Dub Reality
Indigenous Resistance

Interview with IR :: Indigenous Resistance

「ダブ」とは、タフなこの世界の美しきB面

ウガンダのインディジェナス・レジスタンス（IR）、本邦初インタヴュー

On May 5, 2025, Japanese music magazine Ele-King published an interview with IR :: Indigenous Resistance. The interview was conducted by Masanobu Kasuga, a writer and musician based in Sapporo. Ele-King’s online version of the interview marks the first time an interview with IR has appeared in the Japanese press, but also in the Japanese language. It can be read at https://www.ele-king.net/interviews/011762/. 

In the spirit of always presenting work in multiple forms and places, IR presents the original, unedited version of Kasuga’s interview. We deeply appreciate the intelligent questions he sent us and most importantly, the dub respect and care he showed to our security and anonymity. 

 ■What kind of group is IR::Indigenous Resistance? 

IR is an open collective of artists and activists. There are no official members – just collaborators and conspirators.

 ■What is IR’s music? I think many Japanese people will know about IR through this article. How would you explain your music to someone who is listening to it for the first time?

Jamaican dub reggae is a big inspiration for us, as is Detroit techno, hardcore punk, African music, and Indigenous musical traditions – such as those from the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific and the First Peoples of Turtle Island (aka North America, who are erroneously labelled as Native Americans), to name just  a few. We draw on these influences because of the deeper principles that underlie them. So, for us, dub is not a style; it’s an attitude. The same goes for techno, punk, etc.

We also often use spoken-word vocals in multiple languages, such as Spanish (as spoken in South America), Mohawk, Brazilian Portuguese, Lugandan, Swahili, Arabic, the Khalkha Dialect of Mongolia and English. It is essential that our music has a message, but because we work in multiple languages, the message is never one-dimensional. We have also  tried to do innovative things in the way spoken word and sung vocals are combined. For example, mixing poetry/spoken word with sung Indigenous chants so that the two forms are having a conversation with each other.

It is very important to understand that IR doesn’t limit itself to just music as a means to communicate subversive ideas. We are also engaged in the process of making short films, writing and releasing books, clandestine postering(which includes putting up posters with excerpts from our books so anyone on the street can walk by and read them),  and creating murals on walls in different parts of the world.  

At the same time, one can find IR conspirators like Prasonik delivering formal presentations on outernationalism and IR at places like Kolkata and Ahmednagar in India,

or myself having informal dub conversations about Palestine on the streets of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia with subversive Mongolian youth like the musician Bilguudei Билгүүдэй.

These youth are inquisitive and seeking to educate themselves about what’s happening in the world beyond what’s being spoon fed to the public by corporate media. 

 ■Worldwide bases of operations and fluid member composition. IR’s activities in music and art are very diverse, and their bases of operations and places of expression appear and disappear, so it is difficult to get a full picture.  I would like to ask about your bases of operations around the world and the diverse member composition. Secrecy is the underground way. I don’t want to expose your secrets. Please answer to the best of your ability. How was IR formed? How did the members meet?

The inability to have a complete picture of IR is deliberate. We never forget that we live in a world with oppressive governments that absolutely will not hesitate to use brutal tools of oppression against those who go against their agenda. For instance, we never forget that the USA government had the CointelPro program, where they deliberately employed surveillance methods (like wiretapping), assassinated and falsely imprisoned political activists. All of this is factually documented in the book Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.

We always remember that the CIA was involved in the overthrow and murder of President Salvador Allende in Chile as well as the overthrow and assassinations of various African leaders and governments as documented in White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams.

We are also aware of how information is now coming out about the high level of surveillance and sophisticated technologies that was used against students at North American university campuses who were protesting in solidarity with the Palestine liberation movement over the past year. 

So, the oppression by the state has not diminished over time and we are constantly aware of this.

We continue our work, but we stay alert, as Leadbelly advocated in his 1938 blues track, “The Scottsboro Boys.” 

We also organise in a manner to deliberately confuse Babylon. 

For instance, we have organised events in support of the liberation movement for a Free West Papua, and they were organised with conspirators and collaborators in Colombia, Brasil, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Indonesia. All these collaborations took place at the same time in various parts of the world. 

This is decentralized dub, a dub that’s harder to put a finger on. It also has a long history. As we reference in our track “African Anarchists,” in ancient times there were areas of what is now described as Africa that were ruled not by centralized kingdoms, but by loosely connected federations of autonomous villages. We like this as a model of organization.

There’s also a spiritual aspect to the way we organise. 

We live in an era where there is so much emphasis on public fame, personal attention, and ego, as opposed to the actual craft of the work and the actual message. Our mode of operating through action is a rebuttal of this.

We always remember something Dr. Butch Bilal Ware, a teacher of ours, once said: “Before you point out and publicly call out and comment on the flaws of others, look inwards and correct those flaws within yourself first.”

So, for example, it would be very easy to criticize some music genres like reggae for its lack of commentary on genocide, especially in places like Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar and West  Papua.

Instead, we focus on quietly making that which we want to see or hear happen – which is how “Dreams Are Dub But Genocide Is A Reality” came about.

We started work on this album in the summer of 2023, before the most recent Gaza genocide.  We were writing a lot about genocide because we were seeing it happening in so many places in the world and there was so much silence about this. 

One of our IR mottos is

“We enter 

We work 

We disappear” 

Because what is important for us is the message, the work. I

 ■What does “dub” mean to IR? While listening to IR, I thought that dub is “a magical technique like glue that bonds diverse music beyond time and space”. Please tell me about the appeal of dub to you and your practice of it.

Dub is too often defined as a musical style, a subgenre of reggae music, and its influence on other genres is equally narrow, reduced to the use of echo and reverb effects. For IR, dub is not a thing – it’s the quality of a thing, the dub quality of anything. 

We live in a world where music as well as other forms of resistance, protest, and social justice language are institutionalized, neutralized, and de-vitalized into the colonial, capitalist whitestream. Dub is the b-side to these moments of assimilation and co-optation. 

Dub is about fermenting trouble, making Babylon tremble. We really want to emphasize this, the importance of “making Babylon tremble.” It throws our perceptions of how sonic frequencies can and should be used into total disarray. 

That in itself is what makes dub utterly beautiful, an affirmation of the beauty and unbridled complexity of life.

 ■Please tell me about your latest work “Dreams Are Dub But Genocide Is A Reality”. I heard that your chance encounter with Masaya Fantasista in Mongolia was the trigger for the birth of this collaboration. How did you meet?

Yes, indeed it was a beautiful encounter, what we describe as natural dub flow.

Masaya Fantasista, who is also one of the directors of the Jazzy Sport label, had come to Mongolia to play at an international music festival. He was an old friend of Boldoo, the owner of the sadly now-defunct, very influential Mongolian record store Dundgol Records. In the summer of 2023, he was going to play at the official opening of Dundgol Records’ night-time music space and cafe in Ulaanbaatar. So, on a Sunday afternoon, Boldoo presented me to Masaya with the following introduction:

“This person has been living here. They haven’t rented any jeep or hired a guide or travelled with any groups of people. They have just been talking and communicating to the Mongolian people to get to know them. And you know what? They have ended up seeing and getting to all the places they wanted to see. But trying to understand the people is the most important thing for them, more than seeing all the super cool, spectacular scenery Mongolia has to offer.”

Normally, when Boldoo said this to people about me, there was a look of complete bewilderment on their faces, but Masaya just smiled. I could see he instantly got it.

Masaya really exuded this quiet, warm dub, and we soon got to talking about music and quickly realized we had some similar connections. He was very connected with our musical comrades, Detroit techno renegades Underground Resistance (UR). In fact, when he went to Detroit from Japan, he actually stayed with folks we knew. The dub connection got deeper when he revealed that he had been one of the people responsible for bringing Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen to Japan. Well, he got really surprised and overjoyed when he found out I had a personal connection with Fela Kuti himself.

We separated ourselves from the crowd and went to talk privately. I felt I could really talk to him about the mystical dub that had happened to me in Mongolia, and we had a very open and flowing conversation. He spoke and received high-frequency dub effortlessly, so we had a wonderful conversation.

That night, I watched him DJ a set of minimal Afro house. What I immediately noticed was the way he stamped his own particular rhythm and presence onto the set. He was not in my opinion playing to the crowd, but he was on his own musical journey with impressive mixing, breaks, and creative selection. This was not someone following the crowd – quite the opposite. I loved the attitude. Later that night, I slipped him a special Dubdem-designed, Mongolia IR t-shirt into his DJ bag and said to him, “This is a well-deserved surprise and gift for you, my brotha!” We spoke about IR work, and he said to me, “I’ve been a foot soldier in the alternative music scene for 25 years. Anytime you need, I’m here to be of service.”

And that’s how Masaya Fantasista came to be part of this project.

Definitely! We love that Masaya brought this element to this mix. When we were writing the lyrics for the track, one of the tracks that resonated with our spirit was “Bide Up” by Bunny Wailer. This is another track filled with soulful elegance and beauty, a roots reggae track anchored by a gorgeous flute, percussion and lyrics with a focus on spiritual humility and triumph over adversity. We loved that Masaya tuned into this feeling, especially as we didn’t tell him, but he felt it. 

I feel a jazz elegance in the track. Is this something that Masaya brought to the table?

This elegance that Masaya brought to the track was also in keeping with the intention we had writing the lyrics. When folks see that a topic like genocide is going to be the focus of a piece of a music, they tend to see it being connected to musical genres that they automatically think of as being more aggressive, like punk or noise. We love punk and noise, but we wanted to subvert this preconception of how one can approach this subject, lyrically and musically. This is why the first line of the “Genocide” track is “They embraced tenderly.” We consciously wanted to evoke an immediate atmosphere of tenderness. At the same time, we wanted to use a storytelling style so that we could discuss various cases of genocide happening throughout the world, but not in a manner most would expect. 

We were discussing this with Dhangsha and we were in total agreement that it was wonderful that we could have various musical styles not often found together in one project with the soulful jazz elegance that Masaya brings alongside the Bad Brains punk influence, the noise, dissonance and new approach to bass music offered up by Bantu and Dhangsha, the industrial dub influences of folks like Adrian Sherwood, Mark Stewart, and Soy Sos, along with traditional African djembe drumming and traditional Morin Khuur Mongolian Horsehead fiddle.

■ What is the message conveyed in multiple languages, such as Luganda, Arabic, and English?

You have asked us about the use of multiple languages in our recording. On our new  Mongolia African Ancestral Travel (M.A.A.T.) album ( which is available on Bandcamp here at http://tinyurl.com/43b9d2ny ), we are using indigenous African languages like Swahili and Lugandan along the Khalka, a dialect used in Mongolia.

Fortifying Indigenous languages and writing systems is something I have often felt as being essential to countering colonization. I have always noted that one of the key tools of genocide committed against Indigenous Peoples has been the forced eradication of their Indigenous languages.

On the Indigenous Resistance Bandcamp releases IR 15 Revolta Vol 1 and 2, our collaboration with UR and the indigenous Krikati people of Brasil, we deliberately used the indigenous language of the Krikati people as part of the track. It was part of our resistance against colonialism and genocide!

The message of “Dreams Are Dub But Genocide Is A Reality” expresses the importance of maintaining our spiritual strength while observing various situations of genocide happening in the world. Yet, for us, the pivotal line in that track is 

“Sister, a wise teacher Bilal Said to me,

All the praying and all the fasting

will be for nothing

if we allow injustice to persist around us”

This line draws on a quote from Dr. Butch Bilal Ware. It also relates to a conversation I had on the streets of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia with members of the Mongolian band Koncorde. We said to them, “there is a very public genocide happening in Palestine. No one can say they are not aware of it. As young people I need to ask you what are you going to do about this? Because I do believe 15 to 20 years from now folks will ask you what did you about the genocide that  happened. You will be held accountable for your action or non-action.” 

■This work sounds like it was created through a process of recording sound sources in various places, collecting and compiling them, and then turning them into dub. What difficulties did you encounter during the production?

We really believe in the power of improvisation and making the best of situations, and how there are always various “hacks” that can be applied. We remember a few years back when IR was recording our version of “Wirecutter” in Uganda and we were having trouble with vocal-popping sounds on the microphone. We didn’t have a windscreen, but IR conspirator Ramjac sent us notes on a hack where we made a windscreen by stretching nylon material from tights over a coat hanger and placing that in front of the microphone. It worked perfectly! There’s always a way!

It was a similar situation for the vocals on this album. 

Amastara’s vocals were recorded on the bare wooden floor of an apartment in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, waiting patiently till 3 AM so that the sound of passing cars wouldn’t interfere with the recording. The recording was done in one take using the small built-in internal microphone of a device used to connect with the internet. There are no vocals on this album that were recorded in a recording studio using good microphones. They were all recorded in this similar manner just using what was at hand in the time and space available. 

We also asked Kabaka Klacity Labartin in Uganda, East Africa to record vocals for us. His vocals for “Dreams Are Dub But Genocide Is A Reality” were recorded by Ras Charles holding a simple cell phone as Kabaka rocked his vocals sitting in the backyard of our friend’s Bosco’s house. Later on, after some online consultation with Soy Sos, we decided to try and eliminate the sound of vehicle traffic that was coming into the recordings because Bosco’s house was close to the road. Kabaka and Ras Charles went to Atuadub Shrine, the creative art space that members of that IR crew had created deep in the Uganda jungle. Here, amidst posters and artwork for Free West Papua and Free Palestine, and carefully following Soy Sos’ notes, they created a recording booth cubicle by hanging blankets. It was within this improvised recording booth using a cellphone that the vocals for the M.A.A.T. album’s intro and “For Our Sisters And Brothers In Palestine” were recorded.

During the recording of “Dreams are Dub But Genocide is a Reality”, we had to explain to Masaya, who was waiting on Kabaka’s vocals, about some of the obstacles we have to circumvent to make these recordings happen. In this case, Kabaka was living on a small island and did not have access to a phone. We then had to contact Bosco to go find Ras Charles, who also didn’t have a phone and tell him to find Kabaka. I would wait days for someone to find Kabaka and take a phone to him, hoping also that when they found him, there would be sufficient signal for us to be able to talk. When I did reach Kabaka with phone credit and signal rapidly declining, we would rehearse the lyrics on the phone, improvising and rewriting lines to make it flow better for his work. It was creativity under pressure, but we did it!

Discipline and commitment was how the IR crew in Uganda pulled off these recordings. This was required for Kabaka’s vocal as well as for the recording of Ras Isaacs’ drumming, which involved a different set of obstacles, but also a different set of dub triumphs.

On previous occasions, we recorded an entire IR ::  Sankara Future Dub Resurgence album at the Dub Museum using only a simple cell phone to record drums, flutes, percussion, vocals, and ambient found sounds.

In our book Mongolian Dub Journey, there is a detailed story about the various logistical challenges with recording Ras Isaac’s drums in Uganda, travelling by boat to transport audio files to an internet cafe, and a dub miracle that saved the project. It’s never just a click-and-send situation.

 ■ What African musical elements are included in your music? Also, how do you fuse these with dub?

African musical elements play a big part of our music. Not only are we utilizing various types of traditional flutes from Uganda and percussion instruments like djembe and ketteh drums, but we have also in the past used the tom, which is a plucked lamellophone thumb piano that’s used in the traditional music of the Nuer and Anuak people of western Ethiopia. We utilized this instrument in an IR track about land grabbing in western Ethiopia.

It is also important to note that we draw heavily on African musical traditions that were taken across the oceans by forcibly enslaved Africans. We are talking about Kumina and Nyabinghi drumming traditions in Jamaica and the marimba playing of the Pacific coast of Colombia, which is an important Afro-Colombian tradition, one that we incorporated into the IR track we made with Bassilar Membrane and Kabaka Klacity Labartin called “When Thomas Sankara Met Fela Kuti.”

If you check the track “Outernationalism (Soy Sos Fierce Kumina Ceremony Vibes Mix)” that is on the Inner Dub, Outer Dub: Reasoning and Reflection album, you will find the perfect example of how we utilize these musical elements. Kumina is a spiritual ceremonial practice brought to Jamaica by forcibly enslaved Africans from the Congo. I have personally witnessed Kumina ceremonies where there is this intense hypnotic drumming, and the participants dance and enter in trance. It is wonderful and enthralling to witness, and I always wanted to incorporate this into a musical track. In our experience, if we truly feel the dub and spirit of the tradition, it flows effortlessly into dub. It’s a natural dub flow as opposed to contrived dub.

I also want to say that the African elements are not only the actual instruments you hear in the mix, but also the reflections and consequences of conversations we have had with Ethiopian monks living in remote mountain monasteries in Tigray northern Ethiopia, conversations with descendants of the Sufi Saint Cheik Amadou Bamba in Senegal and musical warriors like Fela Kuti.

 ■Influence of UR Looking at your group name and artwork, it seems like Underground Resistance had a big influence. How did they influence you? 

UR is indeed a strong influence and ongoing inspiration on IR’s music as well as our dub principles. However, it’s also worth noting that IR was emerging during the same years as UR, though outside and deep in the shadows of eighties techno/house and nineties rave culture. As a result, our relationship with UR has been mutual and collaborative.

In 2008, UR’s co-founder Mad Mike Banks programmed beats and played synthesizers  for IR 14 Direct Action Dubmissions. This EP features multiple versions of “Krikati”, a track about the Krikati indigenous people of Brasil and their resistance movement against state authorities encroaching on their lands. Around the same time, a powerful photograph of a Krikati woman pushing back against military forces while holding a baby was featured on the homepage of the UR website, Submerge.com.This image was one IR had first used as the album cover for our release IR 15 Revolta Vol 1 which also contained the Krikati mixes.

UR’s Exhibit 3000, the first and only techno museum in the world, currently displays a CD copy of IR 10 Indigenous Dublands alongside vinyls by Moodymann and Drexciya. In 2020, Mad Mike praised IR’s track  “Wire Cutter” and particularly the role played by Sankara Future Dub Resurgence in that collaboration.

For me, the origins of the IR-UR relationship began with meeting Mad Mike and with the joy of discovering a Black and Indigenous entity that dubbed into the same dub principles: working in the shadows, utilising a militant messages and incorporating dub codes into all aspects of a track – the music, the artwork, the liner notes, etc. It was like discovering a like-minded dub conspirator. 

An important area where I was directly influenced by Mad Mike was at his home studio in Detroit. His keyboards were covered to keep off the eyes of prying European visitors, but he uncovered them for me and used his keyboards to show how he and Jeff Mills used different frequencies to evoke specific emotions in listeners. This really opened my mind and really affected my way of approaching, listening and creating music. I started studying frequencies, and I later extended this to my deeper understanding of life and our actions on this planet.

■What political and social message do you want to convey through your music? What are your goals? What is IR trying to achieve through music and art?

One of the things that IR tries through the art, music and films we create is to widen people’s horizons and knowledge about various issues and especially make the links between various cultural, political, and spiritual traditions that they might not normally consider.

We love transmitting code. We love the tiny details. We love moments of silence.

IR 78 Under the Moon, We Return to Water, the latest film that we have done with Ugandan director and editor Joshua Alibet, is an excellent example of us transmitting code. We love working with Joshua not only because he is a cinematic and visual poet who creates beautiful textures with colours, but also because of his attention to detail which flows perfectly with IR style.

IR loves shifting the frame from the expected to the unexpected in a way that makes people question why they felt it was unexpected in the first place.

In a parallel manner, over thirty-five years ago, when we were travelling and we met Japanese tourists, the first thing we would always ask them was what their thoughts were on the current situation of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. They were always shocked that we knew anything at all about the Ainu. 

We shifted the frame.

In a similar vein, this latest IR film is also connected to the forthcoming next IR album, Mongolian African Ancestral Travel album. One of the opening scenes of the film is Ugandan Rasta and IR conspirator Kabaka Klacity Labartin standing inside Atuadub Shrine, the IR art gallery and creative space that is located in the Ugandan jungle. This is our own autonomous space that we constructed. Kabaka is standing beside the artwork of the Mongolian artist Godo Dashdondov Bayartsetseg, which is hung on the wall. For the opening track of the  M.A.A.T album, he learnt and recited the lyrics in the Mongolian language, while being accompanied by a Morin Khuur Mongolian Horsehead fiddle played by Byart. 

Later on in the film, Kabaka paddles in a kayak across Lake Nalubaale (the original African name for Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa). If you look closely at the canoe, you will see that written on the front of the boat  is the word “dub.” But it’s written in the Mongolian language.

This relates to how we met Godo in Mongolia. She showed us that in her personal journals twenty years ago, she was using the word “dub.” She also listens to reggae, dub and techno.

The frame is shifted again.

This is what we refer to as Outernationalism.

Later on in the film, Kabaka returns to Atuadub, what IR Ugandan percussionist Ras Isaac calls our “African Anarchist space.” Joshua Alibet’s camera shows us more code through shots of images on the walls: Sufi saints, Buddhist monks, African Sikhs, Rastafari, and Indigenous medicine people like Cheik Amadou Bamba, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Vaughn Benjamin, and Grey Cloud are alongside revolutionary philosophers, writers and activists from various parts of the world like James Baldwin, Franz Fanon, Audre Lourde, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Trudell, Sonia Sanchez, and Thomas Sankara. Signs for a Free Palestine, a Free West Papua and for a stop to genocide in Sudan are also shown as well as the art for 215 + X, which is a reference to the bodies of Indigenous children found in unmarked graves in residential and industrial schools in Canada and USA.

The placement of these images are deliberate; our conspirators When Vision Meets Dub Architecture spend a lot of time researching and making careful decisions about them. Viewers are invited to further investigate and decipher the code. 

Certainly, one clue that IR is providing in this film (as well as in IR books likeSearching For The Dub Sublime) is that it doesn’t believe in the separation between that which has been described as “spiritual” and that which has been described as  “political.” This code is transmitted in the closing credits of the film, when we see a scene in Uganda of Ras Charles sitting and doing meditation while Ras Isaacs stands beside him holding a sign saying “Dub Is A State Of Mind.” Close by are images of Emperor Haile Sellasie as a child, Eritrean sisters in a poster that says “Dub Meditation Takes My Hand”juxtaposed with poster of Black hardcore punk band Bad Brains and Dhangsha’s photo of the musician Ghetto Priest reading the book African Anarchism: A History of a Movement by Sam Mbah and I. E. Igariwey.

In Searching for the Dub Sublime, we tried to highlight as many cultural and historical figures for whom the spiritual and the political are inseparable. For example, Emir Abdelkader, the Sufi guerrilla leader who spent twenty years fighting the French colonial forces in Algeria and who also wrote Kitab al-Mawaqif, a book on the importance of dreams and visions. There are also the examples of Leonard Crow Dog and Archie Fire Lame Deer, two elders and medicine people from Indigenous communities on Turtle Island, performing ceremonies within and for political protests. Dub Sublime has a detailed story about Ho Chi Minh, the well-known Vietnamese revolutionary, who it is said by some to have once trained to become a Buddhist monk.

These are just a few examples. There are many more. A vital part of IR’s work is to dig for as many examples as possible, knowing that Babylon trembles when this dub knowledge echoes and reverberates throughout our societies.