No wave

Intro

The no wave was born around two New York neighborhoods, the East Village and SoHo. It's here that Brian Eno found a practical application of his own proverbial maxim about the first fans of that “Velvet Underground & Nico” (1967) produced by Andy Warhol himself (“[…] each one of those 30,000 who bought it started a band”), as well as of his “Oblique Strategies” (1975) concerning the theory of the “non-musician.” The result of his research is a compilation, “No New York” (1979), which samples some of the few but legendary remnants of an underground scene of penniless bands living in the metropolis's shadow – Mars, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, DNA and James Chance & The Contortions (as well as Gynecologists and Theoretical Girls, left out of the count) – yet destined to prove fundamentally important to the subsequent development of rock music.
New York, then, is the cradle, but from here the movement gradually expands across space and time, transforming, evolving, broadening, here and there even normalizing itself, proving in any case to be a phenomenon of far wider scope than the common reading that would have it as a niche genre or, worse, an ephemeral trend that soon imploded on itself. And beyond its historiographical and artistic merits, we should also rediscover the aesthetic fascination that has always accompanied the genre, that dark pang that grips the listener when they come across the term “no wave” (the first to define it as such was Lydia Lunch), that shiver induced by the imagery of emptiness, of an extreme frontier beyond the known.
Even if never truly flaunted (and least of all in a political sense), the sweeping negation inherent to the genre is thus the idea at its very core, and it affects both the musical aspects and the underlying intentions. Despite the common ground – the rebellious youthful drive and the denunciation of post-industrial alienation – both new wave, suddenly reduced to a disjointed fragment devoid of real meaning, and punk, peremptorily collapsed into stumbling cadences and repellent screams, are negated, both suddenly relegated to the realm of obsolete, ineffective tools. Chords and riffs are negated, shredded into piercing cacophonies or reduced to a slap of pure noise; groove is negated, reduced to a horrifying arrhythmia or – on the contrary – pushed and insisted upon to the point of bad taste, and so on, threshing everything else, from melody to the entire arrangement. Thus form and composition are withered down to a substandard sketch, and structure shrunk to a subatomic particle.
The practice of no wave certainly also affects the staging, the image that has always gone hand in hand with rock music. The glitter, poses and stage sets that exploded with glam are entombed in an impersonal, almost expressionless, almost funereal demeanor. The icon of the musician-as-star, which had survived until then and was constantly renewed, vanishes – from the point of view of the “no” musicians it reeks of clownish theatrics – and another one appears in its place, of opposite sign, drawn just as it is from the bare, grey bedrooms of the metropolitan suburbs, better suited to a deep immersion into the unconscious underbelly of reality. Stripped in this way of exhibitionist trappings, the music – while still retaining the power of the body – loses its fetishism precisely where it gains mental depth, as if setting out to expose the most perverse side of a collective psychoanalytic session, pushing its most wildly libidinal, even animalistic aspects to the extreme. Simplifying, no wave aims to combine desperation and entertainment.

Through the negation of any academicism (the “no” musicians are also extraordinary forerunners of the lo-fi to come), one then goes back, discovering it as if for a new first time, to a primal stage of making music. The records and live sets last an average of a quarter of an hour, the tracks are dry, tense, neurotic, convulsive, concise; they are unopened cells of terrifying frustration, the typical nucleus waiting to be detonated: no wave does for noise-rock what blues did for rock tout-court. The rest, meaning the musicological and sociological implications, follows close behind. Through the piercing, sordid yet visceral din, in an ever more intense movement from outside to inside, the cosmos of music criticism, the audience, all of society, and finally the psyche, the Self, are erased. In few other genres does this inextricable link between individual, musician, social bearing and art persist; in few other cases can one admire such authenticity in accurately documenting – at once hyperrealistic and expressionistic – the deep psychosocial terror of the “kid” in the monstrous, gargantuan city, at once arid and ever more indifferent.
Not least is the scene's sudden fertility, both in a multidisciplinary sense (spreading from music to performance art, photography, cinema), and in a prophetically temporal sense, a creative ferment born of a crisis situation destined to recur with chilling promptness starting from the late 2000s.

The context and the sources

The first half of the 1970s was the darkest period for the United States since 1929. A string of calamitous events – the dollar crisis (1971), the energy crisis (1973), the Watergate scandal (1974) and the political-military defeat in Vietnam (1975) – combined to deal a mortal blow to the economy, quality of life, socio-cultural vitality and the collective imagination of the entire nation. As if that weren't enough, newly elected Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president who succeeded Richard Nixon in 1977, pursuing a neo-Wilsonian policy of "self-determination", worsened relations with the USSR as well as with all those African, Middle Eastern and Latin American regimes hostile to the US. Public unease spread widely. Young people in particular found themselves suddenly alienated from the future, forced to confront a "no future" years before Johnny Rotten would scream it out across the ocean.
New York remained the nerve center of the country's intellectual and cultural upheavals, but its makeup was changing irreversibly. With the Andy Warhol Factory experience now over and counterculture and the Movement officially in decline, the young people of the "Big Apple" began to feel, even if only indirectly, the influence of the informal innovations coming from the new avant-garde composers. New spaces sprang up, like Yoko Ono's loft, La Monte Young's "Dream House", George Maciunas's "Fluxus" AG Gallery and especially Rhys Chatham's Kitchen, and figures like Steve Reich, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Morton Feldman and Jon Appleton (alongside the equally industrious Paul Lansky and John Heiss) rose to prominence – fundamental personalities who had already absorbed the great lesson of John Cage and Merce Cunningham (their "Cheap Imitation" premiered in 1970) and, even more broadly, had taken in the writings of William S. Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as the lesson of the "negative dialectics" of the Frankfurt School philosophers who had long since relocated to the City.

In the same way, the new generation of young people, whether embryonic "no wave" musicians-to-be or their future audience, were also the first to catch the long wave of the legacy left by the Velvet Underground. More than by their immediate heirs still holding court at Max's Kansas City and CBGB's (New York Dolls, Cramps, Television, Patti Smith Group, Voidoids), they were captivated by the new possibilities pointed to by the rhythmic-electronic noise of Silver Apples and Lothar & The Hand People, by the scruffy dilettantism of the ESP-Disk crowd (Godz, Fugs, Levitts), by the anti-blues of the native Insect Trust and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (certainly admired live in New York in the early 70s), by the experiments of Laurie Anderson, even by the anti-folk of Charles Manson's first legendary LP – a whole creative upheaval over which loomed, imposing and sinister, the iconic, mythical and charismatic stature of Suicide. And they were also the first to strip away the trivial promotional provocation surrounding the returning Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" (1975), the first to take it seriously, as a monolith for the creative music still to come.

One of the first genuine forerunners was the experience of Roddy Hall's Jack Ruby, whose "Hit And Run" (1974) at first seem to position themselves as the corrupt heirs of the Stooges, only to veer midway through into the free release of a substratum of distortion, industrial debris and electronic chaos (with a major role played by Randy Cohen's synthesizer).

In the conscious or unconscious shaping of this new underground crucible, one certainly can't forget the towering, key role played by modern jazz, first with the pivotal albums of Ornette Coleman, above all "Free Jazz" (1960), then through the performances of John Coltrane's legendary quartet at the Village Vanguard and the Village Gate, Milford Graves's New York Art Quartet, James Zitro's sole album, Sun Ra's New York period, Dave Burrell's new pianism, Don Cherry's New York Contemporary Five, Albert Ayler's prophetic "New York Eye And Ear Control" (1964), culminating in the jazz-rock milestones of electric Miles Davis.

But several other influences beyond the city's (or the nation's, or even the continent's) borders helped cement the shaping of this new collective unconscious. The debut "No Record" (1968) by Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band is perhaps the first record to brandish radical critique, negation and nihilism as its unabashed stylistic banners. This experience carries capital importance. If the format is still that of the psychedelic collective and the goal is still the group high, the approach taken – a free-form freak-out akin to, if not directly derived from, Mayo Thompson's Familiar Ugly – instead presents itself as an unprecedented psycho-infernal pandemonium capable of derailing and collapsing the self, even though the intent is primarily politicized to the extreme. Their formula involves obscene, destructive and self-destructive geopolitical proclamations bellowed out, immediately translated into long tirades of noisy, clownish, cartoonish, or simply illiterate improvisation, boisterous jams of out-of-tune notes and harmonic ugliness often with no direction, or indeed no sense at all (aside from a generic mockery of war or patriotism). Theirs is a punk scream well before punk (and before MC5 in Detroit), rooted in '68 but projected well beyond the "Summer Of Love" and safely removed from the celebratory glories of Woodstock, even vaguely akin to Alvin Lucier's experiments in certain vocal techniques.

Even more fundamental is the non-lesson in radical illiteracy of New Hampshire's Shaggs on their sole "Philosophy Of The World" (1969), here pared down to a classic trio, not politicized at all, but rather steeped in a raw, homespun production, as well as an extraordinary forerunner of the female "no wave" bands to come.
Even across the ocean, the negative vision had already clearly surfaced, with the Monks's "Black Monk Time" (1969), and even more so in one of the masterpieces of the great era of Teutonic rock, Neu's "Negativland" (1971). Also fundamental was the activity of English guitarist Derek Bailey, certainly as an innovative improviser, but perhaps even more so as a promoter: on his own initiative came the Incus label (1970), the magazine "Musics" (1975) and the Company collective (1976), through which he gathered talents of the new anti-academic jazz-rock across two continents. No less influential was Evan Parker, who relocated to improvise right in the City toward the end of the 70s. Above all, naturally, there were Eno's "oblique strategies", harbingers of "non-musicians".

Meanwhile, back home, several national schools of illustrious pre-no wave predecessors were gaining increasing prominence, from the first incarnation of Michigan's Destroy All Monsters, an impromptu mix of noise ante-litteram, collective improvisation and trash culture, to the early output of California's Residents, culminating in another great bastion of negation, "Not Available" (1978), as well as the shambolic approximation of the Electric Eels (Cleveland), later evolving into the equally significant Styrenes, the early guitar devastation of Chrome (San Francisco), the turbulent improvisations of Oho (Baltimore), the abrasive "de-evolution" of Devo (Akron), the soured proto-punk of Debris (Chickasha), and the lo-fi madness of Half Japanese (Uniontown).
As for the dance and kitsch influences inherent in the later offshoots of the "no wave" movement, more than the sensational boom of their hugely popular fellow New Yorkers Chic and Village People, it is certainly worth recalling the open-ended project Love Of Life Orchestra by Peter Gordon, another peculiar catalyst for personalities orbiting the Kitchen scene, a formidable Warholian lesson in breaking down barriers between entertainment and high art, in fusing everyday signs with avant-garde techniques, in elevating consumerism, even in proud anti-academicism – an experience that was moreover tied to the then-thriving Lovely Music, a label explicitly devoted to applying avant-garde techniques to light, danceable, entertainment music.

The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse: Mars

Mars were the first, and probably the most important, no wave outfit. They lasted only three years, played live around twenty times, splitting their appearances almost entirely between Max's Kansas City and CBGB's, and entered a recording studio only once, yet their imprint would prove the most far-sighted, fertile and enduring. The lineup of Sumner Crane on vocals, or rather retching (the anti-Lou Reed), Mark Cunningham, deus ex machina on guitar and trumpet (the anti-John Cale), Constance "Lucy Hamilton" Burg, second guitar and second non-voice (the anti-Nico), and Nancy Arlen on drums (the anti-Moe Tucker), was not an anti-musical concept (like that of punk) but a genuine non-concept, authentic non-music deliberately dispensed. In their disorienting, repellent gasp-songs, harmonic rules are devastated in full application of avant-garde tenets, from Cage's chance operations to Mumma's cubicles of noise, but paradoxically they are also catapulted, with the utmost bluntness possible, into scenarios that the avant-garde itself never dared explore: no-man's-lands of unconscious rituals conducted amid the most searing cacophony, landscapes suffocated by savage dissonance, jungles of barbaric pulsations, back alleys populated only by tortured, enigmatic screams. Their instinctive, almost random compositions burn through atomic reserves of guitar distortion in the shortest possible time, detonate within the space of a hideously mutilated rhythmic pattern, and spew rapid vocal sketches of automatons agonizing amid the collapse of technological civilization.

Having moved to New York in 1974, they formed at the end of 1975 as China (perhaps a reference to Nixon's famous trip to China) with a handful of compositions still in the mold of their predecessors and contemporaries, a lascivious mix of Velvet Underground, Devo, Stooges and Voidoids: "Cry", "Big Bird" and "Red" the best of the bunch, "No Idea" the most telling in title. The true link to their second life as Mars, and the germinal cell of the style about to break out, is however "3-E", a lurching rockabilly in which everything – rhythm, harmony and voice – already tends to merge, implode, and negate its own identity. It's followed by its B-side, a booming "11,000 Volts", out-of-line detuned guitar thrashes, and again a sort of "eurhythmic" continual organic reworking of its own foundational elements, plus "Helen Forsdale", post-punk of frenzied percussiveness over a concrete swamp of tortured strings and rasping vocals.
The band pushes further with a sort of concert-recitative, "Hairwaves", made of detuning, bursts of percussion and a half-whispered vocal of sinister anti-zen trance, and even better with "Tunnel", a sonata of pure cacophony, sounds piled onto blind pulsations, and a spent recitation now bordering on pure and simple delirium, a subconscious storm gripped by dissonance, snarling like an apocalyptic beast and whirling like a turbine. The dry minute of drum-lashes and a two-voice invocation screeched over the griddle of "Puerto Rican Ghost" instead preludes the band's first stylistic and ideological pinnacle, "N.N.End", a hideous improvisation led astray by trumpet, tossed onto a railway mass and lashed by lascivious verses. The avalanche of malevolent impulses in "Outside Africa" fits perfectly alongside it, while Burg's vocal masterpiece is "Scorn", an entirely vocalized, hissed song, even straining to break the sound barrier, as it steers a caravan of out-of-control sonic shards.
Ever more distant from punk and ever more absorbed in their intellectual aura, the four arrive at "Monopoly", a rarefied situationist expressionism for two voices, her razor-cuts against his maniacal lascivious delirium, further tortured by tape manipulation (sliced up, deformed, slowed down and sped up), an electronic practice that lends an even more hallucinatory quality of artificial, abstract echoes and reverberations. So "The Immediate Stages Of Erotic" becomes a duel between electrical short-circuits, sub-human screams and a thrilling new commotion, perhaps their most tribal ever, a desperate call to the new animal stage of unconscious metropolitan life. Mars's very brief career closes in a carnal congress of cathartic violence, though their posthumous masterpiece comes in the 15-minute version of "N.N. End", featuring the added talent of a third guitarist with a passion for free jazz, Rudolph Grey (from Von Lmo's circle), which surfaced on the archival bootleg "Live At Irving Plaza" (2014).

The next project, John Gavanti, was born from an idea of Crane's (on vocals, piano and three-string acoustic guitar) and again brings together Cunningham and Burg (winds), plus contributions from DNA, Arto Lindsay, his brother Duncan, and Ikue Mori (percussion and strings). What emerged from the recording sessions, the self-titled "John Gavanti" (1980), was effectively presented as the first – and so far only – "no wave operetta", a free distortion of the Mozartian "Don Giovanni", with a "libretto" built on a series of bizarre events, narrated as a kind of surrealist monologue, set not in the original Seville but on a voyage through various places and cities that also passes through home base New York (as well as Venice), and cluttered with references to Kierkegaard, Lautréamont, and Roussel.
Devoid of Mars's searing distortion but still driven by the same sub-improvisational practice, the combo indulges in tumultuous heaps of rumbling, disintegrated fanfares (an "Overture" of vulgarized free jazz and spartan symphonism), off-beat accompaniments (the crescendo of stubborn wrong notes over the dance rhythm of "Gavanti Samba", the disordered blasts and pianistic avalanches of "Africa"), chaotic string clusters (the cabaletta "Locus Solus") and tonal distortions (the grotesque chase between strings and winds in "Higher And Higher"). The same happens to the voice, whose original retching-scream impulse is retranslated into sardonic, hoarse, tragicomic recitation descended from Delta blues shouters ("I Awake" and "Gavanti's Lament", in which he also synthesizes raga mysticism and chamber dissonance). Burg too, in her brief appearance as vocalist, undergoes her own transformation (hear now her mastery as a glacial nymph on "Mirror Mirror"). A step beyond Weimar expressionism, Mars's new recipe is here put to use for a new mode of staging the pièce, a surplus of absurdism, a "total" tragicomedy.
From this experience, Burg in turn branched off with her own idea, Don King, initially just Cunningham and Duncan Lindsay, put together at first on the spur of the moment to oblige a very young Thurston Moore who was organizing his Noise Fest (1981), then expanded into a quartet with Arto Lindsay and Toni Noguiera, and finally reshaped again with a new rhythm section (Toni Maimone of Pere Ubu and Bill Perry on drums). Aside from clear carryovers from John Gavanti, as in "Marco Polo" and "Revelry" (village-band polyphony and protester-style percussion), Burg all but abolishes cacophony to reign icy and elusive, in the horn-driven funk of "Never Decide" and the pointillistic dub of "Flesh", right up to pieces now built on melodic phrases and lyrical, decadent singing ("Street Of Dreams").

Also from this period comes the duo album "The Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton" (1985) with her friend and fan Lydia Lunch, but increasingly Burg's artistic ambitions turned toward other fields (as did those of former bandmates Crane and Arlen). Cunningham, however, influenced by Don King's European tour – documented on the cassette "On The Mediterranean" (1987) – moved to Spain and remained consistently active in music, ever devoted to experimenting with his trumpet. He first joined the Bel Canto Orchestra, then founded Raeo with Gat Castaño, Anton Ignorant and Pepe Sarto (an occasion that also brought in former bandmate Burg for instrumental cameos), and then began collaborating with guitarist Silvia Mestres on his first solo record, "Blood River Dusk" (1997), and with Convolution. Besides the Bestia Ferida trio's sole "Wounded" (2009), Cunningham also improvised for "Chalkboard" (2010), an interactive installation by Christian Marclay. His latest projects include teaming up with the Murnau B trio, under the name Blood Quartet, for four doom-jazz albums, "Dark Energy" (2015), "Deep Red" (2016), "Until My Darkness Goes" (2018) and "Root 7" (2022), and, on the solo research front, the ten-track collection "Odd Songs" (2020) and the 9 minutes of "Night Train Dream" (2023), on a split with Thymme Jones, his most mysterious soundscape to date.

The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse: Teenage Jesus And The Jerks

Teenage Jesus And The Jerks were formed on the initiative of a very young China/Mars fan, Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Kohl), a self-made kid thrown unceremoniously into the gears of the metropolis, who picked up a guitar and sang, or rather moaned and shrieked, in those underground New York garrets also frequented by a reckless, restless saxophonist expelled from the academies of "free" jazz, James Chance. With an initial, provisional rhythm section of Kawashima "Reck" Akiyoshi on bass and Bradley Field on drums, they recorded their first tracks in 1977, the first version of "The Closet" and the even more maniacally truncated "Less Of Me" and "My Eyes".
Teenage Jesus offer a more regimented, more stylized and blunt, though no less psychotic, version of the horrifying magma of their Mars mentors. From that primal, untamed freedom, Teenage Jesus extract something that even aims at the realm of song-form, albeit certainly its most ramshackle, approximate, brutally sketched, coldly under-arranged, harmonically desaturated variety – and one that, in fact, achieves little more than pure din and clamor.
The band's cross and delight lies above all in its leader and non-ideologue Lunch, the first, true, and in many ways only diva of the movement, a primordial and authentic sex icon even outside those circles, and despot of a dry, hammering, obsessive and obsession-inducing sound. The guitar moves as if through a viscous plasma with few, minimal, elementary gestures, but precisely for that reason all the more unsettling; her cry rings out uncertain, crumpled in on itself, distant and archaic yet gushing with blind, panicked terror; the rhythm section merely props things up with a beat like inanimate obsessives, often falling back on facile, insipid little marches. Lunch proclaims the coming of the anti-author, the anti-Patti Smith. Where Smith is a priestess aiming at consciousness by detailing and dramatizing long monologues, Lunch is a witch-spirit nesting in the most hidden strata of the subconscious through brief, perverse stiletto-thrusts, a handful of mottos meant to shake it, jolt it, shock it, delivered in a manner that is by turns plaintive yet at the same time hollowed-out and expressionless, terrified yet at the same time mechanical, sordid, often closing on small orgasmic moans. Lunch sets, just as unconsciously, a new standard.
With Chance gone, and discovered by Robert Quine acting as producer, they unveil "Orphans", a primitive, morbid, cadenced funk (with Gordon Stevenson now on bass), packed with thick guitar stabs punctuating a feverish nursery-rhyme chant bordering on a mere shriek for its own sake; "Baby Doll", at an extremely slow tempo that borders on hallucination, under the lashes of a Lunch in solemn catalepsy, accelerating into tribal nightmares, thanks also to new bassist Jim Sclavunos, already co-founder of "No Magazine" and formerly of Rhys Chatham's Gynecologists and future Von Lmo's Red Transistor; and "Burning Rubber", with which they complete an ideal polyptych of manifestos for a kind of ideal, primitive grand guignol theater.
Even their purely instrumental aphorisms, in their fleeting automatic-writing style, prove significant, even prescient, from "Race Mixing", a jet of metallic dissonance forever plagued by lashing percussion, to "Freud In Flop", which clearly anticipates the noise-rock of the 80s.
Toward the end of their run (late 1978) they re-recorded "The Closet" to make it their longest, stretched out to the very edge of perception, down to frequencies so evanescent they vanish from the spectrum altogether, in a swarm of irreversible nihilism and psychosis, and almost at the opposite extreme, "I Woke Up Dreaming", which instead drags itself toward a chorus spelled out over a starkly spartan cadence, the result closest to the "song" model.

Lunch launches her career as high priestess of urban bleakness, of a personal ordeal of apathy, self-flagellation and alienation, and, at the same time, as a new author and performer radically grounded in postmodernist kitsch, a grim burlesque of industrial suburra. Through her solo masterpieces, from “Queen Of Siam” (1980) to “The Agony Is The Ecstasy” (1982) – with its best scream-manifesto “No!” – to “In Limbo” (1984), up to the extreme noir tentacle of “Smoke In The Shadows” (2004), and through her collaborations in which she convenes the impromptu supergroup Immaculate Consumptive, reunites with Burg of Mars for “The Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton” (1985), with Howard of the Birthday Party for “Honeymoon In Red” (1987) and “Shotgun Wedding” (1991), with Gordon of Sonic Youth for “Naked In Garden Hills” (1990) under the name Harry Crews, and with Jim Thirwell for the EP “Stinkfist” (1988), “Don’t Fear The Reaper” (1991) and “York” (1997), plus her spoken word acting work, a contradiction in fieri becomes evident: on one hand the witch of moral filth who feeds on that filth almost by inertia, on the other a new active and creative figure, at times perversely elitist, almost opposed to the degenerate “negation” of her beginnings.
To offset this sort of conflict, but also to maintain a kind of perverse artistic equilibrium, over the years Lunch keeps pursuing her urge to lead “no” bands. Once the very brief Teenage adventure is over, she founds Beirut Slump with Liz Swope on bass and Vivienne Dick on organ, with Sclavunos switching to drums. Lunch and Sclavunos carry on in 8 Eyed Spy with new guitarist Michael Paumgardhen, Pat Irwin on sax and George Scott on bass (who had left the Contortions and would die shortly after), and briefly under the name Devil Dogs, while Lunch alone, in 13.13, is backed by the Weirdos (Dix Denney on guitar, Greg Williams on bass, and Cliff Martinez on drums). More recent line-ups include Big Sexy Noise, i.e. Lunch plus Gallon Drunk, and Retrovirus, with the crew of Weasel Walter, whose 8-minute “War Pigs” (2023) stands as the extreme example of this partnership.
Sclavunos becomes Sonic Youth’s first drummer before entering the orbit of Nick Cave, from the second incarnation of the Bad Seeds all the way to Grinderman, but he also forms his own band, the Vanity Set, and stages a multimedia show, “Faustian Pact” (2012), in collaboration with Micki Pellerano (Cult Of Youth) and Peter Mavrogeorgis.

Orbiting within Lunch’s cosmos is also the movement’s cinematic dimension, which obviously feeds on amateur means and improvised actors. Her Dick of Beirut Slump becomes a director and gathers pretty much all her fellow travelers for “Beauty Becomes The Beast” (1979), and her Stevenson of Teenage Jesus directs “Ecstatic Stigmatic” (1980). Chance, Field and Lunch herself appear in Michael McClard’s “Alien Portrait” (1979), while Lunch becomes the lead in Scott & Beth B’s noir “Vortex” (1982). Other underground cult films are Eric Mitchell’s “Red Italy” (1979), Nick Zedd’s “They Eat Scum” (1979) and Jim Jarmusch’s “Permanent Vacation” (1982). Not to be forgotten are obscure and talented filmmakers such as Amos Poe, Diego Cortez and Richard Kern. The paradigm of this generation is Michael Snow’s “New York Eye And Ear Control” (1964), scored with a free improvisation by a sextet of greats led by Ayler.

The four horsemen of the non-Apocalypse: DNA

East Village art student Arthur Morgan “Arto” Lindsay is a stagehand for Mars when he meets Robin Crutchfield, a Body Art enthusiast (like fellow countrymen Vito Acconci and Chris Burden). The spark between the two ignites precisely from their shared passion for performance, which, as DNA, they will filter through the light of the new intellectual barbarism of “no wave.”
Lindsay immediately takes the helm of the new project, going beyond a possible male version of Lunch by conceiving the voice-guitar pairing (no-punk vocals and no-funk guitar scraping) as a running commentary in which the two elements compete with each other, second by second, over who can sound more disjointed, thunderous, virulent, delirious. Crutchfield experiments on keyboards, brazenly illiterate in his tracing of his contemporary idols – Martin Rev, Nico and Yoko Ono – implicitly declaring DNA to be the first to import into the “no” sound the rudimentary electronics coming from the bedrooms of nerds obsessed with the new keyboards, repeating alien, childlike formulas, coded ciphers, sonic alchemies leading nowhere. In place of a drummer, the two then recruit a Japanese girl who had never even touched a drum kit but who nonetheless proves capable of rolling it with schizoid ferocity, Ikue Mori. In their spasmodic, atonal, stupefied symposiums lies an invitation to a kind of anti-aesthetic self-indulgence.

The band’s cornerstone is the single “You & You” (1978), again produced by Quine, a monotonous, impassive electronic pulse (elementary keyboard whirls repeated so fast and so out of phase they become abstract torture), seasoned with Mori’s brutal off-beats and Lindsay’s ultra-neurotic schizophrenia. Its B-side, “Little Ants,” is entirely analogous, a keyboard scrap, minimally melodic punctuation in symbiosis with the drums, while Lindsay produces breathtaking flurries of flayed guitar (mirroring Lunch’s rhythmic alternations). The other recordings perversely expand the spectrum, from more measured episodes like “Egomaniac’s Kiss,” a rhythm'n'blues piece where they twist and coarsen John Lee Hooker, to instrumentals like “Lionel,” a centrifuge from which Hatchfield’s industrial chirring unfurls, to “Not Moving,” probably their crown jewel, in which the keyboard’s role grows even further – phrasing of luminescent scale patterns and brutal impulses – while Mori drums rapidly, pressing forward with her cerebral algorithms, and Lindsay channels a stupefied Byrne, to “Size,” a shapeless modern dance, marching and ragged.
This crescendo of Hatchfield’s importance in the band’s sound is suddenly cut short by his departure. Rather than replace him in kind, Lindsay and Mori pivot, opting for Tim Wright, bassist of the early Pere Ubu, with whom they craft an EP, “A Taste Of DNA” (1981), paradoxically even more adventurous, unbridled, uncontrolled and concentrated: “New Fast,” “5:30,” “32123.” The sound, now bass-oriented, inevitably opens onto the more angular post-punk to come, and even manages to dish up no wave’s hit single, the sinister gallop of “Blonde Red Head.” The final masterpieces tend toward dissolution, from “New New,” a death-rattle of collective improvisation, gradually toward the rarefied trip of “Lying On The Sofa Of Life.”

All three subsequent careers are noteworthy. Lindsay first starts over with a brief collaboration with Seth Tillet, then broadens his collaborations and connections: he reunites with Mars for “John Gavanti” (1979), joins Chance’s impromptu Pill Factory, meets Anton Fier’s Golden Palominos, launches John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards. He then expands – confirming his stature as the scene’s non-intellectual – under the name Ambitious Lovers thanks to a rotating cast: Fier again, Mark Miller, Claudio and Jorge Silva, his brother Duncan, David Moss, Reinaldo Fernandes, and above all programmer Peter Scherer. The run of “Envy” (1984), “Greed” (1988), “Lust” (1991) and, in between, “Pretty Ugly” (1990) with Scherer alone, is a fusion at once cerebral and unconventional, through which he rediscovers his Brazilian roots and projects them back, distorted, to the audience of the emerging discos. After a solo Trio (1995) he reaffirms himself with works like “Mundo Civilizado” (1996), “Prize” (1999) and “Invoke” (2002). Recent collaborative projects include Anarchist Republic Of Bzzz, a quartet with Marc Ribot, and Town, a duo with Sam Hillmer. “Charivari” (2022) is an album of solo-guitar improvisations.

Mori, well aware of her sudden status as stepmother of the new New York avant-garde, sets the drums aside (which she reconsiders at most as a drum machine) to become an all-around improviser and electronic experimenter, in an endless series of projects and collaborations with the scene’s guiding names (Zorn, Hideki, Frith, Gordon and Moore, Parkins, Douglas, Morris, Vandermark, Patton, Ibarra, Rasmussen etc.), as well as in notable solo albums: “Hex Kitchen” (1995), “Garden” (1996), “Labyrinth” (2001), “Myrninerest” (2005), “Class Insecta” (2009), “In The Light Of Shadows” (2015), “Obelisk” (2017), “Tracing The Magic” (2022).

Crutchfield, inventing the moniker Dark Day, instead gives rise to the most overlooked career, recruiting out of nowhere an even more obscure crew of talents, from Phil Kline to Nina Canal (already in Chatham’s circle and future member of Ut), as well as the ever-reliable Arlen from Mars (later replaced by Barry Friar), even if further down the line he shrinks to a duo with Bill Sack, and then to a solo project. Aside from an all-too-hesitant single, “Hands In The Dark/Invisible Man” (1979), the combo draws attention with the long marching-symphonic, Residents-esque rumination of the following “Trapped” (1981), their masterpiece, also bolstered by the six surrealist electronic sketches on the B-side (“Exterminations”). The first albums, “Exterminating Angel” (1980) and “Window” (1982), by now look insistently toward the European wave upheavals, in decadent dances such as “No Nothing Never” and “Arp’s Carpet” and electro-Teutonic dances such as “Window” and “Sleep.” With this first phase concluded, Crutchfield transforms into a chamber-folk composer for “Obsession” (1984), “Beyond The Pale” (1986) and “Darkest Before Dawn” (1989), with only Sack’s guitar and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer’s cello as accompaniment. The comeback works, “Strange Clockwork” (1999), the EP “Loon” (2000) and “Strange Remains” (2014), are instead collections of modest keyboard experiments. Under his own name he has also released a series of acoustic albums for lyre, harp and tanpura.

The four horsemen of the non-Apocalypse: James Chance & The Contortions

James Chance’s Contortions are something of a unicum. Whereas for DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus the compilation “No New York” represents the final statement, for the Contortions it acts as germinal cell, not the summation of an obscure and glorious career but an anticipation of what would shortly become the scene's only true full-length album. Rather than annulling, imploding and deconstructing, the Contortions aim to rebuild, to re-erect a sound in the shadow of a charismatic leader.
The band also embodies the movement’s kitsch wing. While their peers repeatedly embitter and scramble the same disorienting premise, Chance puts it back at the centre, diving headlong into pseudo-commercial ditties, the physical, uninhibited dancing of the newborn discos, the funk school of erotic hip-swaying. While the others’ gaze coldly penetrates the sexual subconscious, Chance’s gives itself over openly and messily to the most lascivious advances: even though the spirit remains the same (no wave), Chance bends it into a personal, explicit tool of provocation.
Another difference from his peers lies in the band’s clear-cut hierarchy, caught in a crystalline absurdism worthy of the Magic Band. At the top, James Chance (born James Siegfried, ed.), is a failed jazz musician, a would-be Ayler and former David Murray student who worshipped the other James, the legendary James Brown, the “sex machine” par excellence, and was instinctively drawn to a dishevelled version of Elvis Presley. After moving to New York, trying out a first band (Flaming Youth), and briefly brushing up against Lunch’s projects, he hits on the pivotal idea of a dissonant fusion centred on vocals and sax, gathering around him George Scott on bass (later replaced by David Hofstra), Don Christensen on drums, Jody Harris on guitar, Pat Place on slide, and Adele Bertei on organ.
The compilation features the first sketches of their non-concerts. “Dish It Out” drags itself along, contorted and psychotic, over convulsive drumming, the funk stammering of the bass, the guitar’s irreducible clams, the organ’s dazed non-counterpoints, and over it all the brutally insolent one-two punch of sax and vocals. “Flip Your Face” has a robust gait, at once mortified by continual stumbles (the first true “contortions” of the non-ensemble), and a jam of dizzyingly deformed timbres, launched by the detuned strings of Place’s guitar. In “Jaded,” instead, the sound thins out and the cadence takes on the shape of sadistic torture, almost ceremonial, the spaces filled by the sidemen in the most hallucinatory way possible, pierced through by Chance’s perverse words.

It looks like the terminal stage, the last spasm, but instead it’s their launchpad. “Buy” (1979), the sextet’s only true album, the only work to really detonate across the clubs of no wave New York, ups the funk quotient, the danceable beat, and shows even greater resolve in the spasmodic indeterminacy of their sound. The centrepiece, “Contort Yourself,” is a modern dance in the vein of Pere Ubu, a bony ballet of venomous syncopations, guitar discharges, furious screams, a genuine paradigm of no-dance-punk and an intimidating proclamation of spectacular orders to contort oneself once, twice, three, four, five times.
But even more representative of this new direction is “Design To Kill,” stentorian, even orderly in its all-instrumental depravity. Although it almost hints at cementing an innovative song-form, on the record Chance also allows himself a personal fluidity between singing and improvised passages, and takes the chance to definitively renounce jazz, indeed letting it regress into a maniacal free-for-all of pure accompaniment, even if “Roving Eye,” split between soul and acid-rock, detonates one of his most iconic sax solos.
Above all, “My Infatuation” becomes a shining example of this scorching identification between personal urges and group inventions, following a disconnection between march-tune and nursery-rhyme registers devoted, in any case, to mutual contortion. “Bedroom Athlete” gives itself over to funk tremors, gestural phrases, broken rhythms, accelerated and immediately decelerated, heightening the sense of the neurasthenia that precedes the most lascivious sexual act, framed by two free-jazz sax sonatas. In “I Don’t Want To Be Happy” his instinctive self-analysis becomes a rhythmic jolt concealing an almost automatic danceability, immediately filled with (anti-)harmonic debris, while “Throw Me Away” becomes the antithesis of the soul song’s emphatic chorus, underscoring the most cathartic of self-directed impatience. Chance simultaneously builds and unbuilds, constructs and deconstructs, relies on a group sound while at the same time selling body and soul to make it conflictual and individualistic. A sort of Mick Jagger caught in an utterly visceral stream of consciousness, he often becomes the exposed, vitalist version of Lunch’s Freudian uncanny.

After recording the score for Diego Cortez’s underground film, never even released, “Grutzi Elvis” (1979) with Lindsay, Field and Scott (rechristened Pill Factory), which also contains the purely percussive sketch “Schleyer’s Tires,” Chance renames himself James White and rebrands his outfit Blacks, focusing precisely on the clash between white rhythm (disco) and black pathos (jazz and rhythm'n'blues) on “Off White” (1979), losing Bertei but reeling Lunch back in for a cameo and one of his anti-guitar masterpieces (“White Devil”). “Live Au Bain Douches” (1980) closes out, and seals, the golden era of James Chance-White.
The line-up continuity breaks with “Sax Maniac” (1982), overhauled into an expanded set-up bolstered by brass guests (with the illustrious Joseph Bowie playing a privileged role), even if White’s style still insists, with renewed barbaric spirit, on dismantling funk syncopations and repeated disco-music lines. The no wave attitude finally fades with the interlude of the “Flaming Demonics” (1983) and with the last Blacks album “Melt Yourself Down” (1986), ending up as little more than a postcard with the Contortions name reconstituted for “Soul Exorcism” (1991), “Molotov Cocktail Lounge” (1996), “White Cannibal” (2000), “Incorrigible” (2012) and “The Flesh Is Weak” (2016). In 2009 he even makes peace with the gospel of jazz, regularly performing standards. He passes away in 2024.
The legacy of the original legendary Contortions is fruitful. Pat Place forms the essential Bush Tetras, stunning pioneers of the punk-funk to come, while Harris, Christensen and Scott form the mighty Raybeats, reviving surf-rock. Bertei forms the dignified Bloods, gives an excellent contribution to the score of Scott & Beth B’s noir “Vortex” (1982), and cuts singles, “Build Me A Bridge” (1983) and “When It’s Over” (1985), plus a late synth-pop album, “Little Lives” (1988), before even trying her hand at house music on “Zami Girl” (1994).

On Branca’s side

Less sensational (but only because it escaped Eno’s call) yet arguably even more influential is the “no wave” sub-scene that arose in the SoHo neighbourhood, a couple of miles from the East Village’s nerve centre. It is here that Rhys Chatham, already an unruly student of La Monte Young and Morton Subotnick, composer and founder of the Kitchen Center, in 1976 – electrified by the Ramones – extends and retranslates his own minimalist research into pseudo-punk bands of non-musicians who will never see the inside of a recording studio, such as Robert Appleton, Nina Canal and Daile Kaplan, i.e. the Gynecologists, later carried forward also as Tone Death, thanks to his friendship with Peter Gordon, and above all enters the orbit of projects led by the neighbourhood’s other emerging figure, Glenn Branca.
A skilled guitarist from Pennsylvania, Branca moves to New York in 1976 after coming to believe, already in his work back in Boston, that his specialty is sound experimentation for live accompaniments to experimental theatre pieces (the Bastard Theater company, which he himself founded). In contact with the New York climate he realises that this supporting experimentation is instead his true centre, splits it off from theatre and makes it his mission. In particular, through contact with Jeffrey Lohn’s N. Dodo Band, the idea emerges of his own group that could, again, appear in public by fusing his own experimentation with punk’s instinctive, barbaric approach: Theoretical Girls, together with Wharton Tiers and Margaret DeWys. Compared to Chatham’s Gynecologists, Branca’s Theoretical Girls at least manage to self-release a single: “U.S. Millie/You Got Me” (1978). “U.S. Millie” (by Lohn) is a hailstorm of minimalist phrases in rapid succession, whereas “You Got Me” (by Branca) sets, between whip-cracks of metal and machine-gun bursts of bass and keyboard, an astonishing alienated, spastic mangling of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”

The experience is, as usual, extremely short and extremely fertile at the same time. Branca forms Daily Life with drummer Barbara Ess, second guitarist Paul McMahon and keyboardist Christine Hahn. Branca, Ess and Hahn carry on as Static with another EP bearing the emblematic title “Theoretical Record” (1979), containing “Don’t Let Me Stop You,” an obsessive monodrama, first quasi-choral and then noisy, and “My Relationship,” another formidable foray into the most clanking post-psychedelia.
A now fully-fledged composer, Branca finally invents no-wave-derived minimalism, multiplying the insights of his early bands into a guitar symphonism oriented toward cacophony. Through his acquaintance with Ned Sublette he gathers a swarm of guitarists, including Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (but also Michael Gross and David Rosenbloom), first in a still-short format, the EP “Lesson No. 1” (1980), and then moving toward the genre’s first masterpieces, “Ascension” (1981) and “Indeterminate Activity Of Resultant Masses” (2007), eventually becoming a fully-fledged symphonist, with the “Symphony No. 1” (1983), nicknamed “Tonal Plexus,” and the “Symphony No. 3” (1983), nicknamed “Gloria” (in which he sets out to cover the entire enharmonic series), not forgetting, moreover, his theatrical roots in the ballet “The World Upside Down” (1992).
Hahn forms CKM with Miranda Stanton and a very young Kim Gordon, then emigrates to Berlin, joining the irregular Martin Kippenberger’s Luxus for the one and only obscure single “New York – Auschwitz” (1979), and later founding Malaria!, thus contributing to the founding of the glorious central European wave scene. Ess becomes the initiator of all-female projects, the feminist performer collective Disband (voices and found percussion only) and the trio Y Pants. Lohn records his own “Music From Paradise” (1984), the score for an experimental ballet dedicated to Biko, a violently free-form ensemble record, the first unruly godchild of godfathers Branca and Chatham, while DeWys will resurface decades later with a long vocal improvisation, “I Oh” (2001). McMahon and Tiers reunite in A Band, but Tiers also makes his mark with his own “Brighter Than Life” (1996), an extreme offshoot of Branca’s symphonies tied to the post-rock era, and later with collections of solo piano pieces, “Mayan Nocturnes” (2013) and “Political Sonatas” (2016).
Chatham will go on to fully launch his own fertile career as a guitar composer, with works such as “Guitar Ring” (1982) and “The Out Of Tune Guitar” (1982), all the way to “Waterloo No. 2” (1986), but his ex-Gynecologists bandmates also remain active in the scene around the Kitchen: Appleton forms Morales and then Tenant with a trio of obscure talents (guitarists Ursula Kinzel and Raphael Rubinstein and drummer Terry Berne), even if their single “Manifestation Of Your Sickness” (1979) shows signs of adapting to post-punk. More forward-looking is Canal with her band Ut’s early EPs, “Ut” (1984) and “Confidential” (1985), and their first album, “Conviction” (1985).

Minor classics of New York's golden season include the obscure Fakir, of the single "The Only Dance There Is" (1981), Noise R Us, Model Citizens, the Mofungo of Elliott Sharp and Robert Sietsema, the thirteen-strong Pulsallama, Ike Yard, Sick Dick And The Volkswagens, and ESG of the Scroggins sisters, true codifiers of the unfunkable anti-dance funk of "Come Away" (1983). Outside New York, brief but notable flare-ups come from Los Angeles's Monitor with "Beak" (1979) and Nervous Gender with "Music From Hell" (1981). Worth a mention too is the Cleveland art-punk lineage descending from Pere Ubu, with Doug Gillard's Death Of Samantha, Mike Hudson's Pagans and Sharp's own Hi Sheriffs Of Blue with Mark Dagley, later morphed into Girls and recently unearthed on the excellent lost album "Punk-Dada Pulchritude" (2015), as well as Boston's own James Clements and Judy Grunwald's Maps, Chris Gill and Jason Shapiro's Vitamin, and Larry "Lifeless" Coyle's Kilslug, Philadelphia's Stick Men, and New Jersey's Gut Bank.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in the UK, a fertile no wave scene of its own was taking shape, cemented by Richard O'Dell's Y Records: from Maximum Joy to Essential Logic (led by a skirt-wearing James Chance in the form of Lora Logic), from Fatal Microbes to Poison Girls – close to the anarcho-punk of Crass – from Kleenex to Shriekback, from Furious Pig to The Raincoats, right up to the brief "shock" experience of The Raped.

Besides James Ulmer, who chose to pay tribute to the movement's glories by titling his Music Revelation Ensemble album "No Wave" (1980), an important offshoot springs from the James Chance circle. On one side, trombonist Joseph Bowie splits off his Defunkt with two albums of jazz-funk heavily oriented toward groove, the self-titled "Defunkt" (1980) and "Thermonuclear Sweat" (1982); on the other, the even more radical Robert Aaron, also among the ranks of the Blacks, hones his own post-free-jazz improvisations on "Datura" (1981).
These experiences open the floodgates, launching a liaison with the progressive contaminations of the Canterbury expatriates who had migrated to the US, starting with Fred Frith, much as the final phase of Davis's great electric period – contaminated and contaminator par excellence – had already set in motion. In other words, some musicians already belonging to the advanced prog generation caught the contagion of the "no" generation, keeping alive – and then evolving – that very idiom which had achieved transcontinental stature but was also slowly slipping into oblivion and disuse: Bill Laswell – his Massacre especially notable on "Killing Time" (1981) – John Lurie, Muffins (America's Soft Machine), Happy The Man, Anton Fier and Alan Licht. This small band of extraordinary talents would lead to the connected generation of John Zorn, Diamanda Galas and Borbetomagus, opening the doors to the new season of New York avant-garde in the 1980s.
Instead, legendary showmen like Klaus Nomi – by then projected toward image refinement (highly sophisticated, decadent-dandy) and the technological rebirth of synth-pop's dawn – would find the exit hatch of the whole "no" movement, as would left-wing intellectuals like Lizzy Mercier Descloux and oblique experimenters like Walter Steding.

Branca's legacy is chiefly responsible for the great crossing from "no" to the far more famous and celebrated noise-rock. First to break through are Sonic Youth, pupils Moore and Ranaldo alongside a Gordon recruited from her stint with Hahn. Through the first self-titled Ep "Sonic Youth" (1982) and the first full-length "Confusion Is Sex" (1983), both released on Branca's freshly founded Neutral label, but also with the Lunch collaboration single "Death Valley '69" (1985) and the essential "Bad Moon Rising" (1985) that includes it, the fragmented ideas of Mars and DNA turn into stylistics, into a band's own grammar, into a perfect eloquence of metropolitan alienation: the primal, unconscious and seething spirit mutates into a conscious, glacial curse of perversion and dissolution.
In the same period, Mike Gira's Swans also assert themselves with the brutal, distorted, murky and delirious early albums "Filth" (1983) and "Cop" (1984), again produced on Neutral Records, records entirely bent on clotting the barely sketched intuitions of Theoretical Girls, amplifying them into a thunderous, ever more grand-guignol, ultra-expressionistic ordeal.

Lesser known but no less significant are Live Skull's "Bringing Home The Bait" (1985), the early Robert Pollard's Phantom Tollbooth, and Antietam (hailing from Kentucky). With records like "From Mars" (1984) and "Love American Style" (1985), and partly also the third "Let It Breed" (1986), the Honeymoon Killers establish themselves as the new demons of CBGB's, just before the flare-up of punk's revival in the uncompromising shape of hardcore. The capital still counts Fish And Roses and God Is My Co-Pilot among its ranks, perhaps the finest heirs of the first mythical season. Initially based in Washington, Jon Spencer and Neil Hagerty's Pussy Galore eventually unleash their respective creative offspring across the City, most notably Royal Trux, who once again demonstrate the effectiveness and fertility of the "no" method in shaping the newly emerging genre, as shown by their masterpieces of deviant anti-blues illiteracy, the debut "Royal Trux" (1987), the lost "Hand Of Glory" (2002) and the monumental "Twin Infinitives" (1990).
Among all the offspring of no-noise scattered across the States, mention must go to the Texan Butthole Surfers of Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary, likewise at the nadir of their most fiery and irreverent inspiration on early works "Butthole Surfers" (1983) and "Psychic Powerless" (1985); Massachusetts's Siege, whose only album "Drop Dead" (1984) holds the gem "Grim Reaper", and their fellow countrymen Moving Targets; Kentucky's Circle X with "Prehistory" (1983); but perhaps even more genuine is the adventure of Maryland's No Trend, with "Too Many Humans" (1984) and "A Dozen Dead Roses" (1985), down to an Ep featuring Lunch, "Heart Of Darkness" (1985).

The gaze can extend as far as Australia, even if the bands there almost immediately fell in step with the continental climate. Far from merely putative is the connection between the wild force and the natural bent for cacophonous gothic of Nick Cave and Mick Harvey's Birthday Party – Australian by nationality but cosmopolitan in spirit – and the sound and aesthetic of the "no" movement, further confirmed by an essential split, again with Lunch, "Drunk On Pope's Blood/The Agony Is The Ecstasy" (1982). Similar, though tilted more toward virtuosic showmanship, is the brief epic of Ed Kuepper and Bob Farrell's Laughing Clowns.

The Awakening and Recent Years

In the 1990s, while the great heirs opted for stylistic turns, pop degenerations, fashionable conformity or auteurist detours, some new upstarts show the first cries of a genuine reawakening of the "no" idiom. First come Dial, founded by Ut veteran Ham (also with Dom Weeks of Furious Pig) and thus direct descendants of Ut, with a string of glorious albums culminating in the colossal "Noise Opera" (2016), inspired by Ornette Coleman, a possible swan song for an entire generation of noise musicians. Acting as a crowbar for new generations, instead, are groups incorporating elements of noise-avant-garde improvisation, such as Azita Youssefi's Scissor Girls, in Chicago, and Amy Heneveld's Meltdown, in Washington. Just as historic no wave was born in opposition to punk, the new mid-90s no wave, entirely female-led, is born in opposition to riot grrrl – again a sordid, psychotic reaction to a revolutionary movement deemed more showy than substantial, hence superficial and simplistic.
Meanwhile, at ground zero New York, the underground scene ekes out a living in the shadow of the grunge and hip-hop explosion and the imitative trends of overseas britpop, limiting itself to small Sonic Youth-indebted flare-ups gathered around Steve Shelley and the Smells Like Records crowd, such as Mosquito, Double Dynamite, Sammy, and not least Blonde Redhead (indebted to DNA in name almost only, thus more of a false alarm of revival). More interesting novelties come instead once again from Chicago, with Us Maple and the Flying Luttenbachers, then Providence, with Arab On Radar, then Miami, with Harry Pussy, and San Francisco, with Deerhoof.

History repeats itself at the turn of the millennium, but this time, rather than a dirge of widespread sociocultural malaise, the "Big Apple" awakens to one of the most terrible shocks in its history: the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001. New York's music scene re-explodes around the already heavily hyped trend of wave revival, dark and punk-funk courtesy of The Strokes, The Rapture, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, and the DFA Records crowd. The Eno of the situation – fittingly, another Brian – Brian Long, producer, radio host and founder of Yes Know, seizes the moment to produce (with Chris White) a retrospective compilation, ironically titled "Yes New York" (2003), partly to promote his management company between the lines, partly as a rallying cry of hope after the catastrophe, and partly, above all, as an ironic counterpoint to the first legendary compilation. In reality, Long's operation, more than two decades on from "No New York", amounts to a trawling exercise to cement a new possible mainstream finally grounded in alternative rock, hardly a probe sent into subterranean darkness.
Once again, then, a new, genuine "no" scene can be felt stirring, once more in opposition to the hype of the revived new wave (rebranded by critics for the occasion as "nu wave"). New forerunners, prophetic as Suicide once were, show the way of extreme electronic modeling of hardcore punk to help refound the "no" idiom: Black Dice, Flux Information Sciences, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance. Hardcore purist initiators are thus found in Shahin Motia's Ex Models, Mark Morgan's Sightings, and Jeannie Kwon's Seconds, while two other acts steer that teaching toward the groove of off-venues and raves: Karen O's Yeah Yeah Yeahs (with Seconds' own Brian Chase) and Angus Andrew's Liars. Two breakthrough singles respectively, "Mr Your On Fire Mr" (2001) and the self-titled Ep "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" (2001) – with the anthem "Bang" – try to build a bridge, admittedly already compromised, between the new avant-garde and the Gang Of Four and The Fall revival. Yet something more uncompromising rises from their work too, endowed with an experimental force of genuine immediacy, of the most authentic generational charisma. The Yeahs improvise an "Art Star" played on the alternation between a jolly little tune and a psychotic collapse, while the Liars invent a vast "This Dust Makes That Mud" of perennial bass rumble, schizoid vocals, noise and scarring samples.

California and Washington once again prove themselves driving centers of the avant-garde, refining what Liars and Yeahs had started. From California comes a spectacular succession of bands: Erase Errata (formerly California Lightening), Numbers, Mae Shi (recently evolved into HLLLYH), Health, Hella, No Age and Sister Fucker; from Washington come Black Eyes, later evolved into Mi Ami. Set apart, but soon brought to light for their talented stubbornness, are also Maryland's Ponytail and Michigan's Wolf Eyes. Canada, for its part, contributes Shearing Pinx.
The right spark is provided by another catastrophe – this time of an economic-financial nature – which, once again, sends its shockwave from the "Big Apple" across the entire globe: the "Great Recession" of the late 2000s, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, headquartered in the City, a symbolic coup de grâce for the "Global Village" and the start of the new precarious age. New York's "no" renaissance, so dramatically revived, finds its whip-crack and seal all in one go in a chance anthem by Vivian Girls, included on their first Ep (2007) and, more than emblematically, titled "No", sung in a cheerful and sarcastic, shyly bittersweet tone, as if the Ramones' primal syllabic fantasy had been made to implode down to the sole particle of negation, hummed ad libitum as an insane yet definitive sign of surrender.

The new blossoming's specialty is nonetheless the male-female duo in the style of the Royal Trux masters, embodied for instance by High Places (later R.R. Barbadas), Sleigh Bells, Ora Iso and even more so Leya, the project that followed the powerful Dreebs of Adam Markiewicz, Jordan Bernstein and Shannon Sigley - a sincere revival of the era's finest underground explorations, but also once again an entirely female affair, like Talk Normal, featuring drummer Andrya Ambro and guitarist Sarah Register, determined to dismantle old-school noise-rock once and for all and restore it to avant-garde status, especially on their debut “Sugarland” (2009). Water From Your Eyes embody almost single-handedly the dance side of things, and Gorgeous the noise-pop one, while Wetware (Matt Morandi and Roxy Farman) channel post-industrial style, lo-fi electroacoustics, anti-tribal rhythms and elusive gothic vocals on “Flail” (2020).

Among the larger ensembles, aside from something notable in the early Parquet Courts, Sediment Club stand out more, and even more so the no-dance, no-funk and no-punk combo Guerilla Toss – a quintet at first – with the two medleys on their debut "Jeffrey Johnson" (2012), openly bent on devouring as many stimuli as possible from the historic scene (Contortions' detunings, Mars's abrasions, Teenage Jesus's shuffling), but also Palberta, with their long inventories of multi-voiced anti-harmonic little inventions. An interesting intersection between Guerilla Toss and Palberta members is Shimmer.
Kill Alters, from their first self-titled cassette (2015) and the concept album "Armed To The Teeth L.M.O.M.M." (2022), initially wanted by drummer Hisham Baroocha, a Black Dice alumnus, but above all dominated by terrorist-noisenik vocalist Bonnie Baxter, also deserve credit for opening up to the – all New York – cosmos of new digital hardcore and breakcore, with acts like Machine Girl, Deli Girls and Murderpact.

Another stunning singer, Veronica Torres, fronts Pill on the masterful "Convenience" (2016). Significant right from its name is also the first Ep by Model Actriz, "No" (2017), but also standing out are the four members of Palm's "Trading Basics" (2015). An extreme yet highly fertile offshoot comes from the ultra-noise trio Piss Sink, but the most original at the turn of the decade are perhaps Lip Critic: besides dusting off the proverbial conciseness of the "no" idiom on their "Kill Lip Critic" (2019) and "Lip Critic II" (2020), the quartet boasts the spectacular setup of two drum kits, a particularly deranged and unhinged vocalist, and an electronic producer.
Solo acts also appear significant, such as a revived Gordon, who finally arrives at an album under her own name, with a title that even aspires to symbolically close the circle, "No Home Record" (2019); Zane Morris, formerly of Never Healed, who under the moniker TINT ventures into the kind of electronic experiments that were once Jon Appleton's at the scene's very origins; Margaret Chardiet under the nom de guerre Pharmakon, a distinguished follower of Galas's electro-noise psychodramas; and Luwayne "dreamcrusher" Glass, another godfather of a new negative art built on the noise-driven manipulation of sample collage and found sound.

Other new talents emerge outside the City. From Providence's tireless forge comes a powerful roar of women, Whore Paint, who describe themselves as a "pre-post-feminist rage-fueled dystopia", along with the harsh-noise and eardrum-shattering shrieks of Stephanie "Gyna Bootleg" Neves, including her Vomitatrix, with Walter on drums, on the devastating no-grind marathon "Sloppy Seconds Saviour" (2022), and Pippi Zornoza with the grandiose recital-sabbath "Fruit Of The Ash" (2018).
Also from California come Naked Lights with "On Nature" (2016), No Babies, active until "Someone To Watch Over Me" (2018), and electro-noise punkette Evicshen. From New Mexico come the duo Endlings, Deerhoof's John Dieterich and improviser Raven Chacon, already known as Summer Assassins. In Ohio, Stella Research Committee are noteworthy. In Chicago, one recalls Ganser with "Odd Talk" (2018) and "Just Look At That Sky" (2020). In New Jersey, Computer Crimes operate – or rather, wreak havoc (from which Mach Turtle would later break off into a no less devastating solo career). In Denton, Texas, a small sub-scene develops around the Dentonpalooza festival: Problem Dogg, Bukkake Moms, Gay Cum Daddies, Reece McLean, Wrangler Cargo Pantler Trio, etc.

Overseas, in Melbourne, sheltered from the excesses of the post-punk revival, are Albert Wolski's Exek, while a glance at Europe in recent years brings to light Aspirin (Switzerland), Kurws (Poland), Timüt (France), Guttersnipe and Omnibael (England), culminating in the abnormal monolith of the Ab'bhau supergroup (Spain) and their "Devastaciones Bajo El Fulgor Del Vacìo" (2022). In Italy, farsighted godfathers were Plasticost, incidentally the only band in the world to stage the legendary no-operetta "John Gavanti" by Mars/DNA, but the foremost representatives are Allun, culminating in the sonata for voice, guitar, sampler and toys "On.it.sed" (2005), alongside the solo ritualistic project Alos by Stefania Pedretti alone, then the early Sneers, Betoschi (of Verdena fame), Piumolesto with "Esoisterico" (2020) and, in part, Leatherette. A good round-up of the domestic scene's one-off flashes can be found in the compilation "Italy No!" (2013). Also worth mentioning is the collaborative album "Wrong Ninna Nanna" (2020), credited to Franco Berardi-Marco Bertoni, featuring Lunch herself.

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10/03/2026