Have a fantastic 4th of July, everyone! I’ll be in NYC, listening to (if not seeing) the fantastic Feelies. I’m posting a song off of their classic debut Crazy Rhythms called “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness,” the title of which aptly sums up the band’s jittery, hyperkinetic charm. I first stumbled across them on celluloid, performing Bowie's "Fame" at a high school reunion from Hell in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild.” I never thought I’d see them (reunited, no less!) on the front page of the NYTimes’ Arts section, but I’m incredibly pleased that they’re there. I hear they’re working on new music too, which is even more exciting.

No Wave addendum: the gallery show at Kerry Schuss has been extended through July! Go see it if you can!

For more information on the Feelies reformation.

The Feelies, “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness” (from Crazy Rhythms)

Posted by Andrea at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m pretty sure that the first mention of No Wave that I ever encountered was in an old issue of Spin (Bongo cover?) in an article written by Byron Coley. So, there’s a nice kind of symmetry to corresponding with him on the topic now. Better still, there’s a sumptuous volume to go along with, the just-released No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 [Abrams], co-authored with Thurston Moore.

+ Can "No Wave" be defined?

As befits the name itself, No Wave is easier to define by what it is not than what it is. Although the earliest presumed practitioners (China/Mars) assumed they were working in a fairly orthodox "underground rock" tradition, the truth it that their sensibilities were so strange their potential to actually follow in the steps of Television (or whomever) was extremely limited.

Continue reading "Interview: BYRON COLEY" »

Posted by Andrea at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few years ago, who’d have thought that scrappy, oddball No Wave would have its own little Modern Library? It’s a testament to its decidedly hard to define, thorny nature that each of the following books is indispensable in its own way, offering up fresh takes on a scene that never stuck around long enough to wear out its welcome.

(No Wave Post-Punk Underground 1976-1980 will be covered in more depth on Sunday.)

• NY Noise [Soul Jazz] The companion book to the excellent Soul Jazz series of the same name, NY Noise isn’t exclusively about No Wave, per se. Paula Court’s noirish, often stark, photographs capture the vibrancy of the downtown scene in all its stark, often desperate glory. Flitting from avant-art space the Kitchen to the latest Robert Wilson production at BAM to smoke-filled late nights at the Mudd Club, Court’s NY scene plays out like an all-night party populated by insane geniuses.

• No Wave [Black Dog] Blending a treasure-trove of rare archival visuals with a carefully-researched history, Marc Masters’ volume brings (critical) order to No Wave’s chaos, without sacrificing or otherwise blunting the obvious vibrancy and volatility of the music. (No mean feat.) Drawing on an exhaustive array of interviews and archival material, the book is, quite simply, a great read. (The pictures are fantastic, too.)

• The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984 [Princeton] A more academic take on the downtown scene, this companion book to two exhibits at NYU and Parsons depicts the creative denizens of downtown as desert flowers, persisting in spite of (to spite?) the scorched-earth landscape around them. None of these books glorify (morally) bankrupt, rat-infested, desolate NYC, but The Downtown Book is especially hard-hitting in its assessment. The apocalyptic vibe is only magnified by the looming AIDS epidemic, which was soon to decimate NYC’s creative community.

Matthew Yoblonsky’s chapter on No Wave cinema is a valuable companion-piece to Marc Masters’ chapter on the subject. Fantastic visuals here too.

• Punk tabloid Search & Destroy was never just about No Wave, but a rich, inclusive, and often surprising take on the punk scene —not just in San Francisco, where the magazine was based, but on a global scale. Tabloid-sized and writ large, the magazine could be in-your-face and even ugly where the stark realities of life in the 20th century were concerned. But the interviews were far more in-depth and thoughtful than you’d expect from a scrappy zine, never once going the expected route. Where else could you read about Tim Wright’s adventures in the jungles of Belize? Or Winston Tong’s fascination with Chinese puppetry?

When the magazine inevitably ran its course, successor RE/Search (currently available in tabloid reprints) went even further left-field, mixing music journalism and vibrant photography with highly politicized, outspoken cultural coverage; equally fascinated by the clash of modern and ancient cultures (later explored more fully in the RE/Search series Modern Primitives), a single eclectic issue spanned topics as diverse as Kathy Acker, SF punks Flipper, Sordide Sentimentale , and cannibalism. Publishers V Vale and A. Juno’s intellectual, gut-feeling approach to their subject matter gave much-needed credence to what was seen as a teenage subculture; for them, Punk is personal, political —and, ultimately, indelible.

PS: I’m running a few days behind with posts. You now have until Sunday to send in contest entries. I’ll be drawing winners and posting my interview with Byron Coley on Monday. Thanks!

No Wave| NY Noise| No Wave Post-Punk Underground 1976-1980 | The Downtown Book | Search & Destroy/ReSearch | Theoretical Girls| Y Pants | ubuweb

The Static, Live at Riverside Studios, London, 24 Feb 1979 (from Audio Arts Supplement)

Theoretical Girls, “US Millie” (Live at the Kitchen, April 9, 1979) [courtesy of Acute]

Barbara Barg + Barbara Ess, Excerpts from “Streetcar Named Desire (for Blanche)” (from Tellus 5 & 6: Special Double Audio Visual Issue)

Y Pants, “Beat It Down” (from Noise Fest, recorded at White Columns Gallery, NYC, 16-24 June 1981)

Posted by Andrea at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the beginning, No Wave was an anti-movement set up in stark opposition to punk's tired reliance on conventional three-chord riffs. Stylistically exploiting the frisson between crudity and sophistication, groups like Suicide, DNA, and Ut reflected New York City’s moral chaos back on itself, turning art into shock therapy. (TV Party's Glenn O'Brien once quipped that No Wave was "a Gong Show for geniuses.")

From such assaultive beginnings, No Wave proved to be a complicated, elastic, genre-hopping beast. Subsequently, its influence has proven more long-lasting than the movement itself: its blend of twitchy disco, corrosive noise, and lo-fi recording techniques shifted paradigms, throwing off the lumbering bombast of mid ‘70s MOR with short, sharp, shocking songs that drew blood, striking nerves as well as chords. A generation later, these sounds are still au courant.

Here, Robin Crutchfield (DNA, Dark Day) ; Sally Young, Nina Canal, and Jacqui Ham of Ut ; and Phil Kline (the Del-Byzanteens, Dark Day) offer up their recollections.

Robin Crutchfield: Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks coined the phrase in an interview in New York Rocker with Roy Trakin, when he asked her if her music was “new wave.” She leered and jeered at him like he was an idiot, with the crack “’New Wave’? More like No Wave!!!" You'd have to talk to her, but her band and a few others really reacted against the whole 3-chord rock school of bands that were coming out of England like the Sex Pistols. It was a kind of disassembling of what passed for the time as rock and roll, taking apart the chords, the rhythms, the over-rehearsed quality of it. It needed to be screamingly raw and fresh like a newborn baby, screaming its lungs out, pulled into a polyester 70s world of American tedium.

Continue reading "NO WAVE Week | Part 1" »

Posted by Andrea at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have just released NO WAVE [Abrams Image], a widescreen visual chronicle of NYC's downtown experimental music scene circa 1976-1980. The book brings the era to vivid life, through a great mix of visuals —from club flyers to posed portraits and candids taken in skuzzy clubs and on crumbling tenement rooftops. Thrumming with the same kind of vibrant, often confrontational energy as the music itself, the books paints a wonderfully complete portrait of a movement that happened to be an anti-movement, "a wave that didn't ride in on a wave," to paraphrase Dark Day's Robin Crutchfield.

To celebrate, Warped Reality has two signed copies of the book to give away.

The prize drawing will be on Friday, June 13, just in time for the book release party in NYC. (Fittingly, the Friday the 13th release party will also mark the one-time only reunion of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Lydia Lunch's merry band of enfants terribles. Rumor has it that Mr. Moore himself will step in to complete the lineup.)

All you have to do to enter the contest is answer the following question:

Email your answer to: warpedrealitymagazine@gmail.com.

Check Warped Reality often throughout early June for a slew of No Wave rarities, even rarer visuals, and interviews from the archives, culminating on June 13th with an interview with Byron Coley.

The following songs can all be found on No New York.

Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, “Red Alert”

Mars, “Hairwaves”

James Chance & the Contortions, “Dish It Out”

DNA, “Not Moving”

PHOTOS, CLOCKWISE, L-R: CLUB 57 FLYER; JAMES CHANCE [EDO BERTOGLIO]; SALLY YOUNG & KAREN ACHENBACH OF UT [SUPER-8 FOOTAGE SHOT BY ERICKA BECKMAN]; NOISE FEST CASSETTE COVER, 1981.

Posted by Andrea at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)