We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Camila Alvarez. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with camila below.

Camila, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

It’s so hard to find honest work in general these days, much less work that is not just honest but actually means a lot to you and feels important against the weight of this heavy world that gets thrown in our faces every time we look at our phones. My whole life, I’ve had a very short attention span for things that don’t hold a lot of meaning for me and an opposingly intense attention span for the things that do. This mixed with the series of life-changing events that lead me to start the band Period Bomb has made it very difficult for me to just stop and start living a normal life. It has never been anything less than challenging to survive in this world or even succeed as a band on any level with a band called Period Bomb, but I’ve always known that nothing valuable is ever easy. To get a real feel for the series of events that unmistakably shaped us as a band you’d have to read the book ‘Tales from the C*nt’, but leading feminist writer Vivien Goldman put it like this:
“Sometimes harrowing and sometimes hilarious, the way this cinematic group of outlaws known as Period Bomb formed and made the world their stage while attempting to take down r*pe-culture in the indie-underground by seizing every single stage or lack-thereof they could is nothing short of mythical. Camila is undoubtedly spearheading this generation’s army of She-Punks.”

My latest work has very much been dealing with the battle in my head between calling myself fully-healed and moving on with my life because I am too old to stay focused on a topic that is seen as belonging to young girls, or staying committed to making feminism hip to talk about again. It almost seems as feminism is seen as out-of-fashion, especially with the idea of ‘trad-wives’ being very much pushed onto younger audiences through TikTok. The idea is so backwards and shockingly vile to women everywhere that it is almost more addictively cringe than listening to a TikTok about the increasing number of r*apes and deaths of women that have gone overlooked by law enforcement. Seeing this reinforces in me the certainty that I have to keep going. Whenever there is a need for a feminist band and the only bands they seem to be able to come up with are ones that are so soft-spoken and hyper-sexualized that they actually feel to me as pandering to pedophilia, I know that I have to keep going. When I see news of a new ‘feminist’ fashion line, but the only feminism I can find are subtle tongue-in-cheek hints at possibly-feminist ideas, I know that my fashion-line is actually more necessary than ever and does mean a lot to a lot of people because it makes them feel heard, their loudness justified and our voices together powerful.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am very proud to have been part of a spear-heading a resurgence of riot-grrrl culture in LA in the mid-20-teens with the start of Period Bomb and subsequent underground festivals that followed. I wasn’t that focused on any one type of musical style, but the message behind and movement that was built by Kathleen Hannah and Riot Grrrl did give me a lot of encouragement to bring back this kind of energy to the music scene because all I saw was a resurgence of creepy 60’s-styled boy-groups and a sudden lapse in the progress of the different feminist waves in history. It was definite progress to make ‘third-wave feminism’ be dedicated incorporating trans-women and women of color that had felt left out of the prior waves, but when are we going to gang together to actually go after a shared goal already? The past waves our previous generations had very definitive goals: The 1st wave to vote, the 2nd to have equal pay in the workforce… Well I guess we just gave up there! What does it say about our generation of women when our grandmother’s had to fight for the right to vote, our mother’s had to fight to be allowed to apply for certain jobs and have fair pay, and then our generation just gives up on the whole idea of equal-pay and instead focuses on inclusivity at protests when it’s unclear what the protests are even for?

It felt so good for my ADD-brain to have a clear and poignant message: Women are still not safe or respected in this society and the authorities still do not listen to us. We were embraced not just by women but all people who felt outcasted and mistreated by authorities. Our shows and videos were being covered by local news and press around the world, but it was still not enough to keep 5 heads afloat, especially in a city like Los Angeles, so I relocated the band back to my hometown of Miami, FL. There, I was slowly but surely embraced by hardcore scene, and nationally got mixed into a new wave of punk named ‘egg-punk’, because our gear was so cheap that our recordings, especially the vocals, were muffled and sounded funny. We were just doing out best to get the message out still but getting out of the cycle of poverty in South Florida is really no joke. If it wasn’t for the noise scene and namely Rat Bastard, we might have never been given a show down there because the punk scene tends to be very uniform. We were able to tour nationally for almost a whole decade straight because we lived out of the bassist grandma’s house for free. Creating our own merch by hand and taking our own minivan all across the US several times a year, with a few other countries sprinkled in, created quite a discipline in us that is very distinct and hard to apply to any other craft. We then migrated to Baltimore to record our first serious record ‘Threat’ and learn from the best, Jason Willett, how to mix and make musical sense of the chaotic cacophony that was Period Bomb. Between this very niche knowledge, the distinct style I harnessed in my DIY merchandise, and of course my collection of connections and artifacts that tie together a very vibrant quilt of expressive performers that make up this global underground of artists who are still fighting for the right to make art that is not solely motivated by capital gains, my commitment is set to be lifelong. We as a band also have been growing a record label and collective that throws underground festivals called Crass Lips since 2016, making it almost a decade old. We just put out out 9th Compilation tape that have become very beloved to the community, especially with their growing frustrations with Spotify that insists on pushing boring cookie-cutter music onto them that make them feel even more alone and like the hope for real expression through music is dead.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

The only solution for any of society’s cultural woes is to not forget that we do live in a creative ecosystem and that since as long as humans have been around, our solution to every crisis has always been the same: community. Human-connection is our most vital resource, without each other we are nothing. That is somehow so easy to forget nowadays when ‘social’ media makes it so easy to forget about people and only remember your latest social goal. We have been increasingly pushed this idea that minimalism is best and that if someone is not serving you you should throw them out, but I reject that idea. I think that they want us to do that so that we feel more reliant on the internet than ever, because the powers that be can control us through the internet. In a real-life community setting, we are much more powerful and difficult to control, and that’s why real community and real art is more under attack than ever.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Non-creatives don’t understand that real art is usually seen as ugly at first. They might remember this from history class, but forget to apply it to their daily life. Sure, beauty is enough, but art is not synonymous with beauty. Art serves almost an opposing purpose to beauty. Beauty is meant to soothe, much like religion. Most people nowadays think of music almost synonymously with soothing, when at the root of music is muse – which comes from the Greek word for ‘to think’. For centuries, philosophy and thinking have been at the center of our culture and seen as our main motivation to live…’I think therefore I am’. Yet in our fast-paced society, we often accept that we just don’t have the time to think about an art piece or music, so if it is not immediately gratifying to us, we just leave it behind. This has created such a deep divide between non-artists and artists, who must express their most societally-challenging thoughts or lose all motivation to live. Not only do our Crass Lips Compilations do increasingly well selling out faster and faster every year because people are so sick of the kind of lifeless music Spotify thinks they want, but also our Crass Lips shirt that says ‘Give me difficult-listening or give me death’, beckoning the origins in freedom our country was built on.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://crasslipsrecords.org/period-bomb
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/period_bomb
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/periodBOMB
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@periodbombtv
• Other: Links to buy the book or fashions are found at CrassLipsRecords.org/period-bomb

  As well as links to stream the music, but here they anyway:

  crasslipsrecords.bandcamp.com
  periodbomb.bandcamp.com
  

Image Credits

In order of appearence:
Shot in white blouse by Adam Boren Bennett
Shot in White, spotted body suit by Walter Wlodarczyk
Close-up shot by Jules Brink
Fashion shots by Marcella Odette