Interview by Wells.

pastepunk: What does DIY mean to you guys?

DIY is very important to all of us, Imean we still silk screen our shirts in our living room. But DIY means much more than the sum of what it literally stands for. It’s not just about "doing it yourself." It is hard and perhaps even wrong to categorize punk as a musical style, fashion sense, or even as an ethic. Many pioneering punk bands (as well as many bands today) held an ethic that most of us would categorize somewhere between confusing and repulsive. But we can categorize punk as an economy. A parallel and often parasitic network that makes and trades goods, cutting the services for cost. The parasitic aspect of the punk economy can clearly be seen in the late shift at any Kinkos. This economy has been a long time in the making. It is a real concrete thing that we can and should be proud of and this is a good thing to call DIY; not necessarily doing things yourself but participating in the economy of our community, for its preservation and advancement. I could go on about this forever. Our drummer Josh, and I both ran button farm for a long time, I think making buttons provided a good perspective on DIY economics.

pastepunk: You guys run I FARM as dictatorship right? How does that work out?

I’m not sure how to answer this question. it should either be with cool intellectual detachment or with the smarmyness with which it was offered. I FARM is not run as a dictatorship, but it is not run as a quasi-democratic oligarchy either. Any member of I FARM is "authorized" to make decisions for the band. Being in a DIY band is a very full time job. Between booking and screening, it’s hard to do anything else. Decisions have to be made or nothing will get done. Every member of I FARM is very busy always, and there is not always time to confer. If it seems like a decision that anyone in the band made was bad (and we’ve certainly done that) then we’ll talk about it. I took off a year in between schools to work primarily on I FARM crap, and so it would be easy to say that I was dictator, but in reality it was just that I had time to deal with all the dumb crap that somebody has to deal with. Creative decisions take us a really long time to make because there are no dominant personalities or paradigms in the band. I don’t think you will ever meet a band of four individuals more different and equal. We actually had to sequester ourselves for a weekend, to finally agree on the artwork for our new record. Essentially I guess, I FARM is made up not of four dictators (though we’ve certainly all got the personality for it) but of four autonomous individuals who have decided to act in tandem, and put infinite faith and trust in the others.

pastepunk: I’ve heard you guys have some different political affiliations like IWW and the Communist Party. How big a part does that stuff play in your lives? How much does it influence I FARM?

Actually that is not true, I can categorically state that I am not now and never was a member of the Communist Party. I am a Marxist but not a Lenninist and therefore, I don’t believe in parties. Jeremy and I were both members of the IWW and we both share an admiration for the American Labor history commemorated there. But all the members of I FARM have very different politics. radically different. We all try not to misrepresent the others in our work. But while our politics may be different, our humanism is essentially the same. I think it is our shared humanism that becomes a common source of inspiration. The why’s rather than the how’s. If you really want to pin it down, I think the I FARM politic as it stands, is a sort of hopeful and melancholy humanism.

pastepunk: I know this is a typical question, but I think people still like to hear it. What bands are you all listening to currently?

Again, we each have very different tastes in music. I’ll give it a shot and hope I don’t offend anyone. We all like some of the more metal bands like DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN and CONVERGE. We all like QUADALIACHA, PLOW UNITED, and DILLINGER 4. Josh and Jeremy are very into NOMEANSNO and MR. BUNGLE, and a lot of very tricky math stuff. Jeremy and I listen to quite a bit of grindcore. John has been listening to a lot of CAVE IN and LIFETIME. Jeremy is super into the REFUSED. We all like MADONNA. Oh yeah, I really like SUICIDAL TENDENCIES.

pastepunk: Who’s ruining the scene?

I think that the people ruining the scene (perhaps even including myself) are some of the older kids who look down on the younger kids for essentially being young and dumb. When someone first gets involved with punk, it’s a new world to them and they won’t always see everything for exactly what it is instantly.

pastepunk: You just finished up your movie. Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, i just finished a 20 minute film - i’ve locked picture but it won’t be done until the winter. It was an amazing experience. I knew it was going to be my last short before I shoot my feature, and that I had better make all the mistakes now and not later. And i sure did. But it came out good though. The funny parts are funny and hopefully the sad parts are sad. It took place during World War IIi, so the fun of the costumes and the guns almost made up for the fact that we shot in 18 inches of snow. Filmmaking is a much different experience for me than music and I try to use one to inform the other. I guess this doesn’t concern I FARM so much so i’ll stop - except to say that all the other members of I FARM are very supportive of my filmmaking and have helped me out on and off set tremendously. They were all there for my screening, which was really important to me.

pastepunk: What was recording at The Blasting Room like?

Recording at the blasting room was possibly the best thing that I FARM has ever done (sneaking onto the PROPAGANDHI show in St. Louis in now second). We broke down about twice a day, in snow sometimes. but we made it to Ft. Collins only to find that the label hadn’t sent the money yet, which was very stressful, but Bill, Jason and Stephen, were amazing at helping us destress and concentrate on the record. Everyone in their crew is amazing, I mean these people took care of us. Bill and Stacey made us breakfast every morning, we even had an amazing Thanksgiving dinner. And when recording, they took the time to make sure that they understood us, as a band. It wasn’t just about recording us correctly, to sound professional. They were very vocal about wanting to learn from us, as much as we from them. and the result shows. ‘Sincerely Robots,’ is a much more mature record than I think any of us was capable of making before. We can’t imagine recording anywhere else and are looking forward to going back soon.

pastepunk: What prompted the decision to have the new record come out on Cool Guy records, instead of sticking with Crap records or Creep records?

All the people at Crap and Creep records are friends of ours. Good friends. It can be very hard to put out records with people who you care about that much. For this record we wanted much more of a black box label where we deal with them and then detach. But I can’t imagine a time when I FARM won’t be associated with Creep/Crap records nor would I want to. There is almost nothing that Arik or Carly could call and ask for that we wouldn’t do. But it would have been really hard to ask either of them for six thousand dollars to record at the Blasting Room, because we know what a hardship it would be. We found Cool Guy because Cool Guy found us. We were looking for a label and they called - we listened. And once we had addressed some concerns we had, it seemed like the right thing to do.

pastepunk: I’ve noticed that Cool Guy records uses a lot of rhetoric about "positivity" and "community" but then goes ahead and does records like "Greatasstits" by the NOBODYS (ed. note: Didn't Hopeless put this album out as well?). I know a lot of people would say that record objectifies women and runs contrary to some of the sloganeering by Cool Guy. I wonder how some of the more politically minded bands, like FIFTEEN and SIREN, who’ve worked with Cool Guy reconciled that. Was that something you guys had to think about before agreeing to do the record?

Of course it was a concern. It was something we talked about with Danny at length; judging from the conversation I can only imagine it’s a conversation that he has often with his bands. As far as I FARM is concerned, he put out an arguably sexist record by an arguably shitty band. Was it a great decision? No. Did he have reasons that he told us? Yes. Were we impressed by those reasons? Not really. Does that make him unworthy to put out our record because he made a choice we don’t agree with? Obviously not. Discussions of free speech of this nature are unwieldy, uninspired and largley reserved for college talk. I know people consider us a political band, and I do as well, but to decide on a record label based on who agrees with us the most politically would be a strange and dangerous road. Cool Guy monetarily supports many causes which we feel are important and has its own programs which we respect.

pastepunk: What’s going on with tour this summer?

We are doing a seven week tour, essentially around the periphery of the U.S. and then eastern Canada. It's still pretty much a typical I FARM tour; by that I mean all kinds of venues and all kinds of bands. I think that’s my favorite thing about being in I FARM. We’ve never quite been pigeon holed into a category and we get to play all kinds of shows (as long as it's all ages).

pastepunk: How’d the move from upstate New York to New York City impact I FARM? What’s the NYC scene like?

The move to Brooklyn happened to coincide with many things that were changing and so in many ways it is the beginning of the modern I FARM era. We left Ithaca for a ten week tour and when we were done we would be living in New York. The biggest change has been of our drummer. Phil Fitzgerald, the drummer from the "this one’s better e.p." through the split with OPERATION: CLIFF CLAVIN, began to have pain in his arm. 2/3rds of the way through tour and he had to go home and Josh, whose band FUNBOX had just broken up, agreed to play drums through till the end of tour and then decided to join the band. It was a very lucky thing, as we had been close friends with FUNBOX for about a year. Josh adds a new dynamic to the band that is very unique and goes along way towards forming the sound that we have now. He lives in Washington D.C., where Jeremy is also moving. The New York scene is pretty cool though we haven’t fully integrated ourselves in it yet. What I miss most about Ithaca was the total immersion that you can only have in a small town. Where we could guarantee free food, housing, and at least $100 dollars for any touring band who came through.

pastepunk: As individuals, you all have some pretty serious endeavors outside of I FARM, and punk in general. Do you think you’ll be lifers in the scene? Who’ll drop out first?

I guess one of us will drop out once other stuff becomes too much, but since we are so busy now and still do it, I can’t imagine when/if that will be. Kids don’t drop out of the scene as fast as they used to, and I think that is a really positive development. We all have huge outside interests that do take up a lot of time. John is a mechanical engineer. Right now he is helping to design tremendous caskets to keep nuclear waste from leaking into the world (for real), Josh and Jeremy both have degrees in audio engineering and are putting together a studio called the Note Factory. I am in my third year of film school at NYU. All these things are very important to us but we find time for I FARM because it is what love. And the things we learn in the band are useful in our outside work. I think we all feel like punk has been so good to us and has taught us so much that just turning on it, would be unfair and unfeasible.