis, One flew over the cockoos nest, Thelma and Louise, new cinema Paradiso, The color Violet, a lot of non holliwood and not famous movies I enjoyed..

Generally dark commedies, dystopian movies, mindfuck movies!

BOOKS :

Cristina : I liked Dean Koontz 'one door away from heaven' , 'the Kite runner', 1984 and the animal factory, 'fear of flying' Erica Jong, Roald Dahl's Matilda, 'va dove ti porta il cuore' (follow your heart) Susanna Tamaro, All the 'Little women' books, 'the color violet', Haruki Murakami's Norwegian wood, a lot of Banana Yoshimoto's books..

PY (authors) : Orwell, Poppy Z Brite, David Vann and a lot of Dystopian books, and old gothic books.

4- What are your releases ? What do you things that you are sad in your records ?(demo-cd-lp-ep…)

RELEASES : 

2015 - 2018 demos

2018 split tape with Ascidie

2019 split LP with Pakt, split EP with Grenzlinie, split LP with Discordance

If you mean what we don't like about, I guess the demo has a shitty sound as we recorded it terribly, but noise freaks really like it :D 

the CD's are quite ok, they are the same of the LPs. So about the LPs has we record, mix and master it ourselves with PC programmes it's quite ok for not professionals, we don't have good sound for nowdays expectations, but we are not sad about it : years ago people had worse sound and nobody was complaining, now everybody became a perfect-and-all-the-same- sound lover in the DIY scene...mixing ourselves is like a statement untill now.

Our vinyls came out on 10+ labels doing a coproduction together and we reall ylove this DIY way to release stuff : a label releasing one band means that the label is big and has to be rich to do it..after they impose their price to the band, also, the distributon is better with a coproduction. Like this we can say we are everywhere!

5- What about your lyrics ?

My lyrics talk about injustices, killing of : freedom, animals, populations and minorities, about the 'white male privilege', about white people privileges in general, shitty fascism and racism, women rights, women revendications, antipsychiatry...about the rich eating the poor, anarchist topics in general but a lot of queer inclusive feminist touch :) they are mostly in english but I am introducing more and more italian lyrics and there's one in dutch as it was against fascist flemish people in belgium.

6- Can you give info about your closest friends , bands and the scene in your country ?

Mhh Belgium has way too many bands! Sure check Travolta (power violence) and Arrogänt (dbeat): there's Nico from Loner cult records in them, he used to play in King terror as a bass player and now he sings. Rene Biname, anarco punk since the 80s, Crete et Paquerette and Mammout, electropunk/electro crust queercore. One ex drummer of MatraK AttaKK, has some bands, one of them is Naked Ape, grind core and there's KxDxG from Namur, mince core and Ulrikes Dream, anarchopunk from Leuven.All the people mentioned are active people in the DIY scene of belgium helping touring bands and supporting bands around!

We have also another project : noisy dbeat/anarchopunk called Ortika (ortika.bandcamp.com) where we switch some instruments and there's 2 singer and the bass player of Ulrikes Dream.

7- Do you want to explain something with you music ?

I try to explain stuff I lived and or studies, it's not really easy with lyrics.. and a lot of people stop to read lyrics of bands. So it's always a risk that who reads my lyrics already knows what I am talking about. Surely I am trying to move or provoke some people, as it's easy to talk about capitalism, but everybody choose whose cause is to support and which one is not...some guys are totally 'manarchists', some people dont like antipsychiatry but they like anticapitalism..I try to talk about inconsistency of humans and even if I am aware we all have, I try to talk about the less discussed in people of western europe, for example.

8- Can you say the things you mostly hate in the world ?

Patriarchy. Capitalism, Racism, Domination/Submission, Populism, Autorithy... :)

9- Do you use alcohol and drugs 

We drink from time to time, but we don't make it become an addiction nor a pride. About drugs we don't really dig them. But what's a drug? we have nothing against drugs alone, it's how they are produced and who dies for it that matters. 2 of us dont smoke tabac, I think they are one of the worst drug ever, I used to smoke untill 1 year ago and really glad it's finished.

10- What do you know about TURKEY ?

That you have great landscapes and food, but not so much freedom. Your president is a dictator and kills minorities and Isis is even in your government. That a lot of your protestors are killed and that a lot of information is hidden to you.

I think this happens in every country, but in some is so damn clear.

Still you have a lot of corageous men and women that tried to spread other values and in the 80s there was some rising of anarchist propaganda with fanzines.

We heard that the punk/metal scene is nice and loads of people goes to shows tough. Cristina : I ever met a turkish artist in Gent that was imprisoned in the 90s as his art was considered anarchist so he flee to belgium, indeed he told me about a lot of injustices happened to him and his homosexual and or women friends. So I guess living there ain't easy.

11- What about your future plans and releases ?

After 2 tours canceled due to covid, we hope our shows in May and our UK tour in beginning june will be saved! We want to remake our spanish/portuguese tour in october/november, we wait for more news about the pandemic to re-book it!

in september we planned Poland/Belarus tour (Belarus is just 1 date at the border, or we would need a visa) and we hope next year to do Japan/Indonesia and Philippines as well as we learned that we waited too long to go out of europe. We dont like touring with planes tough, it's really unethical and antiecological, but thats why we arrived in Greece with a car, but going to East Asia is pity enough not possible without flying.

LINKS:

https://matrakattakkcrust.bandcamp.com/

https://matrakattakk.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/MatraKAttaKK/