SEATTLE — The Department of Homeland Security may be substantially hipper than previously known.
Chris Walla, the guitarist and producer for indie rock legends Death Cab for Cutie, says border guards seized a computer drive containing the master tracks for his upcoming solo album last month when a courier tried to deliver it to Seattle-based Barsuk Records from a studio in Vancouver, B.C.
“I don’t know what red flag could possibly have gone up at the border,” Walla said Wednesday in a phone interview from Portland, Ore. “It’s so baffling to me.”
Walla said he had been working on the extremely political album, called “Field Manual,” in British Columbia, and that the songs had been mixed by producer Warne Livesey. Barsuk needed the music to meet its production schedule, and a Hipposonic Studios employee volunteered to drive the mixed songs, on tape, and the original master tracks, on a computer hard drive, to Seattle on Sept. 19.
The courier, Brendan Brown, was turned away at the Peace Arch border crossing in Blaine. Guards let him keep the tapes, but seized the hard drive for examination by computer forensics experts, according to Walla and Hipposonic President Rob Darch.
Walla said he believed the confiscation was random, but Barsuk and some music publications hinted it may have been more than a coincidence that such a political album — it includes songs criticizing the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war and the firings of U.S. attorneys by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — was seized.
“Interestingly, a strong political thread runs through the record’s lyrics; Walla takes more than a few shots at U.S. policy, both at home and abroad, and challenges at least one senator to find the exit door,” said a statement on Barsuk’s Web site. “For whatever reason, the drive has still not been returned.”
Mike Milne, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, described any suggestion of political motivation as baloney.
“These guys don’t even know who Death Cab for Cutie is, let alone that he’s doing political music,” Milne said of the border guards.
Milne noted that child pornography is sometimes shipped across the border in hard drives. And — perhaps a more likely explanation — commercial items may not be imported through the Peace Arch crossing, but must go through the nearby Pacific Highway border point. Such commercial merchandise typically requires formal importing procedures.
“Recorded music is commercial material,” Milne noted. “Chris Walla is a commercial entity in a multibillion-dollar industry.”
Whatever the initial reason the hard drive was detained, Milne said late Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement forensic experts had examined it and decided it could be released.
“We have attempted to make two notifications to the importer to pick it up, that it’s free to go, but we haven’t heard back from him,” Milne said, adding it appeared those were phone messages left between Sept. 19 and Oct. 1.
Walla had the seized files on a backup hard drive on Vancouver Island, but Barsuk didn’t want to try to ship that drive to Seattle in case that one was seized too, said Josh Rosenfeld, the label’s co-founder. Within several days, that backup drive had been copied and successfully shipped to Seattle.
The lost time prevented Walla from finishing the album on time, but it’s still expected to be released Jan. 29, Rosenfeld said.
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