Discussed: Plastics, idling, bagpipes, showers, coyotes, chemicals, Christ, death, near death, Christian Death, Enid Snarb, Man is the Bastard, time, dreams, baptism, bombs, Steve Mccay, sepsis, oscillators, LAFMS, Tesla, Hammond, clocks, etc.
Henry Barnes is a traditionalist and innovator who lives outside of time and thinks on a cosmic scale. His contributions to noise and experimental underground music cannot be overstated.
Barnes joined the legendary 90s power violence band Man Is The Bastard early on. Bastard Noise was formed soon after as an avenue for the band to explore its more experimental sounds and to showcase Henry’s hand-built amps, oscillators and guitars. He’s been playing as Amps For Christ, both solo and with various collaborators, for decades.
AFC’s 1999 release Circuits is a good intro to his work. Like most AFC releases, it has the quality of a lost artifact. It’s easy to imagine this record materializing from some uncontained time continuum, wormholing its way to Earth. It’s a buzzing mutant amalgamation of traditional folk music, bastardized hardcore, and avant-garde sludge circuitry.
We caught Barnes after his set at the Wonder Valley Experimental Music Festival, outside of Twenty Nine Palms, CA. It was a good collection of freaks in the desert and the first noise fest we attended since the pandemic. We lurked anonymously in the familiarity and felt deeply relieved.
A far corner of the outdoor stage was taken up by Barnes’ handmade gear: classic AFC amps, hanging percussion, a mysterious tall spinning cylinder, and a literal axe. Barnes jumped onstage with urgency, his long white beard blown around by the desert wind. He read a poem over colliding arpeggiating notes and piercing frequencies that blasted out of his amps. The performance was about seven minutes long. As fans of short sets, it was a welcomed torrent.
This interview has been condensed from an expansive 4 hour conversation in Barnes’ minivan after the fest. It ended with Henry whispering that all noise is music and calling our attention to the distant coyotes and restless ambience of the pre-dawn desert.
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[Henry describes his own performance earlier that night]
Just boom, and it’s done! You don’t need any more. Everyone’s mouths are open. It’s just, Yes, OK, that was it.
I made the words up today while I was driving, and it made me feel good. There’s all these cars from LA backed up out here, so I came up with that line, “There’s a traffic jam to nowhere.” And then, for some reason, I was thinking about plastic. I’ve done plastic themes before. But, like, plastic chains–you’re caught up in these plastic chains. You got plastic chains on your feet. You’re hogtied.
It’s in our blood. Microplastics.
Yeah, plastic chains. Then I went to the Ukraine war, because I wanted to say something that’s right fucking now, that’s happening right now. We have this whole thing going on, and it’s all about money. That’s why I said, “It’s war money. All money is war money.” Because that’s basically what backs up the dollar, and people don’t realize it’s the military. The military is what makes the dollar worth anything. It’s always been that way. What backs up money is war. Period. I had to say it, so it came out.
Totally. We actually just listened to a talk on the history of debt on the drive down. It was David Graeber. He talked about how the minting of coins always coincided with wars, standing armies, and empire. We appreciated your set, too, because we’re Ukrainian. Our grandfather spoke the language and had a strong connection to the culture. When he was dying he was singing old Ukrainian lullabies to himself. Sadly, we’ve never made it there.
So you appreciated the fact that I didn’t say, “Oh, I love Vladimir Putin. He’s so great for doing this shit.” Never. None of that crap. You didn’t get any of that from me, thank you. And you’re not going to! I said he was a dog! We let him bark. And then he jumped over the fence, and we pulled his collar, and now we’re hoping for the dog catcher. That was the last part of the lyrics; they were about Putin. He was the dog that jumped over the fence, we let him bark and then we pulled his collar. Fucking ‘a. It’s pretty heavy shit.
I was at the Post Office in Claremont and there was this long red-haired kid who looked very hip. I said, “I’m glad the PO is still going. I’m against privatizing this shit. Fuck that.” He was all like, yay, you know—very left. And then we’re still in this long line, so I say, “God, the state of Ukraine is just terrible. He really shouldn’t have gone in there and started a war. But, you know, when Gorbachev and Reagan made the deal they told them NATO wouldn’t expand any further East.” He fucking turned away from me and wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I said it kind of casually, just acknowledging the truce, the agreement that they would give up Eastern Germany if we didn’t expand NATO. But they have no power, you know? Russia’s got nothing.
How far is Claremont from here?
About two and a half hours on the freeway. It’s about 170 miles. Claremont is its own thing, too, because of the way the mountains are. It’s weird... you have the San Bernardino Mountains to our west now, then you have the San Gabriel Mountains, which are one of the very few transverse ranges in the world, above LA and Claremont.
What’s the massive one when you’re coming here from Palm Springs?
That’s San Jacinto. My sister calls it “Jack!” The biggest one is San Gorgonio just to the north. My grandfather has the fastest record for climbing it.
We’ve noticed things with Scottish names out here. It’s curious.
Why Aberdeen Road and all this Scottish shit? I’m not exactly sure why that is. My great grandmother was Scottish. She came here with her father when she was five. They were early pioneers in this region. There must have been other Scotts, because there are so many names like that. My mother has a lot of lowland Scottish in her, so if you put both my parents together I am predominantly Scott. My dad’s side was my Great Grandmother from the desert, but my mother was from Maine and her mother had all the Grahams and Reids. She had a little bit of Irish and English also, so that means I’m a fuckin’ British isles mutt, that’s predominantly Scottish.
Has that history always resonated with you?
It has. It gets me a little emotional. This noise right here, [music we could hear outside from the show] to me, this is a drone, and I’ve always liked drones. My grandfather came up to me when I was 15, and I was dealing with a lot of emotional shit like you do in high school—puberty and all that shit. I had been sending him these Christmas tapes and he goes, “Why do you want to make your guitar sound like a bagpipe?” I was like, “I don’t know, Grandpa. Why would I?”
So you were 15 and playing guitar and you were already trying to make it not sound like a guitar?
I was already trying to make it sound like a bagpipe.
And you were making these recordings on tape to send to your grandpa. Was he a music lover?
Yeah, he was. He loved classical music. He was kind of a hard core guy. During The Depression in America he survived by killing birds, living on birds. Excuse me; I’m getting too emotional. He got a job protecting an orange grove in San Bernadino in the 30s, and he had to support his mother, his sister, all the women in his family. They had no money, so they would eat quails. He was a really good shot. He would be in this orange grove with this 22 rifle.... I actually have his old 22.
Talk about somebody who saves everything! He saved every fucking screw. No waste. You know, fuck the waste! I’m so tired of waste. You see people sitting in their cars idling. The people who sit in their car with their AC on, just sitting there with the car on? That fucking shit is called idling.
You probably see that a lot in the desert?
No. More like every day in Claremont. It’s normal now! It makes me think of MLK saying, “I have talked to God, and you are too arrogant, and I will break the backbone of your power.” That’s what he said, and what he was talking about was this bullshit!! It’s fucking horrible! It’s absolutely horrible, and it’s considered normal. You see people who otherwise seem like cool people, and they’re doing it. You see it all over. There’ll be three people sitting in their car with the windows rolled up so they don’t have to talk to homeless people, won’t have to talk to poor people. It’s isolationism. And they’re sitting there with their fucking cars on, on their phones. I see it every fucking day! Now, that is arrogant. That kind of shit would piss me off if I was God. I don’t even have AC in this car; it doesn’t work. You’re not gonna catch me doing that.
And it’s part of the reason it’s getting so hot, like with climate change. And then you’re sitting there with the air on and the car running. It’s this insane feedback loop.
Exactly. That’s basically what it is. Most people think it’s ok. Young, cool looking, mustached, hippy looking, just sitting there in their fucking car idling it while they’re on the phone.
Did you grow up with access to nature?
I had an unusual childhood. I grew up with a somewhat aristocratic mother and a working class father. My mother’s mother was given an award for a children’s book she wrote called The Cat That Went To Heaven. So Granny split the award money between my mother and her sister, as dowries. When my mother married my father she bought this place in the middle of fucking nowhere, north of Claremont, in the La Verne foothills. It was very rural back then, and she didn’t contain us at all. She just let us go wild. All of that walk-three-miles-to-school type stuff was real. One time me and my brother were going up this firebreak when I was four or five, and we got trailed by coyotes, a whole pack. They didn’t eat us. I always felt a kinship with coyotes for not eating me.
My mother didn’t deal with us. Everyone made fun of us. We’d go to school looking all wild, and they’d call us Barnyard, because our last name is Barnes.
Yeah, it was pretty similar with us.
Not showered, never clean. At one point I was really proud of myself because I hadn’t taken a shower in six months. Fuck it, you know? Who gives a shit? As long as you survive. I think shit builds up on your skin that’s probably good for you.
Our dad stopped showering for like 10 years. He’s really proud of it. He says he’s got a Civil War-era regimen.
He understands what I’m talking about! I think you build up an immunity to diseases and all kinds of crap if you don’t shower. But that’s just my own opinion. My wife, my girlfriend that I met in 2005 and went on tour with, she’s all into showering, so I do it more often to make her happy!