Sounding Radical Environmentalism in the PNW: Avant-Activism of ¡TchKunG!

“Today, only 2% of the original ancient forests are left,” sounds a man’s voice. Thus opens the track “Clearcut” by the performance ensemble ¡TchKunG! from their 1996 album Post World Handbook. A chorus of chainsaws revs underneath, followed by the creaking and crashing of a massive tree felled for lumber. The sonic texture rapidly devolves into a cacophony of found sounds, junkyard instruments, and harshly distorted vocals. “A tree farm is not a forest,” a woman’s voice echoes. “It’s a forest turned into a slaughterhouse.” The sound is not quite metal, not quite punk, and it’s certainly not the grunge sound of Pearl Jam or Nirvana. What results in the sonic mesh of metallic percussion, electronic feedback, and shouted lyrics is both industrial (as the group’s name implies) and yet distinctly anti-industry: an anthem of radical environmentalism simultaneously embedded within the increasingly manufactured urban landscapes of the 1990s Pacific Northwest.

More often than not, however, these shows didn’t end in the clubs but rather continued out into the streets. With propagandistic lyrics shaped by members’ deep investment in leftist causes—especially environmentalism—and musical influences spanning from musique-concrète to Japanese taiko drumming to Irish folk music, ¡TchKunG! rapidly built a following more like an activist coalition than a musical fanbase. This growing momentum culminated in 1999, when several former members broke off to form the even more influential Infernal Noise Brigade, which contributed directly to organizing efforts and provided a soundtrack to protests against the World Trade Organization from November 30^th to December 3rd.

In this short article, I situate ¡TchKunG! within a larger scholarly conversation on the role of avant-garde and underground arts scenes within activist, and particularly environmentalist, political campaigns. Through a close examination of the group’s self-produced documentary “TchKunG vs. The State” from 1996 alongside local journalism archives which sonicle the collective’s dramatic, though brief, rise to prominence, I theorize that ¡TchKunG! helped to create a wider network of what I term “avant-activist” arts groups both nationally and internationally in the immediate lead up to the 21^st century. By “avant-activist,” I refer to aesthetic and organizing practices that refuse stable boundaries—between art and direct action, between “music” and “noise,” and between Euro-American experimentalism and the heterogeneous traditions often subsumed under “world music.” Attending to the fluidity and hybridity of ¡TchKunG!’s sound and performance practice, I argue, allows us to hear how these groups sonically unsettle the categories through which environmental politics are imagined and adjudicated in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In particular, by highlighting the now infamous 1994 Bumbershoot Festival during which riot police violently clashed with audience members and performers at a ¡TchKunG! show, I want to consider the more tangible political consequences of “avant-garde” or “experimental” aesthetics, and the value frameworks which shape these aesthetics. This paper thus explicitly brings together work on “protest music” as well as scholarship which seeks to theorize experimentalism more holistically. As Benjamin Piekut writes,

‘[E]xperimentalism’ comes into being through conflict and disagreement; the emergence of the category is not the cause but the result of clashes over how and where to extend networks or make new connections.^[2]

In this sense, I argue that the deeper ontological resonances of experimentalism, including resistance and protest as well as potential violence and disruption, generate ripples not only through contemporary activist movements, but through our colonially-derived constructions of what constitutes “music” vs. “noise” in the first place. This is especially complicated by groups like ¡TchKung! which intentionally blur boundaries between the avant-garde, industrial aesthetics, and what they refer to as “world music.” By critically examining the path paved by these groups, I want therefore to consider the broader implications of this work not only within scholarly fields like “ecomusicology,” but within an increasingly devastating moment for environmental protection policy and activism. As environmentalist groups are threatened with legal battles over damages done through activist efforts, we are left to question what shape future environmentalist actions will take, and the roles which music and sound will play within them. Borrowing from environmental justice scholar Julie Sze, what might a more holistic approach to environmentalist music-making look like in our current “moment of danger”?^[3]

The Rise and Fall of ¡TchKunG!

It perhaps would be misleading to characterize ¡TchKunG! as a self-contained, cohesive “band.” Their performances often featured a wide and shifting cast of not only musicians, but also dancers, fire performers, and guerilla actors. However, the collective traces its roots to a core group of activists who relocated from Norman, Oklahoma to Washington State around 1991. The group established a kind of headquarters for themselves in the form of an old farmhouse where they managed to live and work for free in return for repairing and cleaning up decades worth of trash left behind from illegal dumping. Out of this hub, nicknamed “The Squat” by members, a small core group of activists, including Rick Tahoma Wilson, Grey Filastine, and Devon Cecily (and I will quickly note that due to animosity between members and local law enforcement, these individuals tend to appear in written materials only by their first names), began to strategize. It should be emphasized that, by their own depictions, most of the members of ¡TchKunG! did not begin as conservatory-trained or professionally credentialed musicians. While their music would become the collective’s most recognizable and longest-lasting cultural marker, the performance traditions that they established were always guided by their (albeit somewhat eclectic) political and activist ideologies first and foremost. As Christina SporrongTchKunG! collaborator would later remark, “we were active on many fronts: The Displacement Coalition, Earth First!, Cop Watch, and the Squat was a central hub for this kind of 90’s activism.”^[4]

The sound of ¡TchKunG! was thus always driven by the underlying goal of coalition-building. In this regard, the group drew much inspiration from the Industrial Workers of the World (or IWW), also known as “the Wobblies,” a labor union which also had strong ties to the city through its involvement in the Seattle General Strike of 1919. As violinist Devon would later note,

The key thing about why the Wobblies were successful is because they had a whole culture…They had music and art and were completely inclusive to any gender, any color, or any level of education. So it was key to the Wobblies’ success because, if you add in art and music, then your message becomes more powerful.^[5]

In this spirit of cultural collectivism, and influenced in part by Seattle’s bourgeoning rock scene, the residents of The Squat thereby aimed to create a sound that would provide fuel for their activist ambitions. Key to this was a focus on percussion-centric instrumentation, a choice guided primarily by a high accessibility to audibility ratio: drums, scrap metal, and other struck objects could be scavenged or built cheaply, learned and played collectively with relatively little formal training, and projected loudly enough to cut through city traffic, protest chants, and police sirens. However, the group still wanted a musical aesthetic that aligned more directly with their political values. As percussionist Grey (now a member of the environmentalist musical duo Filastine & Nova) notes,

I was listening to a lot of strange drum noise ensembles and industrial music…but I was really looking for what would come after industrial music. So then I started studying all these different forms of percussion—African, Afro-Cuban, Indian—and I thought: What can you take from the aesthetics and philosophy that comes out of industrial music? I tried to apply all these kinds of various musical ideas and rhythms, as well as elements of the extreme noise and avant-garde music that I was listening to, and basically throw all those in a blender. And then you come up with something like ¡TchKunG!^[6]

From this point, the collective began hosting shows in The Squat’s spacious basement, and as they quickly gained became known for their intense, often literally fiery performances, they were soon booking gigs across Seattle and beyond.

One of the most notorious shows ¡TchKunG! played took place on September 5, 1994 at Seattle’s biggest music and arts festival: Bumbershoot. After approximately one year of performing shows throughout Pacific Northwest and developing a reputation as one of the region’s most chaotic and bombastic acts, the Bumbershoot Festival was actually a comparatively sedate gig for the group, with numerous families with young children in the crowd. However, the Seattle Police Department, by this point aware of ¡TchKunG!’s reputation, and perhaps unwilling to take any chances, sent thirty cops armed with full riot gear to the show. In the self-produced documentary “¡TchKunG! vs. The State,” members of the group later recounted how the police shot tear gas into the indoor venue, seemingly unprovoked, and stormed the crowd (Figure 2). As described in the Seattle-based music magazine The Rocket, “several witnesses alleged that police misread the crowd and used a show of force far beyond what was necessary to get people out of the hall.”^[7]

Despite the radical reputation of the group, ¡TchKunG! members have consistently alleged that no concert attendees were ever injured at any of their shows. However, by breaching this apparent boundary of nonviolence, the Seattle Police Department entered into a more belligerent relationship with the group. Three weeks following the Bumbershoot incident, ¡TchKunG! staged a characteristically avant-garde performance as their own kind of theatrical response. As vocalist Rick describes,

We had a life-size effigy of a cop but it was filled with donuts, piñata style. We also had a guy dressed up as a cop, ride a motorcycle into the back of the venue, jump off and start beating people with the floppy rubber truncheon. He then arrested a naked performer and then threw him into a cage on stage. And then, when the band finally came on we just hit all the sirens, killed the lights, and lit flames.^[8]

Although purely staged, this performance symbolically cemented the group’s identity at least within the local concert scene not only as an environmentalist collective but a more fully anarchist one. Their united aesthetic and ideological character carry over into the studio albums the group produced over their approximately seven-year run, with tracks like “Picture of the Riotzone” from their third and final album Incite, composed of recordings of riot crowds from various U.S. cities, even pushing the boundaries of what constitutes “music” (Figure 3). As I articulate in the following section, this precedent set by ¡TchKunG! would have a direct impact on activist musical efforts of the years immediately following.

The Avant-Activist Aesthetic Model

While ¡TchKunG! eventually dissolved as a formal collective in 1998, the energy that they had helped to build did not dissipate. Rather, as Jennifer Whitney recounts in her essay, “Infernal Noise: Sowing a Propaganda of Sound,” many former members of the group found that the radical environmentalist and anti-globalization sentiments that ¡TchKunG! had helped to foster carried directly over into growing activist movements in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. Whitney describes how, alongside Grey Filastine and numerous other former bandmates, she helped to establish the Infernal Noise Brigade (or INB), “a marching drum orchestra and street performance crew activated by massive political and cultural uprisings.”^[9] The band formed largely in anticipation of the Direct Action Network shutdown of the World Trade Organization ministerial scheduled to take place in Seattle on November 30 (or “N30”), 1999, and provided not only a “Soundtrack to the Post World Insurrection” (to borrow from the final ¡TchKunG! album title), but “tactical psychological support” for the over 40,000 protestors who took part in demonstrations. Following from what many perceived as a logistical victory on the part of anti-globalization protestors, the INB continued to play at demonstrations worldwide, helping to inspire the vast network of activist street bands which sprang forth in their wake, including the Brass Liberation and Rude Mechanical Orchestras, Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band, Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble, and the HONK! Family Band amongst countless others.

Of course, it is no coincidence that the Infernal Noise Brigade was guided by many of the same principles ¡TchKunG! had upheld in the years prior, but this time in a more mobile format. “The aesthetic of the INB is entirely post-textual,” the group’s agitprop materials assert.

The INB provides subliminal disruption of time, using drums to divide it into disorienting rhythmic patterns which disturb the linear sequence. Songs in different tongues further infect the monoculture. In the path to constructing a better reality, and in destructing a system based in the misery of alienation, we choose noise as our tool.^[10]

Calling this practice “post-textual” does not mean that words, lyrics, or slogans disappear; rather, it names an aesthetic in which semantic content is continually exceeded by timbre, rhythm, volume, and the collective movement of bodies in the street. Noise here is not simply excess or pollution but a deliberate tactic: a way of overwhelming the orderly temporalities and listening protocols of state power, including the very noise ordinances that often constrain environmental protest. Embedded within this language are echoes of the avant-garde, hybridized musical aesthetics which attracted, surprised, and at times, confused ¡TchKunG!’s audiences. In a written interview with the collective’s members, Silja J. A. Talvi remarks that he was taken aback when Rick described the group as a “world music band.” However, the members elaborate that their sonic aesthetic intentionally combines “a lot of disparate, different areas of culture,” recombining them into a kind of “post-apocalyptic soup.”^[11] While journalists and ¡TchKunG! collaborators often described the resulting aesthetic through more ambiguously “tribal” or even “shamanistic” terms, the group was actually noteworthy for its integration of specific folk rhythms, often integrated by members who had studied them in their countries of origin. As Whitney describes, this compositional aesthetic carried over directly into the INB:

We then processed the beats through a recombinant format, resulting in a border-violating amalgamation of unexpected elements – for example, a traditional folk rhythm from Rajasthan is modified to snare and tom drums, with a galloping metallophonic Moroccan Gnaoua line clattering across the top.^[12]

Again, and with particular leadership from Grey Filastine who had spent much of the early 1990s studying percussion in Brazil and Morocco, the INB incorporated these seemingly conflicting elements not purely out of an experimental or cacophonous impulse, but with an explicit desire to sound out their solidarity-driven politics, in Whitney’s words, “fueled from beyond the horizons of imperialist-imposed borders.”^[13] For some listeners—police, festival organizers, nearby residents—the dense, amplified percussion could register primarily as undifferentiated “noise,” an aural sign of disorder. For participants inside the marches, however, the same textures articulated intricate rhythmic logics, cues for coordinated direct action, and audible links to geographically dispersed struggles. Their use of transnational rhythmic vocabularies refused the sanitized, market-friendly legibility through which “world music” often circulates, instead mobilizing hybridity in ways that were intentionally abrasive, unsellable, and aligned with the political conditions of the marches themselves. In this sense, and without essentializing, avant-activist groups like ¡TchKunG! ask us to hear “world music” and the sound of the avant-garde through much more commensurate terms, as overlapping practices that continually renegotiate who and what is allowed to sound in public.

In his 2015 book Radicalism and Music, Jonathan Pieslak provides an overview of the music cultures of what he refers to as “Radical Environmental and Animal Rights Activist” or “REARA” organizations, focusing most specifically on Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Pieslak breaks his categorization of REARA musics largely into two main genres: that of the more folksy, acoustic fare outlined, for example, by The Earth First! Li’l Green Songbook, and that of the distinct hard-core, punk, and metal sub-genre, “Vegan Straight Edge.” As Pieslak writes,

If the cultural artifacts of a radical movement provide a lens through which to view its ideology, goals, member recruitment, retention, and motivation for action, then REARA’s characteristics will resound in its music culture.^[14]

As I have hopefully demonstrated, ¡TchKunG! and the later INB’s musical aesthetics were indeed consistently constructed in alignment with the activist ideologies of the group. However, Pieslak does not include more experimentally hybridized radical Leftist musical groups like ¡TchKunG! in his analysis, despite their obvious core environmentalist ideologies. Somewhat cynically, he instead points out that “it represents a far more lucrative endeavor to present radicalism through ambiguous antiauthoritarian, anti-industrial, or anticapitalist viewpoints than to dig into exactly why one is radical.”^[15] Rather than viewing such ambiguity as merely a market-friendly vagueness, I argue that the very instability of ¡TchKunG!’s sound—its refusal to sit comfortably within established genre labels or within the nature/culture and music/noise binaries—can itself be politically generative. The aesthetic ambiguity expressed through the avant-activism of groups like ¡TchKunG! does not hide their politics, but reworks the terms on which environmental struggle is heard, redistributing who and what counts as an environmental subject in the first place. As I move into the final section of this paper, I wish to push back against Pieslak’s assertion here, and consider instead whether the intentional aesthetic ambiguity expressed through the avant-activism of groups like ¡TchKunG! actually gets at the root of environmentalist causes more effectively than more clearly outlined genres.

Musical Environmentalisms Otherwise

On Saturday, 1 March 2025, a group of protestors gathered near the Nisqually entrance at Mt. Rainier National Park just outside of Seattle. The event was just one of many protests which took place that day in the nation’s national parks, as local activists, environmental enthusiasts, and former park rangers gathered in opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of at least 1,000 National Park Service employees the previous month. At Mt. Rainier, however, Hweqwidi Hanford McCloud, a leader and Tribal Council Member of the Nisqually Tribe of Washington State, opened the event with a short performance, joined by his family. “I was talking to everybody about this, about activism,” he says,

where I was tied to a tree when I was your age, right here, by a ribbon. My grandma didn’t want these trees cut, especially in this area…Back in 2016, we created a song, and I say created because I’ve been telling this story for almost 25 years. They just barely started listening, especially to our side of the story. This song represented that.^[16]

As McCloud points out, environmental injustice has always also been rooted in land theft from Native peoples, a perspective which is elucidated through his song’s musical aesthetics. Indeed, numerous Indigenous metal bands, including Gyibaaw, from what is now the Northwestern coast of Canada, and Pewmayén, a Mapuche band based from the western side of the Andes, have taken up this perspective through their music.^[17] Utilizing their own unique form of hybridized avant-activism, Indigenous groups like these seem to dare the listener to draw boundaries around them, to try to parse out the line between experimental noise, protest, and so-called “world music” within their sounds.

Figure 4. Screen capture of TikTok,“My favorite moment of the day last Saturday at the Protect Your Parks Protest at Mt. Rainier National Park.”

I can’t help but notice parallels between the experimental/world music dichotomy I have presented here and the slippery binary between “nature” and “culture” which fields such as ecomusicology have both critiqued and perhaps unintentionally upheld. The aesthetic ambiguity that animates ¡TchKunG! and the INB—an ambiguity that resists clear delineation between genres, geographies, and value systems—mirrors the very instability of these binaries. Indeed, just as the avant-activist groups often push against genre boundaries, they simultaneously push against our expectations of the “natural” soundscape, perhaps even causing us to reconsider what we imagine environmentally just environments to sound like. I do not wish to imply that groups like ¡TchKunG! provide us with straight-forward answers to these questions, and in many ways, they leave me with more questions than answers. However, in a moment where the state of environmental protection feels particularly dire, we of course are forced to reckon with the future of protest music. We must concern ourselves both with the root causes and political terrains that this music will target, as well as the musical and performative aesthetics that will affect the most change within our shifting, often fraught media landscapes. Perhaps more broadly, however, we must re-imagine the futures which our musical and artistic aesthetics have the capacity to create, the values which they might uphold.

Footnotes

1. Rick Tahoma Wilson, “The Most Dangerous Band in Seattle: the Story of ¡TchKunG!,” interview by Chris Tharp, Rant Alley, 8 March 2023, https://rantalleycom.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-most-dangerous-band-in-seattle-the-story-of-tchkung/.

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2. Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011): 11.

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3. Julie Sze, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (University of California Press, 2020).

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4. Christina Sporrong, “The Most Dangerous Band in Seattle: the Story of ¡TchKunG!,” interview by Chris Tharp, Rant Alley, 8 March 2023, https://rantalleycom.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-most-dangerous-band-in-seattle-the-story-of-tchkung/.

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5. Devon Cecily, “The Most Dangerous Band in Seattle: the Story of ¡TchKunG!,” interview by Chris Tharp, Rant Alley, 8 March 2023, https://rantalleycom.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-most-dangerous-band-in-seattle-the-story-of-tchkung/.

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6. Grey Filastine, “The Most Dangerous Band in Seattle: the Story of ¡TchKunG!,” interview by Chris Tharp, Rant Alley, 8 March 2023, https://rantalleycom.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-most-dangerous-band-in-seattle-the-story-of-tchkung/.

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7. Charles R. Cross, “Cops Mace Crowd at Bumbershoot,” The Rocket Magazine, 14 September 1994, 8.

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8. Rick Tahoma Wilson, “The Most Dangerous Band in Seattle: the Story of ¡TchKunG!,” interview by Chris Tharp, Rant Alley, 8 March 2023, https://rantalleycom.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-most-dangerous-band-in-seattle-the-story-of-tchkung/.

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9. Jennifer Whitney, “Infernal Noise: Sowing a Propaganda of Sound,” in HONK!

   A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism, edited by Reebee Garofalo, Erin T. Allen, and Andrew Snyder (Routledge Press, 2019), 227.

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10. Whitney, 230-232.

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11. Rick Tahoma Wilson, “¡TchKunG!: The Great Insurrection,” interview by Silja J. A. Talvi, The Rocket Magazine, 21 April 1999, 15.

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12. Whitney, 232.

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13. Whitney, 233.

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14. Jonathan Pieslak, Radicalism & Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 167.

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15. Pieslak, 173.

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16. Madeleinewilsonphoto (@madeleinewilsonphoto), “My favorite moment of the day last Saturday at the Protect Your Parks Protest at Mt. Rainier National Park,” Video, 3 March 2025, https://www.tiktok.com/@madeleinewilsonphoto/video/7477757441606733099.

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17. See Max Ritts, A Resonant Ecology (Duke University Press, 2024); Jacob Rekedal, “Martyrdom and Mapuche Metal: Defying Cultural and Territorial Reductions in Twenty-First-Century Wallmapu,” Ethnomusicology 63, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 78-104.

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    *Elizabeth Frickey is a Ph.D. candidate and MacCracken Fellow studying musicology at New York University. Her dissertation project examines the cultural, ecological, and political impact of community gardens and other NYC greenspaces through the lens of music and sound. Elizabeth has presented her research in numerous national and international settings, including annual meetings of the Society for American Music; the American Musicological Society; the Society for Ethnomusicology; the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network; and the 2023 Music, Research, and Activism Conference held in Helsinki. Her writing has also been published in numerous forums including Jazz & Culture, the Journal of Jazz Studies, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Journal SEAMUS.