Seance: No Wave '78 - '82

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'No Wave was a short-lived but influential art music and art scene that thrived briefly in New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk subculture. The term No Wave is in part satiric wordplay rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre. The term also highlights the music's experimental nature: No Wave music belonged to no fixed style or genre. In many ways, No Wave is not a clearly definable musical genre with consistent features. Various groups drew on such disparate styles as funk, jazz, blues, punk rock, avant garde, and experimental. There are, however, some elements common to most No Wave music, such as abrasive atonal sounds, repetitive driving rhythms, and a tendency to emphasize musical texture over melody. No wave lyrics often focused on nihilism and confrontation. No Wave is often better defined in terms of the artistic environment in which it thrived and the character of performances typical to its context. No Wave performances drew heavily on performance art and as a result were often both highly theatrical and minimalistic in their renditions.'



Trailer: S.A. Crary's 'Kill Your Idols' (1:32)


Simon Reynolds on No Wave's precedents: 'The primitivist freak-rock of The Godz and Cromagnon and the ESP label’s out-jazz in general .... Some of the more extreme krautrock like sloppy primitivists Amon Duul and Neu! at their most noise-sculpture oriented also. In his The Wire primer on No Wave, Alan Licht (who you might call a neo-No Wave musician) cites The Godz’ 1966 tune “White Cat Heat” and the Nihilist Spasm Band’s first album from 1968, No Record; also The Stooges’ “LA Blues” off Funhouse. Also worthy of mention is a near-contemporary release, “Radio Ethiopia”, the freeform title track of Patti Smiths’ 1976 album, which is described thus in The Sex Revolts: ”a total insurrection against structure. There's only the loosest of rhythmic vertebrae, and even that departs halfway through, leaving unmoored percussion and clustered clouds of cymbal-spray. The guitars quickly abandon the semblance of riffs, dissolve into gouts of freeform noise and graffiti-like scrawls of endless soloing. Patti Smith goes beyond emulating a rock'n'roll shaman like Jim Morrison, with his clear diction and bombastic gravity; she sounds like the genuine article, a shaman from the Amazon, tripping madly on hallucinogenic tree-bark. She gnashes and drools, chokes and gasps strangulated incantations. The closest to this voodoo delirium that any male singer has gotten is Iggy Pop's howls at the climax of 'TV Eye' and Tim Buckley's Starsailor.”

Joe Carducci on No Wave's precedents: 'NYC has a hard time producing legitimate small band music, but it does encourage interesting anti-rock experiments (Dylan, Velvets, Suicide). This new experiment in error contributed music--especially early on--that was rock music no matter its willful autism. This scene somewhat suggests the earlier German rock scene in its emphasis on concept. The difference was that whereas the German had no rock history, these New Yorkers wished they had none, so determined were they to break out of it and into something new …. With the cool of the Velvets but the assaultive instincts of Suicide and the energy of the Ramones, groups like the Contortions, DNA, Dark Day, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Chain Gang, the Theoretical Girls, and the Static used traditional line ups but effectively turned each instrument in on itself as if each player had to analyse each act of hitting, picking and singing rather than merely attempting to reach a groove with the others and swing with it,” Carducci quips that this “was like staring down at the bicycle’s mechanism while you ride so as to better experience the act of riding”. This reminded me of the similar metaphor used by Gayatri Spivak attempting to explain deconstruction: “like riding a bicycle as slowly as you can without falling off.'

-- the above text and much of that below is taken from Simon Reynolds' very excellent post on No Wave at his blog.

The (incomplete) line up:


Bush Tetras 'Too Many Creeps' clip (3:58)



8-Eyed Spy

8-Eyed Spy: 'Not spelled Eight Eyed Spy as it is in the first UK edition (sigh). A great band, actually, especially doing cover versions: Creedence’s “Run Through The Jungle,” and also Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (Lydia was doing a lot of acid at that point) (c.f. Siouxsie Sioux, there’s a definite touch of Grace Slick to Lunch’s piercing Munch-lady vocals). “'Dead You Me Beside” , the least typical 8-Eyed song, is the best thing they did (it’s a joke title: it’s the B-side to the 7 inch single “Diddy Wah Diddy”), and sounds like a more composed version of Beirut Slump’s abjection s(pl)urge.'



The Contortions 'I Can't Stand Myself' live (4:17)

James Chance (The Contortions): "My attitude is anti-humanistic. i don’t basically care about the human race… I'm glad there's all the pollution and radiation and everything in America, 'cos i just want to see them all get killed off." NME, June 23 1979



Come On

Artist's Space festival: 'Before this epochal festival there had been a kind of dress rehearsal, a benefit for X magazine, on 12th March 1978—another crucial event in the genesis of No Wave.

Line up at Artists Space

Tuesday: The Communists/Terminal (a female synthesiser player who performed with the machine on a coffee table propped up by telephone books!)

Wednesday: Theoretical Girls/The Gynecologists (featuring Nina Canal later of Ut, and Rhys Chatham)

Thursday: Tone Death/Daily Life (the latter Barbara Ess's band before Y Pants, according to Robin Crutchfield)

Friday: DNA/Contortions

Saturday: Mars/Teenage Jesus and the Jerks Crutchfield believes that Jules' Baptiste's Red Decade and a group called Boris Policeband also played.'



Sonic Youth 'Death Valley '69' clip (5:45)



Dark Day

Arto Lindsay (DNA) on Dark Day (Robin Crutchfield): “He was gay and very ambiguous looking sexually and he was heavy. And he took a photo of himself with all these babies, little dolls, taped to his chest. And it was a really striking image, it appeared everywhere. Part of my notion was to make the most extreme group I could come up with—that this was the way to make it big.”



DNA live at the Mudd Club (10:46)

'Arto Lindsay’s primary motivation was to sound the opposite of Mars’ amorphous wall of clangour. “They were my best friends and it was my idea of a cool strategy to do something completely different, yet complementary to what they were doing.” Hence the sculptural, spiky, avant-funk sound of DNA.'



Futants



Lizzy Mercier Descloux 'Mais o Sont Gazelles?' clip (3:22)



Judy Nylon



Glenn Branca solo 1978 (1:59)



Mars

'Mars... first to form. Also the first to split up. “At one time we did talk about our evolution and described it as a countdown from 10 to 1. When we reached 1 the only direction was to start counting up again. Which could have happened, but didn’t”.'



Raybeats 'Jack the Ripper' clip (3:06)



Model Citizens

'Suicide should have been the American Kraftwerk. The parallels are striking: both bands shared roots in the mantra-minimalism of the Velvets and Stooges, both renounced guitars and groove for synths and metronomic beats, both shared a facility for hymnal melodies. But where Kraftwerk changed the face of European pop, siring everything from Moroder's electro-disco to synth-pop to techno-rave, Suicide collided with the brick wall of America's guitar-fixated, Luddite rockism. Singer Alan Vega and synth-man Martin Rev spent seven years languishing in Lower East Side sub-bohemia,interrupted by the occasional live performance to baffled, hostile audiences, before they got to cut their first record.'



Suicide 'Dream Baby Dream' clip (3:50)



Red Transistor

'The closest parallel for Teenage Jesus at this point was the regal-glacial hauteur and martial rhythms of their UK contemporaries Siouxsie and The Banshees, but specifically the incarnation of the band featuring McKay and Morris, as heard on The Scream and Join Hands. Compare Siouxsie’s suburban-relapse type lyrics with Lunch’s “I’m in a closet and I can’t breathe/Won’t you just please release me?/I can’t move and my kidneys fail/The size of this room feels like jail/I can’t talk I can’t enunciate/and I’m treated like Sharon Tate/Suburban wealth and middle class well being/All it did was strip my feelings.”'



Teenage Jesus & the Jerks 'Orphans' clip (2:28)



Rhys Chatham

Another No Wave influence: '“The Dada voice experiments, but more from imagining what they’d been like than actually hearing them!” Arto Linday is talking about the bruitisme and noise-poems of Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck and Kurt Schwitters, which can be heard on Futurism & Dada Reviewed, a compilation released by LTM. On the noise-poem “L’Amiral Cherche Une Maison A Louer”, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck unleash a polyphonic babble of multilingual nonsense, punctuated with circus-clown irruptions of rude noise, enough to get your blood boiling with excitement almost a century later. Kurt Schwitters’ life-long work-in-process “Die Sonate in Urlauten”, captured for posterity in 1938, is a tour de force of phonetic poetry, peppering your ears with flurries of phonemes and scattering consonants like confetti around your head.'



Wiseblood 'Motorslug live (9:10)



The Static

'Lounge Lizards were suffused in wry retro-neuvo tongue-in-chic humor: Lurie once declared that their music was “funny the way Jayne Mansfield’s breasts are funny”, then admitted “I’m not sure what that is though.” In another interview he declared of the Lounge Lizards’ music that “its defects are its qualities”. Lounge Lizards weren’t quite camp but they rubbed the spiritually earnest jazz custodians of the loft scene up the wrong way. “The ‘fake jazz’ quip haunted Lurie’s whole career,” says Glenn O’Brien. “But it wasn’t fake, they were historically grounded musicians drawing on Thelonius Monk and that whole Ornette Coleman area.”'



Lounge Lizards 'Dutch Schultz' live (2:50)



Ut



Swans 'A Screw' clip (3:30)

Optimo's No Wave mix tape:

'This mix isn't really a mix in the conventional sense but rather 14 No Wave tracks blended together. I'm going to give a bit of detail about each track on the mix for a change, so for those who like to just download and run, here's the tracklist. For anyone who wants to know a bit more, scroll down. This mix is 60.6mb and lasts approx. 44 minutes. Apologies to those on a 56k connection.'

Mars - 3E
DNA - You and You
Teenage Jesus and The Jerks - Freud In Flop
The Contortions - Contort Yourself
The Fire Engines - Get Up And Use Me
Blurt - Puppeteer
Tools You Can Trust - Show Your Teeth
Sonic Youth - Shaking Hell
8 Eyed Spy - Lazy In Love
Pulsallama - On The Rag
Arto / Neto - Pini, Pini
Y Pants - That's The Way Boys Are
ImpLOG - Breakfast
Jill Kroesen - Fay Shism Blues

Download and more info here.

About:
* New York No Wave Archive
* @ Wikipedia
* Thurston Moore and Byron Coley No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams Books)
* Marc Masters No Wave (Red Dog Books)

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