Last year it was reported that more than 600 international bands and artists performed live at South-By-Southwest. This year, amid controversial deportation language included in the Austin festival’s performance contracts, one band has already been aggressively turned away by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers: Italian post-punk band Soviet Soviet.
On Friday (March 10), the trio posted a statement to its Facebook page detailing their harrowing incident earlier in the week in Seattle, in which the band was detained, arrested, and subsequently deported. According to NPR, Soviet Soviet were traveling to the U.S. under a visa waiver program called ESTA. “Such visas are frequently used by bands coming to the United States when they only are slated to play unpaid showcases,” NPR writes, “as paid work while traveling on an ESTA is prohibited.”
Read Soviet Soviet’s full statement below.
Soviet Soviet state that though they arrived at Seattle with documentation that their shows, including a performance for Seattle radio station KEXP, a Los Angeles gig at the Echoplex, and a handful of other dates, including SXSW, were unpaid and “promotional,” a dispute arose when officials saw two of the venues the band were performing at were charging a cover.
More from NPR:
“The band says that its three musicians were questioned for several hours, and ‘agents’ (presumably U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers) denied them entry into the country. From the airport, the band says, the three were taken to a jail and held overnight before being escorted to a plane and sent back to Italy. The three say that they were treated ‘like criminals.’
In its statement, Soviet Soviet says that the agents’ refusal to permit the band’s entry seems to have stemmed from the fact that the agents believed that the group needed work visas to enter the U.S., because two of the venues at which Soviet Soviet was slated to perform were going to charge audiences entry fees — even though the band says that its musicians were not going to earn any money while in the U.S.”
Soviet Soviet — consisting of guitarist Alessandro Costantini, drummer Alessandro Ferri, and bassist/vocalist Andrea Giometti — formed in the Italian city of Pesaro in 2008. KEXP cited the band’s “dark, anthemic, post-punk sound,” and applied heavy praise for the group’s 2016 sophomore album Endless. In a 2009 review of their single “Marksman,” Pitchfork wrote: “To their credit, Soviet Soviet take a broad view of the [post-punk] genre, ignoring timestamps and geographic restrictions to assemble a specimen uniquely theirs — from the frenetic opening gallop to the frayed-string finish.”