NYC power trio Countdown To Putsch was formed by former members of the NYC area DIY hardcore outfits JUdas Iscariot, Thats All She Wrote, and Your Adversary in the late 90's, and took the Citizen's Arrest and Ornette Coleman influences of Iscariot's free jazz/hardcore experimentation a step further into even more anarcho-charged territory. 2001's Ideas For The Living And Willing To Act was the band's second album, and as with all of their releases, is presented as more of an art-manifesto than a typical music release, with the 16-track CD packaged inside of a hefty, 100 page magazine-style booklet with full color covers, which is filled with the band's lyrics, mock-fanzine content, interviews with people involved with the creation of the album (i.e., Alap Momin of Dalek who produced Ideas For The Living...) as well as social activists associated with the band, and lots and lots of anarchist agit-prop artwork, poetry, and writings. The music on the CD is a fiery fusion of instrument-swapping free jazz/"fire music", scathing blasts of hardcore/grind, and 90's-era "emotional hardcore" a la Dischord Records, the band members breaking out trombones and saxophones and even a homemade didgeridoo made out of PVC pipe, the vocals a combination of emotional spoken-word passages and frantic screams. It's pretty tough to compare Countdown to anyone else, they were definitely mining their own sound for the several years that they were recording and releasing albums, probably the closest coordinates (aside from the aforementioned Judas Iscariot) would be the post-hardcore jazz mutations of Iceburn's later material combined with the fall-on-the-floor energy of Three Studies For A Crucifixion; and as with all of their releases, the last track on the disc is given over to a social activist, here with a lengthy spoken word presentation by feminist Susan Brownmiller.