No Wave for Dummies

In 1978, rebellion was a word on everyone's lips, its meaning taken for granted, its iconography already fixed, while its leading champions savored the intoxication of popularity and ever-larger crowds, effectively leaving the underground - sonic and otherwise - an empty space with no points of reference, even as it throbbed, saturated with potential. There was an urgency to restore a deeper, almost existential meaning to that word. A meaning all too often defined by its grotesque absence.

It arose as a physiological necessity, the NO season, as an irritated response to these and other demands, which musically could only translate into an alternative to what the scene was offering: punk and new wave, however far apart, share a single, multi-faceted lack: a serious and radical challenge to commercialization, to a philosophical subversion that had dozed off into anti-systemic clichés and reassuring statements of intent. In music, to the song-form itself.

The no-wavers lived out this condition free of any slogans: starting with the first legendary live show at Artists' Space, where even the names of the performers vanished, replaced on the bill by a disorienting "bands." Its architects were non-musicians (no reference here is accidental) with literary and performative artistic aspirations and no clear path forward, who, coming into contact with the vital New York music scene of the time, found themselves as illuminated freaks ready to dismantle rock from its very guts, using its own tools, with minimalists and noisers of every stripe in mind. In a way, it was the most shameless provocation ever hurled at the unchallenged trinities of verse-bridge-chorus and bass-guitar-drums.

For those who catch a whiff of the darkest nihilism, it might help to cite a famous anecdote featuring Lydia Lunch, poetess of many perverse appetites and undisputed godmother of the phenomenon: "Nihilist? The whole fucking country was nihilist. Where do you think we came from? The great lie of the summer of love, Charles Manson, the Vietnam War. Where's the positive in that? Am I supposed to be some fucking positive person? Fuck you! If you want positivity, go look for it somewhere else. Go find yourself another lie instead."

Is no-wave, then, a movement? James Chance and many of his cohorts would recoil in horror at the definition. No-wave has more to do, perhaps, with a "feeling," a movement of negation against every narrowly defined code, digging out a terrible meaning close to the chronic ambivalence of all human expression and, as such, capable of secretly crossing the boundaries of scene and genre. It's no surprise, then, to find its symptoms in seemingly distant territories, like disco music, in its darker and more unpredictable shades later known as "mutant," and above all in the funky catalog of Ze Records, which would host many of the NO protagonists alongside a sizeable crew of "borderline" names, from the tropicalisms of Kid Creole to the naive-funk of Lizzy Mercier Descloux.

No-wave is therefore an act of refusal and negation that is also, necessarily, linguistic. And it's perhaps no coincidence, as Marc Masters has suggested, that its death coincided with the exact moment it was named, finished, probably already at those very meetings held to decide on a title for the famous Eno-produced compilation: No New York.

Let's try, then, to sum up this non-movement by (non)definition, in ten essential albums.

James Chance & The Contortions – Buy (1979, ZE Records)

Formed with David Hofstra, Don Christensen and Jody Harris, the Contortions are James Chance's first incarnation, an exception among his no-wave contemporaries for being the only one to master an instrument at a near-academic level – that alto sax being his main vehicle of expression and an indispensable part of his aesthetic, which also includes a considerable number of Brylcreem jars and full-on brawls he personally started with his own audience. The first album of a short and uneven saga, "Buy" is the outstanding manifesto of this music devoted to disintegration: sped-up, ungainly funk rhythms, basslines pumped up front, assorted noise, and Chance's sax laying into everything with hints of the most extreme free-jazz (Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler are among the palpable influences). The album's nine tracks – plus three more taken from a live set at CBGB's – are so many miniatures of an agitated, pathologically paranoid psyche, torn between nihilistic urges neurotically spat out ("Design To Kill", "Throw Me Away") and improbable sensual surrenders ("Anesthetic"), which are really scraps of erotic provocation morbidly granted and withheld at once. The album also includes "Contort Yourself", probably the best-known tour de force of the bunch, an invitation to erase every inhibition and cultural norm and to twist perversely in a game with no tomorrow that burns through pain and pleasure in a single stroke. Probably the most explicit and extreme statement of the entire no-wave scene. Having delivered "Buy", James Chance would perform yet another acrobatic contortion and transform into James White, the alias under which he would record "Off White" just a few months later, an album that delves deeper into funkier, more sensual tones, featuring a cameo from Lydia Lunch (who, incidentally, was briefly involved with Chance). The Contortions, meanwhile, with wildly different line-ups, would only resurface in 1991 ("Soul Exorcism") and 2000 ("White Cannibal").

DNA – A Taste Of DNA (1981, American Clavé)

Arto Lindsay is certainly one of no-wave's most prominent intellectuals. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Arto spent many years in Brazil before moving to New York, where, drawn in by the intense artistic and musical ferment of the Lower East Side, he founded DNA in 1978 together with keyboardist Robin Crutchfield. With Japanese drummer Ikue Mori brought on board, the trio found a place on the landmark "No New York", eventually releasing an EP only three years later, by which point Crutchfield had already gone his own way (in 1980 he had put out another essential no-wave text, "Exterminating Angel"). With ex-Pere Ubu man Tim Wright brought in to replace him, Lindsay could finally unleash his "negative" guitar art in full, screeching skeletally over the asymmetrical gallop of "New Fast", cackling metallically and abrasively through the hiccuping ritualism of "5:30", and coiling neurosis around the skittering pow-wow of "Blonde Redhead". Adding the finishing touch is that voice, at once listless and hallucinated, which Lindsay lets ring out almost as a symbol of icy detachment from a reality too ugly to be true. By contrast, Mori's jittery drumming and Wright's round bass tone still betray strong traces of an increasingly universal "modern dance". The tracks are short, sometimes extremely so (ranging from the fifty-three seconds of "32123" – a martial funk that keeps rummaging through itself, blinded by darkness – to the two minutes fifty of "New New", the summa of their anarchic digressions), but DNA needs very little, in the end, to stir up the waters and leave an indelible mark, not before bidding us farewell with the cursed suspense of "Lying On The Sofa Of Life", a slow descent into hell or a listless climb back up to the streets of New York (which, in the end, amounts to the same thing...).

Mars – Mars Ep (1980, Infidelity)

Nihilistic symphonies. The sound of underground New York, the one made of sewers and rats, blood-stained needles and the stench of piss. Sumner Crane (guitar, vocals), Nancy Arlen (drums), China Burg (guitar, vocals) and Mark Cunningham (bass, vocals) are responsible for this quarter-hour of monotone impulses, guitars proceeding by drilling motions and slide-motion derailments (no chords, only transfigurations of chords, atonal sketches at best), dyslexic drum patterns and subhuman howls-retches-splutterings. These fifteen minutes were recorded live in December '78, at a completely empty Max's Kansas City, because the show had already ended about an hour earlier. It was released with packaging that was spartan to say the least, deepening the mystery around a band that never missed a chance to display its nihilistic attitude. An attitude that came back fully intact the moment the needle began tracing the vinyl's grooves, stumbling first into "N.N. End", which, having thrown open the gates of hell, staggers forward lost, as if wanting to reveal to us that the monstrous derangement of the psyche that produced it will be the imminent future awaiting each one of us. After all, anguish is the very substance these nightmares are made of. "Scorn" then guides us through degenerate industrial pulses, alien primitivism, harmonic dissociations; "Outside Africa" plays the card of a lumbering ritual staged in the middle of chaos, where a female voice can at best sketch out some deformed litany, some hermetic mumbling. A clumsy drumming, meanwhile, leads the dance in "Monopoly", while "The Immediate Stages Of Erotic" warps their vision even further, abandoning us in the middle of a perpetual, spastic radiation. It's their most outrageous moment, the one in which the uprooting of rock's very substance is taken to the point of paroxysm. From here, the step toward the worst sonic disfigurements would be a short one...

Teenage Jesus & The Jerks – Everything (1995, Atavistic)

Led by her depraved majesty Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks were in many ways the paradigmatic emblem of the NO era. Much of the personalities orbiting around the Jerks, Lunch included, built their style and compositional attitude on conscious "academic" incompetence, as a key to challenging punk-rock's mannerist clichés, from the established notion of playing as "skill and craft" to the attendant stadium-rock liturgies: Teenage Jesus scraped beer cans, shards of glass and knives across their slides and unleashed brief, orgiastic bursts of noise, in shows that lasted on average ten minutes or so. Formed in 1976 with a line-up that initially also included James Chance and drummer Bradley Field, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, during their active years, only released scattered singles for Migraine and Ze Records, starting with the programmatic "Orphans": nihilistic, aggressive on every possible level, as disturbing as almost anything heard up to that point, made even more unsettling by the fact that the voice belongs to a disjointed seventeen-year-old girl who has already seen it all. The group was among those championed by Eno for the "No New York" compilation, but by then Teenage Jesus had already ceased to exist, burning out as instantly as their own songs: what would remain were a handful of side projects and, above all, the towering personality of Lydia Lunch, who carried the band's gospel forward in a more lasting and coherent way. The band's scattered EPs would only be gathered, in 1995, into the (naturally) very short compilation "Everything", curated by Atavistic.

Glenn Branca – Ascension (1981, 99 Records)

One of the great minds of his era, Glenn Branca crossed paths with the no-wave experience as early as the late Seventies, when he was leading Theoretical Girls. The insights of that project, launched in 1978 together with Jeffrey Lohn, would be refined by the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania guitarist on this record, released by 99 Records in 1981. "Ascension" is a treatise in noise maximalism that resembles a classical composition more than a rock record. Walls of guitars (four of them, to be precise: alongside Branca, David Rosenbloom, Lee Ranaldo and Ned Sublette all take part) generate "sonic" explosions and layerings, counterpoints and cyclical progressions chasing each other in an endless hall of mirrors, while Stephan Wischerth's drums and Jeffrey Glenn's bass geometrize and defuse things whenever needed. Almost retracing the preparatory groundwork of the first EP, "Lesson no. 2" offers an atonal, pulsing variant of his investigations, essentially conjuring out of nowhere a sound that, in effect, invents Sonic Youth. "The Spectacular Commodity", on the other hand, builds its structure with calculated incisiveness: first, a continuous, thrilling churning, then a slow and grating triangulation of strings and harmonics conversing across different octaves, propped up by a railroading drum pattern that pushes toward a climax seemingly bound to collapse, at any moment, into a disastrous harmonic chaos. Instead, the ride keeps building toward an ever more epic, anthemic finale. Glacial and detached, claustrophobic and charged with horror-movie tension is, then, the universe that "Structure" delivers as an interlude, paving the way for the hypnotic gallop of "Light Fields (In Consonance)", all a game of running exchanges and micro-variations that, second by second, sketch out yet another symphonic panorama ascending skyward with exponential grandiloquence. The title track, finally, holds the ending you don't expect: a distillate of cosmic ecstasy that keeps teetering on the edge of the stars' abyss, crossing Wagnerian saturations and once again unleashing minimalist turmoil and stunning conflagrations, but this time from a completely "transcendental" vantage point. Almost Zen applied to noise.

Alan Vega – Alan Vega (1980, ZE Records)

Cited by many as the primary and original architect of the entire no-wave aesthetic, Alan "Vega" Bermowitz emerges from the synthetic nightmares of Suicide dressed as an alienated rockabilly balladeer. The single "Jukebox Babe" and the other seven tracks released in 1980 on the self-titled debut album pick up the dialogue with rock-blues architecture, but bend it into a restless, never too accommodating shape, with the nihilistic ghost of Suicide always lurking in the background. Vega presents himself as a sort of post-industrial Elvis on tranquilizers, his songs are rockabilly sketches thick with echoes, reverb and drum machines, his lyrics fiercely hallucinated urban fragments: even the seemingly more crowd-pleasing moments – the rock'n'roll of "Speedway" and "Fireball", the sensual "Love Cry", the pathetic sentimentality of "Lonely" – constantly move under the sign of an underlying nervousness, surfacing as rumbling basslines, jittery synths and semi-psychotic vocals. The speeding psychedelic rush of "Bye Bye Bayou", meanwhile, brilliantly sums it all up in eight minutes teetering on the edge of ultimate delirium, which, instead of a liberating detonation, fizzles out into a kind of muffled implosion. Also known as no-wave for definitively emptied-out nostalgia.

"Alan Vega" would be completed the following year by its companion piece "Collision Drive".

Half Japanese – 1/2 Gentlemen Not Beasts (1979, Armageddon)

Half Japanese's music, even before punk, had already absorbed and processed that iconoclastic lesson, going beyond it in a way so revolutionary it approaches an epileptic version of abstract "lo-fi", yet with an intellectual bent. Music that revels in chaos, that reckons, one way or another, with the Shaggs, with master Van Vliet, with the Stooges (the "Raw Power" version), with Jackson Pollock's "exploded" palettes, with the Velvet Underground (a freeze-dried "Sister Ray"), and, why not, with free-jazz's explorations at the very limits of psychic automatism. David and Jad Fair, brothers who grew up in a small town in southern Michigan, couldn't have known it at the time, but they were essentially already beyond punk, already beyond new-wave, in a territory with no borders, where there are no "waves", only the flat calm of boredom, the mocking sneer of an ignorance that demotes art to pure, agonizing ejaculation. No-wave? "No", full stop. The triple album "1/2 Gentlemen Not Beasts" is one of the most extreme outposts in all of rock music. The origin of many, many things. A black hole of sonic nonsense, harmonic lobotomies, idiotic lyrics and insistent pollution, alienating minimalism, covers raped without a shred of restraint (drawn from the catalogues of Buddy Holly, Modern Lovers, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, etc.), because their essence hides deep down and you'll never track it down just by circling around it without ever landing the blow. Fifty non-songs, fifty mini-frescoes of a generation teetering on the edge of the abyss, courtesy of two bespectacled nerds who, rather than rewriting or dismantling the rules, simply decided to ignore them. The result is a radical, neurasthenic jumble of anarchic triumphs. Some of the song titles alone speak volumes, for that matter. A few examples? "Shhh/Shhh/Shhh", "Rrrrrrrr", "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr", "Tn Tn Tn Tn Ki", “Bbbbbbbb / Bbbbbbbb / Bbbbbbbb”, and so on. You have to understand them: they were bored kids.

Liquid Liquid – Liquid Liquid (1997, Mo Wax)

New Yorkers with an anti attitude, like almost everyone else involved in this story, Liquid Liquid built, with their slim discography, a kind of bridge between the atonal cacophony of the earliest no-wavers and the different (yet, in meaning, quite similar) dissidence-in-disguise that was starting to stir at the time in slightly more popular territory - David Byrne's ethno-wave neuroses above all, but also the disco-funk impulses responsible for an ever-growing number of crossovers with the art-rock world, unthinkable just a little while before. Liquid Liquid's music, for a long time a niche delight for the few who owned the five EPs released on 99 Records between 1980 and 1984, stands out above all for its near-total removal of guitars, replaced by a more "minimalist" marimba, the only melodic voice in a landscape otherwise crowded exclusively with basses and percussion. The voice of charismatic frontman Sal Principato is no exception: restless, it emphasizes the rhythmic side and the powerful groove of every track with yelps and wild lines that point straight back to Byrne's Remain In Light, with the band frequently urging crowds to bring their own percussion from home or to bang on whatever object was within reach during the performance. This music would go on to exert an unexpected influence on certain strands of hip-hop to come (just listen to the seminal "Cavern"), surviving only on specialist compilations until the vital 1997 reissue on Mo Wax of the "Liquid Liquid" collection, gathering three of the band's EPs ("Optimo", "Successive Reflexes", "Liquid Liquid") along with some live excerpts from Berkeley Square.

Golden Palominos – The Golden Palominos (1983, Celluloid)

Gathered around Anton Fier, already a veteran of legendary outfits like Pere Ubu and Feelies, a handful of musicians largely tied to the no-wave experience came together in 1983: among others, Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell, Fred Frith, Nicky Skopelitis and John Zorn. Golden Palominos represent a sonic experience that, refining the lessons of Material and Massacre, runs through - and stirs together in an intellectualist melting pot (which also puts to good use some techniques borrowed from the young hip-hop scene) - funk, free jazz and New York-style rock experimentalism (the "negative" lesson is, of course, very much present in the background). The peak of the project is undoubtedly this self-titled debut, dominated by Fier's acrobatic, untamed drumming (which triumphs in the hysterical frame of "Cookout") and by Laswell's monumental fretless bass, the load-bearing cores of an all-consuming sound continually assaulted by a whole series of horn-driven jeers and raids, disorienting effects, alienating guitar flashes and turntable scratches. Lindsay's apathetic, cutting voice, already present on the opening "Clean Pate", does the rest. It's a voice monstrously disfigured by electronics through the asymmetrical weave of "Hot Seat", besieged by increasingly jagged free-jazz vertigo. On "Under The Cap", the drums' relentless, tribal geometry finds an irreverent counterpoint in the duel-duet between a squawking sax and grotesque vocalizing. Solemn and elastic, the mutant body of "Monday Night" draws in a swarm of sonic acrobatics, while both "I.D." and "Two Sided Fist" play the repetition card to amplify the sense of alienation. A record to be enjoyed with both mind and body.

Track: "Monday Night".

Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Mambo Nassau (1981, ZE Records)

Within the NO economy, Lizzy Mercier Descloux's music is the unrepeatable result of a series of coincidences and astral conjunctions unique in their combination. Born and raised between Lyon and Paris, where she earned her art diploma, after striking up a genuine friendship with Patti Smith and Richard Hell and contributing substantially to the growth of the French new wave scene (the magazine "Rock News" was born from one of her ideas), in 1977 she decided, together with her partner Michel Esteban, to try her luck in New York, where she immediately found a special kinship with the NO movement. A self-taught guitarist, Lizzy, alongside Esteban, was the founder of ZE Records, an essential reference point for the whole no-wave scene and a pioneer of the most funk-oriented crossovers. After the release of the mysterious "Press Color", featuring an irreverent cover of the Little Willie John classic, renamed "Tumor", all of Little Lizzy's class is fully on display on her second album, recorded in the Bahamas. "Mambo Nassau" pushes the no-wave coordinates toward strangely warm and colorful latitudes, a mixed-blood intoxication of powerful grooves, ecstatic vocalizing and ahead-of-its-time worldbeat impulses, an impetuous crossover that effectively folds in references as disparate as Nino Rota, Bob Marley and Kool & The Gang (the irresistible disco-funk of "Funky Stuff"). Increasingly drawn to world sounds, Lizzy would vanish for a long stretch into Africa, absorbed in studying the musical fusions of Soweto. She later withdrew into private life in Corsica, working on a novel that was never published, and where she died prematurely in 2003. Of cancer, not without a note of the most excruciating irony.

Photo at the top of the article: Robert Longo, from the series "Men In The Cities", 1979 NY.

Home: Barbara Kruger, "Sex Lure".

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