In 2016, the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline started in an area of the Standing Rock Reservation on the border of North and South Dakota. The daily protests attracted international attention and grew throughout the summer of 2016. As with every big event nowadays, there was no lack of cameras documenting this struggle of the local native peoples' desires for protecting their autonomy (and water) against the unfathomably large corporate/industrial/political/militarized-police powers that were trying to lay the multi-state pipeline through the Sioux Tribe's sacred land.

The work on the pipeline was halted in 2017. It is still stopped (as far as I know) with things surely now being fought over in the courts.

I regularly binge-watched videos of the events as they developed. Then, in September of 2016, someone hired Frost Kennels of Hartville, Ohio to bring out biting dogs to intimidate, attack and injure people trying to stop the pipeline. (I also learned that a Biting Dog is an actual classification of working dogs--poor little critters).

One particular photo from the attack dog incidents etched itself into my brain. The image is of a female security agent in her khaki pants and rather fashionable round sunglasses positioning herself behind the dog and seeming to shove to dog--with its already bloody mouth and snout--at the protestors. This one image stood out as a symbol of broader dynamics that repeatedly play out between protestors and security forces. Those dynamics of weaponized force being pointed at and inflicted upon people who want to make change that better protects their community, people who are often just noisy, bare-armed, caring-types wearing t-shirts and sun-dresses.

I used that image of the dog-weaponizing security chick for making the collage that is the cover of this album. You can see the original image within the information I've included with the title track: Dog Sicker--Track One.

For me, the image feels emblematic of how people in the security forces (particularly the police) often weaponize everything against people who are usually defenseless except for the passion that they feel about their cause. The dog was surely trained by the Frost Kennels of Hartville, Ohio to attack and bite when given some signal or command, perhaps when shoved in the way the glamour-cop is shoving. The Dog Sickers remain hidden behind their dark glasses and blood-dripping shove-puppies.

The military-style response to the Standing Rock protests are, of course, not new. They have echoes of police dogs being sicked on African Americans protesting for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. They also reverberate into incidents of excessive force by police in response to Black Lives Matter protests, just to name a few.

Anyway, the cover image has been bubbling in my brain since 2016 and my muses finally moved me to make these improvised pieces of music.

I don't think any of these pieces can be directly linked to any particular incident. I had no intent to focus them in that specific a way. I play to let energies move in the ways they find they need to, in ways they need to to find new emotional juxtapositions. I play to let invisible voices find form. Or, something like that.