No wave

New York City, May 1978. Soho's Artists Space hosts a series of benefit concerts featuring several groups of musicians morbidly drawn to the free jazz of Albert Ayler, the avant-garde experiments of Glenn Branca, Philip Glass and Charlemagne Palestine, the funk of James Brown, the garage rock of the Stooges, and the newly established punk fashion inspired by the look of Richard Hell. This blend of influences gives rise to a musical genre that, until then, had no name, one that makes violence, noise and dissonance its banner.

The “non-musician” Brian Eno, in town to help finish post-production on the second Talking Heads record, gets the chance to see these artists perform live and is so struck by them that he decides to capture their nihilistic, iconoclastic spirit on vinyl. Contortions, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Mars and DNA are the groups chosen to hand down to history one of the great, unrepeatable masterpieces of 20th-century music: the compilation “No New York”, a seminal work steeped in rage and terror, pushing toward a repulsive sublimation of the very concept of “music”.

The recording sessions for what would become the manifesto of No Wave took place at Big Apple Studios in Manhattan during the spring of ’78. The heavy burden of opening the album falls to Contortions, who, through spastic sonic incursions borrowed from free jazz and funk, carry out a brutal dismantling of melody. The nightmare has begun, “the doors are closing”, and there's no turning back. The sinister atmospheres pervading the music of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks worm their way into the listener's unconscious, priming them to face their own destruction, while Mars accompanies them with leaden, unsettling sounds on this journey to the end of the night, one that finds its epilogue in the schizophrenic delirium of DNA. Arto Lindsay's group closes the album with four memorably cacophonous tracks, charged with adrenaline and an unbearable sense of unease, savaging the listener's corpse with ruthless ferocity.

The music contained in “No New York” is, to this day, so innovative that any attempt to pin it down to specific historical, social or artistic movements proves futile: the ferocity sketched by the wails of James Chance's saxophone, the unease expressed by the chilling howls of Lydia Lunch, poetess of the underworld and urban decay, the atonal squalor of Sumner Crane's theatrical vocals, and the epileptic fervor refracted through Arto Lindsay's twelve-string Danelectro all embody chronic paranoias intrinsic to the human soul, which, stripped of context by an anarchic rejection of conformism, make the album an immortal work.

The compilation was released in November 1978 by Antilles, an Island affiliate, but was met with a negative response from both audiences and critics, who called it “inaccessible and inhuman”. In truth, “No New York” irrevocably upended the orthodox approach to music, elevating its noise component to a subject worthy of interest; this shift in focus would prove to be one of the most important insights in the history of rock since the self-titled debut of Velvet Underground & Nico, and would find followers among some of the most important and influential musicians of the Eighties, from John Zorn to Sonic Youth, from the Swans to Pussy Galore.

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16/03/2006