C Powers returns to NYC’s Sorry Records this month with her new album, ‘Unlawful Assembly’. Listen to ‘I Will Not Live In A Fascist State’ below.
Following previous appearances on the label including last year’s collaborative EP with CH Rom as Pump Media Unlimited, the Portland-based artist channels her work in abolitionist movements and anti-displacement organising into nine club tracks that imbue their furious production with collective purpose and power.
At points, this intention is overt, like in the metallic dub march of ‘Lombard’, which samples a megaphone call and response of “fuck the police” over melodic synths and head-nodding drums. ‘I Will Not Live In A Fascist State’ pits its titular chant over protest drums, shuffling techno rhythms and heart-clutching sub-bass.
Even outside of these clear markers, however, this album is geared toward direct action, produced specifically to be heard through the speakers of car stereos and boomboxes at protests. The drums in tracks like ‘Failure To Comply’, ‘Munitions’ ‘If We Don’t Get It’ crunch as though being transmitted directly through a megaphone, their raw energy bursting out of the muffled crowd noise in the backdrop.
This music comes from a place of lived experience and on-the-ground work from C Powers. An accompanying text for the release explains: “When she moved to LA in 2019, Cecilia [C Powers] joined the Los Angeles Tenants Union, helping working class and undocumented families organize against unethical landlords and gentrification in North Hollywood. Upon moving to Portland a year later, she became a co-founding member of Don’t Evict Portland, a tenant-lead organization that is working to build tenant power and delay, reduce, or eliminate the harm and violence of evictions.”
The field recordings in the album were all made between May and December 2020, captured “under extreme conditions in which equipment was sometimes damaged while recording, or the recordist experienced or narrowly escaped bodily harm.”
Urgent, essential and, crucially, danceable, ‘Unlawful Assembly’ will be released on Friday 19th March. Pre-order/save it here. Listen to ‘I Will Not Live In A Fascist State’ below.