Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog Are Losing Their Minds – Useful for Fans and Public Health Officials Alike

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog is not the kind of trio that arrives with a fixed plan and politely executes it. After nearly twenty years together, Ribot, Shahzad Ismaily and Ches Smith have become something closer to a volatile organism: part rock band, part free-jazz pressure system, part political alarm, part joke that suddenly stops being funny because the world caught up with it. Their songs can mutate according to the room, the news, a stomach ache, or Ribot’s “pathological inability” to obey a setlist. In this conversation, he talks about Ceramic Dog as his longest relationship, comedy after irony, fascism and post-fascism, new material, losing their minds in public, and the mild existential terror of playing inside a decommissioned Ukrainian stone carrier welded to the bottom of the Danube. Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog plays A38 Ship on June 30.

This summer’s run moves fast: Spain, Greece, Croatia, Hungary in quick succession. After this many years, what still makes you want to do a tour like this?

What made Marilyn Monroe want to pose nude?

You’ve had the same two people, Shahzad Ismaily and Ches Smith, beside you for close to twenty years now. Most marriages don’t last that long. Was there a specific night, or tour, where the three of you stopped being three musicians and started being one organism?

Yes, twenty years! its true. I woke up one day and realized Ceramic Dog is my longest term relationship. Which, when looked at in one way, is kind of sad. But on the other hand, its kind of great. 

You lead a lot of bands: Los Cubanos Postizos, the Hurry Red Telephone quartet, the solo work. What can you do inside Ceramic Dog that you can’t do anywhere else? What does this particular trio let out of you?

We have a strange method… we jam until we come up with something that makes us laugh hysterically…then we know another hit is on the way. 

Ceramic Dog lives in the gap between rock, free jazz, no wave and the protest song, sometimes all four inside one tune. Standing onstage, before the count in, do you ever actually know which way a given night is going to go? Or is that the whole point of not knowing?

There’s a whole lot of not knowing (aka: “improvisation”) going on. The vibe in the room, or something that happened somewhere in the outside world, or a stomach ache, can change everything at the last minute.
I’m known for my pathological inability to actually play the setlists I occasionally try to write. 

How much of a Ceramic Dog show is written and how much is found in the room that night? And does an audience, a Budapest crowd on a ship versus a festival field in Croatia, actually bend where the set goes?

See above. 

The band has never hidden its sense of humor: the rants, the deadpan, the unlikely covers. How essential is that comedy to what Ceramic Dog is? And does American sarcasm survive the trip across the Atlantic, or does it land differently for a European room?

Well, don;t know about sarcasm. Its getting harder and harder to say outrageous things ironically that some asshole isn’t saying 100% seriously. So, sometimes, we’re forced to say simple, direct, non-ironic, non-metaphoric things. Things like: “fuck Donald Trump and the fascist pig he rode in on”. And “fuck music generated by AI systems trained on music ingested without consent”. And stuff.  

From Songs of Resistance through Connection, you’ve never kept your politics out of the music, and you’ve publicly used hard words, „fascist” among them, about the direction of things back home. When you bring that material to a European audience in 2026, does it feel like preaching to the choir, like a warning, or like something else entirely?

I don’t know: you tell me. It would be a bit presumptuous for an American to preach to a Hungarian choir– at, least since April 23rd– so i hope we haven’t and won’t.
But Dante reserved the lowest circle of hell for those who remained neutral in a time of their country’s crisis. I’d like something at least a few floors up. 
I think I’ve used the word “fascist” accurately, at least insofar intentions go.  
The actual phenom is probably better described as “post-facism” (see: G.M. Tamas), but again– hip Budapesters already knew that, right?
On the other hand, it took Mussolini 6 years to establish full totalitarian control in Italy. Will we see that kind of overt violence in the US? Ask me after the November elections. I hope not.

You called Connection the best thing Ceramic Dog has ever made. It’s been out a couple of years and through a lot of stages now. Do you still stand by that, and what has the live version become that the studio one wasn’t?

Yeah, we’re proud of “Connection”. We toured on it happily for a few years, and we’re still doing key songs, but we’re in the process of developing new material….so we’re premiering a bunch of new stuff as well.  

Where does this trio still have to go? After twenty years and five albums, is there a record or a sound the three of you can feel coming but haven’t reached yet?

Yes, We’re losing our minds, and we hope the music will provide a sonic documentation of this process that will be useful to fans and public health officials alike.  

You’ve played Budapest several times before. The Trafó with Ceramic Dog back in 2017, the House of Music solo just last year. But this is your first time on the A38, a decommissioned Ukrainian built stone carrier ship welded to the bottom of the Danube. Did anyone warn you you’d be playing inside a boat, and does a hull full of people change how a trio like this attacks a set?

Oh my. I hope the welders did a good job. I’m trying to envision how welding at the bottom of a river looks. Its kind of freaking me out.