Lydia Lunch - The Aesthetics of Depravity

The story about to be told is one of art and depravity.

New York, 1976: generational malaise, the posthumous, illegitimate and rebellious offspring of flower-power hegemony, is taking shape, spawning new codes and new labels. Young people who, as if waking from an induced sleep, suddenly and traumatically find themselves staring straight into the eyes of a crumbling reality.

A counter-culture advances, howling and defiant against every call to order; its physical bearing is pained, emaciated, exactly like the gashes adorning its soul.

Spokespeople for this awakening and for a nihilistic refusal of any form of cultural conformity, they become figures within the scene born from the ashes of the Velvet Underground adventure, that restless and unsettling parenthesis of psychedelia: Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and the renegade prophet of the age, Lou Reed.

The new poets maudits become adolescent avatars, perfectly able to embody the sense of anguish and annihilation running through the younger generations.

This spark sets off some fascinating monsters: from that tense starting point, a whole fan of ways to express unease opens up, with correspondingly varied approaches to making music: from the raw, elemental proto-punk energy of the Ramones and the Reds to the pop-punk outcomes of A's; from the spectral, nocturnal decadence of Suicide, among the pioneers of the new wave era, to the debunking parody of Devo, from the theatre of the absurd staged by Pere Ubu, to the erudite experiments of Residents, passing through the stark essentialism of Tuxedomoon.

New York, 1978: like layers of soil gradually peeled back to reveal ever deeper fissures, this subversive charge doesn't burn out in two years; instead, it conceals an underground of modus vivendi et cogitandi pushed toward a form of extremism, at first almost unwitting, but which, as it unfolds, proves capable of self-determination and of transcending every rigid framework.

Investigator of the depths, proudly indifferent to any form of self-promotion, becomes Brian Eno, who, with the release of “No New York” (Antilles, 1978), frees from any self-referential parenthesis a swarm of artists, or would-be artists, left on the margins of New York's underground scene — musicians whose stylistic hallmark is atonality, noise, nervous breakdown, in some cases outright psychopathy. The champions of de-construction throw down a challenge to what might be called the traditional song structure, in favour of an open declaration of rage and hatred toward their own lived experience. The cultural humus from which these new heroes spring is that sub-proletariat which breeds true children of maladjustment, figures often on the verge of self-destruction; what takes shape is a sound with sharply defined urban contours, narrating depression, alienation, and the contradictions of a postmodern society irremediably doomed to become a victim of itself.

The protagonists of this negation of every trace of harmony, melody and order are Arto Lindsay, founder of Dna — in whose ranks also serves another of the era's most innovative spirits, Robin Lee Crutchfield — the Contortions, Mars, and Lydia Lunch.

Lydia is the very young mother of the No Wave movement, the elder sister of other extreme figures who, following parallel paths in other contexts, would go on to create characters with a distinctive musical identity as well as image: saxophonist Lora Logic and her partner in wild stage antics Poly Styrene, in the English group X-Ray Spex; the dark priestess with a voice opening onto a kaleidoscope of demonic shades, Diamanda Galas; women endowed with compelling charisma, despite lives marked by sexual use and abuse, attraction to drugs and alcohol, germinal forms of archaic-rooted neurosis, but also sensibilities shot through with a strong cerebral streak, which allowed them to write essential chapters in the history of avant-garde music and art.

Lydia Lunch took her first steps in music at just seventeen, in 1976, playing guitar and singing in Teenage Jesus And Jerks alongside saxophonist James Chance. The rebellious teenager immediately imposed her already well-defined, striking personality, becoming the group's leader as well as its lyricist; setting the rules of the game, she stamped the band with an aura of absolute rejection of the conventional, denouncing without any shame even the harshest of experiences. This willful attitude paid off: in 1979 Teenage Jesus And Jerks managed to release their self-titled album (reissued in 1996 by Ata under the title “Everything”), on which Lunch's voice becomes a harrowing scream over rhythms devoid of any linearity or lightness. The singing is, at times, a hysterical fit, the unbroken crying of an abused child, a will to vomit up every possible malaise, over distorted, screeching guitars still charged with punk energy.

The album unfolds across twelve tracks steeped in noise and pain: desperate denunciation in “Orphans”, pleading tears in “Closet”, over a guitar lost in desolate spirals; the playing-out of multiple selves, all belonging to one single, maladjusted I, in the drunken, delirious theatrical piece staged in “I Woke Up A Dreaming”; the disjointed, furious chant of horror in “Baby Doll” is counterbalanced by the deranged incursions into unknown territory of the instrumental “Race Mixing”, full of distortions that breed an uncertain psychedelia; the finale brings what are perhaps the album's sunniest moments: the divertissement punctuated by the neurotic, fluttering saxophone of “My Eyes” and the dynamic symbiosis of martial vocals and mocking sax in “Less Of Me”.

Lydia, restless and genetically unstable, driven by a vital need for experience — even the most extreme kind — had in 1978 met the little-known, deranged Bob Swope, a singer who, with not always happy results, tried to turn himself into her male alter ego, likewise playing the part of the child mistreated by God and the world and taken into the arms of a more understanding Jesus and the other “little brothers of torment”; the following year gave rise to the parallel project Beirut Slump, in which she plays guitar with taut tension, generating flashbacks of violent nightmares, as in the claustrophobic “Staircase”, the chilling declamations found on “Case#14”, the acid parades through the darkness of “See Pretty” — perhaps the clearest and most distinctive episode of a venture that, for its remaining handful of tracks, was destined to remain trapped in the shadow of Teenage Jesus And Jerks.

After the colourless parenthesis of Beirut Slump, Lydia realised she was now ready to record a solo album, one in which her vocal ability could shine on its own terms, purged of brazen, impulsive outbursts, so as to resonate thin, faint, beautifully broken and hypnotic. It was 1980 when, on Triple X, what can perhaps be considered her masterpiece was released — proof of her transition from sulky, hysterical girl to a woman capable of self-sedating and sedating others, as well as seducing and enchanting listeners beyond the strictly punk circuit from which she had emerged as a teenager, now also winking at certain jazz and blues cues: Queen Of Siam, made with Billy Ver Planck's orchestra, becomes a shadowy, murky and unrepeatable nuance that she gives to the history of music as well as to herself, finally freeing herself from the traps laid by specialists in cliché. The violence of her early years dissolves into the subtle cerebral quality of “Mechanical Flattery”, a beautiful opening track in which the child, having gotten through the necessary crying stage, sits down exhausted to recount what happened to her, against a backdrop of spare drums, saxophone sobs and a piano hiding behind its own reticence; a still-dazed vocal fills the space of a catatonic rhythm in “Tied And Twist”, a wavelength shared by “Los Banditos”, in which the tranquilliser's effect has worn off, leaving faint nervous twitches, delivered with the performance of a true femme fatale from some smoky jazz club; the mood turns confidential on “Carnival Fat Man”, a sparkling conversation between Lydia and the “fat carnival man”, laid out over an almost saloon-style accordion; the album comes full circle with “Blood Of Tin”, a restless and unsettling echo of the opening nightmare, a crescendo game of strings and horns.

Now determined to explore every musical territory with an increasingly mature touch, in 1981 Lydia founded 8 Eyed Spy, with whom she staged performances of adrenaline-fuelled rock, backed by a lineup of real pedigree: Pat Irwin on guitar, Jim Sclavunos on drums and ex-Contortions member George Scott on bass. The atmospheres of the tracks produced, despite opening up to sunnier rock'n'roll and blues ideas, are shot through with a feverish “devil inside” that remains the fundamental stylistic hallmark of her entire output, not only musical (Lydia would go on to experiment across the board: poetry, photography, and film, experiences just as well received and acclaimed). With 8 Eyed Spy, things move from the swaggering, good-humoured hard rock rides of “Diddy Wah Diddy”, “Love Split With Blood” and “Motor Oil Shanty” to the tones brimming with positive energy and anticipation of “Lazy In Love”, a beautifully realised synergy between voice and instrumentation, the record's gem; the notes stretch out in a wary version of “Run Through The Jungle”, dispensing visionary blues dominated by Irwin's muted sax; punk-rock nursery rhymes run through “Innocence”, pairing the saxophone with the climax of “I Want Candy”, a nervous stomp on the accelerator.

The compilation Hysterie, released on Widowspeak, the label Lydia founded in 1984, would gather, in 1986, the output of 8 Eyed Spy together with the Teenage Jesus And Jerks and Beirut Slump material.

In 1982, at the height of the dark-wave surge: Lydia, less of an aesthete than Siouxsie, more brazen than Diamanda Galas, gives birth to a new, oppressed creature — with the remaining Weirdos she records 13.13, an airless, depressed parenthesis. If, instrumentally, the album offers sufficiently dark déjà-vu, it grants the vocals, by contrast, their deserved space: sinuous ballads wrapped around the bass (“The Side Of Nowhere”), alternating with blind spiral staircases leading down to hell (the funereal “Snakepit Breakdown”); stream-of-consciousness expansions in the evanescent “Suicide Ocean” and in the slowed syncopations of “Lock Your Door”, both premonitions of certain Dead Can Dance atmospheres.

That same year, a constructive London jaunt produced collaborations with genuinely sinister effects: Lydia recorded The Agony Is The Ecstasy, an atmospheric, sulphurous track nearly 20 minutes long, with Steve Severin of Siouxsie And The Banshees on guitar.

Lydia's attraction to darkness is a point of no return. With In Limbo, a 1984 record enriched by Thurston Moore's bass, the descent into murkiness continues, dissolving into hypnotic ecstasy (“I Wish I Wish”), an icy declamation in mechanical lockstep between bass, drums and sax (“1000 Lies”), the sway of a listless body and a dazed head, with a saxophone tracing its contours in the air (the exquisite “Still Burning”).

That same year Lydia took part in the Death Valley 69 project by Sonic Youth, also appearing in the devastating video of the same name.

What followed was an experiment on piano and guitar in Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton, together with ex-Mars member Lucy Hamilton, cited in the title, on guitar and bass clarinet, an instrument that makes the whole thing even more spectral. The result is sonic thunderstorms (“Emerald Pale Has Disappeared”), cerebral whirls in apparent stillness (“How Men Die In Their Sleep”), blurred flashes alternating with sharper frames of anguished dreams (“A Quiet Night Of Murder In”).

1987, besides Honeymoon In Red, an album born from her 1982 collaboration with the Birthday Party of fellow damned soul Nick Cave, containing a viscous, crepuscular version of Nancy Sinatra's “Some Velvet Morning”, also opens with the scandalous Stinkfist, whose title track is a delirious journey into sexual drive, a blend of moans and electronic sounds that shamelessly stage intercourse between Lydia and Foetus, aka Clint Ruin, her partner at the time. A sulphurous sheen coats the record, concentrated entirely in the intense simulated orgasm that closes “Meltdown Oratorio”.

After a collaboration with Kim Gordon, traces of which can be found in Naked In Garden Hills, Lydia returns to record a solo album in 1991, joined by former Birthday Party member Rowland Howard. Shotgun Wedding, while still tinted with the usual noir, offers a breath of fresh air after her latest, most extreme experiments. The vocals fall back into line, lucid and self-aware, giving shape to a grey-toned rock, at times intimate ("In My Time Of Diyng"), dark duets ("Endless Fall"), bass-and-guitar echoes of Cure ("What Is Memory?"), and tortured introspection verging on gothic ("Incubator"). The closer ("Black Juju") brings just the right dose of dynamism to the whole album, with a sharp, lean use of instruments, energized by percussion lurking in the background.

The early 1990s unfold through a series of spoken-word productions, in which the focus turns to burning issues like the Gulf War on P.O.W. in 1992 — a discourse that broadens and deepens on the triple album Crimes Against Nature, released the following year.

In 1998 Matrikamantra was recorded, though it wouldn't see release until three years later: an evocative work shot through with understated jazz ("Inverted Dream-World Of Whispers"), sensual sleepwalking narrated by piano ("Psychic Anthropology"), cerebral electronic confessions hemmed in by restrained drumming ("Escape- Desease Of The Night"), but also profane flamenco hailing Cagliostro ("Solo Mystico-Vortex"), subterranean electric shocks disrupting its seeming linearity ("Lethe-Hermones") and apocalyptic closers ("Archives Of Blood-Exit").

The venture into uncharted sonic territory continues with Champagne, Cocaine And Nicotine, a mini-album recorded with Anubian Lights in 2002. The record skilfully blends her voice — low and insinuating as ever — with spacey, dreamlike electronic interludes ("Stains") and ironic, reverb-drenched tangos that would later be remixed ("Potato Tango").

Smoke In The Shadows (2004) is her first solo album of the new millennium, a vessel for the most disparate and skilfully crafted ideas, confirming her extraordinary versatility and openness to the new. Lydia sounds more relaxed, perfectly at ease playing the sly jazz-singer ("Johnny Behind The Duece"), a queen cat duly attended by a chorus of handmaiden kittens ("I Love How You"), taking the lead through psychedelic funk ("Lost World"), breathless, evanescent reggae ("Sway"), a trip-hop excursion in the vein of Massive Attack ("Blame"), acid hip-hop ("Trick Baby") and visceral forays into world music ("Hot Tip").

In Big Sexy Noise, a name that serves as both title and musical manifesto for the project, Lunch takes a journey back into lost noise, alongside other veterans of the great alternative-rock season of the '90s — namely three-quarters of Gallon Drunk: James Johnston on guitar, Ian White on drums and Terry Edwards on organ and sax.

First of all, there's the blues: tar-black, dazed by horns and metropolitan carbon monoxide. Then there's punk, the most theatrical kind, close to performance art: Lunch's delivery, her voice ever lower, glassy, cracked. Finally, there's noise: distortion, fuzz as foamy and festering as an overflowing sewer, the barbed wire of feedback, the almost-free sax that slashes across the monolithic riffs and plays counterpoint to Lunch, the school of no wave and Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon co-wrote a good part of the tracks).

A fury that strikes, sexy, ironic, foul-mouthed, with "Another Man Coming", punctuated by snapping rhythms almost in rap time; it takes on jazzy, noir tones on the hypnotic "Bad For Bobby" and builds into a sort of hyperrealistic blues-doom on the mighty "Baby Faced Killer" and the one-act monologue of "Your Love Don't Pay My Fuckin' Rent". Then there's the "lived-in" cover of Lou Reed's "Kill Your Sons": when Lunch delivers – her voice harsh and ravaged like the veins of a seasoned addict – “(…) but when you shoot you up with thorazine on/ crystal smoke/ you choke/ like a son of a gun”, she who has herself flirted more than once with madness and psychiatric wards, it sends genuine chills down your spine.

Were it not for a few stylistic missteps (the anthemic, full-throated street-punk of "Digging The Hole" and "That Smell"), Big Sexy Noise would be a truly flawless record.

The second chapter of the Big Sexy Noise project, Trust The Witch (2011), is its most aggressive and brazen incarnation: Lunch sheds the guise of the call girl and, decked out in studs, fishnets and latex gloves, prowls the night hungry for sex and dissolution. There's no window dressing, no foreplay: "Ballin' The Jack" and "Cross The Line" are pure hardcore delirium, with Edwards' sax reduced to short, maddened shrieks and Lunch spitting obscenities in her darkest, most malevolent shades.

There's no resisting the New York witch when she then tries to seduce us with two sultry blues numbers like "Won't Leave You Alone" and "Trust The Witch" — at that point, surrender is total. "Got a thousand ways to torture you/ a hundred ways to make you cry", she warns us right after on "Devil's Working Overtime", but more than a threat, it's an inviting erotic proposition the listener simply cannot turn down: once moral judgment is suspended, the word "perversion" loses all meaning.

So, amid roaring garage rock and lustful slow-downs, we arrive at "Forever On The Run", the summa of the record and a fresh statement of intent from Lunch: the mud is left behind, she climbs back on the motorcycle, heading into the night toward new depravities. It's the rawest, most carnal side of the listener that the album tries to provoke, as profane as a blasphemy, as instinctive and liberating as an orgasm.

In June 2014 came A Fistful Of Desert Blues, which revives the partnership between Lydia Lunch and Cypress Grove (Tony Chmelik), the British musician who worked alongside Jeffrey Lee Pierce between the late '80s and early '90s. A collaboration born in 2006 specifically to pay tribute to the work of the late, great Gun Club frontman, when Chmelik assembled an "all-star cast" (Nick Cave, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop and many others, Lunch among them) for his "Jeffrey Lee Pierce Session Project".

While musically the backdrop is rooted in Pierce's tormented, restless blues, thematically the "desert" where the duo's poems come to life unfolds on the other side of the Atlantic: it's the Spanish region of Almeria, backdrop to countless westerns, that inspires the whole record — a fascination with the Iberian peninsula that's no accident, given that Lydia has been living in Barcelona for about a decade.

The tracks on A Fistful Of Desert Blues are built on a framework starring Lunch's raspy voice and Chmelik's guitar, but there's no shortage of rarefied passages entrusted with the most intense moments — "pauses" that bring to mind Sergio Leone's close-ups and the tension generated by his inscrutable faces. The blues of Lydia and Cypress Grove takes many forms: lunar ballads (the born-to-lose love recounted in "When You're Better"), desert folk ("Devil Winds", "Revolver", "Beautiful Liar"), building up to a small twilight-western epic ("I'll Be Damned", "Jericho").

The finale is reserved for the more "restless" tracks, where the passion of his inspirer Jeffrey Lee Pierce resonates more than ever. And the story doesn't end there, poised to carry on fruitfully, prodding us toward the reflection that, sometimes, flowers really do grow from dung, where maladjustment becomes the distinctive mark of a personality and a modus vivendi openly declared and worn with pride: there's no scandal here, hitting rock bottom has simply been recounted brilliantly.

The follow-up, Twin Horses, released the following year, also features Rome's Spiritual Front.

Among the many more recent solo works, at least Marchesa deserves a mention, a personal tribute to De Sade made together with Stefano Rossello of Rustblade. With the sulphurous grin of a Vincent Price who's just downed a shot of burning tar, Lunch unleashes her graceless rasps over a spectral broth of electronic MSG, at times brushing up against Lustmord-style dark-ambient, at times embracing a certain synthetic vintage à-la Wendy Carlos, taking care to grate every consonant with the merciless intensity of a remorseless executioner. The opening salvo of this grand guignol is so guttural it would make Tom Waits on "The Black Rider" look pale by comparison, with the rest being half an hour of business-as-usual spoken word. Dear old DAF, we're sure, would have approved.

Many thanks to Martino Lorusso for his invaluable and constant encouragement.

Contributions by Simone Coacci ("Big Sexy Noise"), Roberto Rizzo ("Trust The Witch"), Lorenzo Pagani ("A Fistful Of Desert Blues"), Ossydiana Speri ("Twin Horses", "Marchesa")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google