In 2007, the good become superior and the bad become worse. The enlightened continue on their path to understanding and contentment. Take a stand, speak your mind during this Pig year."
The theme for Year of the Pig is exploitation and violence against women, using prostitution as a main symbol. We recorded this while the Robert Pickton trial is picking up here in Canada - Pickton is a farmer from British Columbia who has been charged with the murder of 26 prostitutes from one of the poorest districts in Canada. We feel that violence against women, represented here by the issue of prostitutes rights in particular, is an issue that is still taboo, and rights for sex workers is an issue that people are still afraid to look at head on, and deal with in a meaningfull way. Sexism exists everywhere and as we've seen in the Pickton case, it can far too easily manifest as abuse, rape and murder shut out from the public eye. This violence is more easily accomodated when working prostitutes aren't protected by the full scope of the law in their workplaces, and when their role exists outside of the purview of our collective morality. In this way, we also view violence against prostitutes as symtomatic of our society's tendency to try and launder our collective guilt and shame through a third party, in this case prostitutes. They exist as a special part of our culture where we can lash out at them, of our own shame and guilt with sexual issues of shame and possesion, and blame and exploit them, instead of dealing with those issues ourselves. Sexism and violence agaisnt women exist, and as long as there are classes of society that we keep beneath our collective moral societal obligations, those classes will bear the full brunt of the hatred and fear we can dish out. We also with to state that "Year of the Pig" is not the attempt to condemn Robert Pickton, or any other individual specifically for any specific crime - the scope of these issues are broader than isolated incidents. The habitual compartmentalization of these sorts of crimes is part of the problem - we wish to state that sexism and violence persist not simply due to the actions of a few deviant criminals, but because as a whole we refuse to properly deal with these issues.
We wrote "Year of the Pig" according to the spacial and spiritual rules laid out in the Chinese Zodiac. We do this once a year – last year was "Year of the God", next year is "Year of the Rat". It is a special process we only bring out for these yearly rousing recording sessions. It is a 60 year cycle, so accordingly there will be 60 of these 12"'s, by us or by the bands we pass it down to. The combination element for this year was gold, so (as usual), we tried to surround ourselves with as much gold as possible in the studio – a few people came up who had fronts in their mouths, and we all had to borrow our parents jewelry. The lights from the studio were cascading off all the pieces in the room. The Heaven element for this year was fire, so we also managed to put up a huge fire in the middle of the floor. We did the drum tracks only with the fire, because we had to move the set-up onto the roof of the building. For us recording is all about balance basically – we usually try now to have certain people come in to lay down the area in a way we don't really understand – we just sit there and eat handfuls of salvia while these dowsers come in and point to what instruments are ready, you've got these geosophists pointing us in certain directions, sigils are going up all over the place, it can get pretty real in the year of the fourth trine.
