C Powers - Unlawful Assembly (2025)

Revisiting events that altered the composer’s life drastically, C Powers creates in Unlawful Assembly a swirling introspective space burrowed within the chaos, danger, and noise of a fascist and collapsing Amerikkka.

For over half a decade, Cecilia Powers has been active in anti-displacement organizing. When she moved to LA in 2019, Cecilia 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.

Cecilia has spent years attempting to inform her music with the lessons and experiences she gained from participating in abolition movements and tenant organizing. Her objective as a composer has been to capture or create moments where action and disruption are injected with rhythm, noise, and bodily movement. At times, C Powers has experimented with “injection” by creating compositions specific to direct actions. “Weaponizing” these compositions or “injections” meant tailoring them to be played from amplifiers or systems specific to action plans or conditions (tracks for car stereos and boomboxes at protests utilizing large car caravans, or hacks and modifications for megaphones as examples). Unlawful Assembly is the cumulative result of Cecilia’s efforts to explore the intersection of direct action and music.

While mainly driven by a focus on historical documentation for future movements, Cecilia also created a space of art-self-therapy in re-imagining the soundscapes, pressure, emotional impact and of events she experienced alongside countless others. The works collected in Unlawful send the listener into collision with sonic violence without warning. Throughout the album, Cecilia develops a unique language within her sonic realism and begins to re-animate thematic elements of the real conditions experienced. As scores of innocent bystanders were assaulted by sudden bursts of aggression and projectile fire, the listener is pummeled with noise and field recordings of brutality on tracks like “Munitions”, and “If We Don't Get It (IWDGI)”.

Cecilia re-animates the War-Drumming and Chanting of multi-hour marches on tracks like “I Will Not Live In A Fascist State”, and the joyous call and response found on “Lombard”. One can feel the panic of evading riot police violence oozing out of the swirling rhythms of “Resignation Dance” and “Failure To Comply.” The infamous “LRAD” sonic suppression device can be heard on the title track and others, as can the howling responses from anti-racist protesters.

The dread of neoliberalism, and the rage it inspires, permeate the entire album while immersing the listener in the atmospheric details of the gritty urban Pacific Northwest. C Powers’ re-capture of so many chaotic nights will demand the listener keep their “head on a swivel” while also offering a space to heal. Perhaps this album has a backward gaze fixed in a time not too long ago—Cecilia hopes it can help those who are ready to regroup in order to move onward.

All source material recorded on stolen Chinook lands (also known as Portland, OR) from May 2020 - Dec 2020. The field recordings in this work were made under extreme conditions in which equipment was sometimes damaged while recording, or the recordist experienced or narrowly escaped bodily harm.