"No" Subject

Hello folks. I'm off to the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in about 15 minutes, so normal service should resume next Monday or thereabouts (I doubt you'll even notice, hahaha). For some content to keep you going, have a short article I wrote on No Wave for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford, which may or may not have been published, I don't know.

"Yes it sounds like a joke. Yes it sounds like something the NME would make up (incidentally does anyone remember their laughable attempt at “no name” some years back?). No, you’ve almost certainly never heard of it. But No Wave was an influential, pioneering and often challenging music and art scene that briefly thrived in New York in the late 70s and early 80s.
Although not strictly a coherent genre in itself the No Wave bands formed a loose collection that sort to distance themselves from the emergent new wave scene. Drawing on a range of diverse influence, including funk, jazz and all things avant garde, the music itself is often extremely dissonant and seems to favour rhythm and texture over actual melody. The musicians, many of them artists as well, embraced the “do it yourself” attitude of punk, with added nihilist tendencies.
No Wave’s mission statement is undoubtedly the Brian Eno produced “No New York”, which features tracks by scene stalwarts James Chance and the Contortions, DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Of these the Contortions are by far the best, their signature song “Contort Yourself” being an essential introductory track, whereas Teenage Jesus are definitely best avoided at first.
However, perhaps a better introduction to the varied sounds of the scene, and one that’s somewhat easier to get hold of, is the “New York Noise” compilation, which includes tracks by the almost criminally funky Konk, the magnificent Bush Tetras and the sublime ESG.
Inevitably the influence of No Wave far surpassed the extremely limited popularity it enjoyed during its lifetime. Theoretical Girls, and especially their experimental guitarist Glenn Branca, were greatly influential on Sonic Youth and indeed both Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore played with Branca on his solo recordings. Sonic Youth’s “Confusion is Sex” is the best realisation of their early No Wave tendencies and Glenn Branca’s “Lesson No. 1” is one of the most beautiful and interesting compositions of the period, and relatively easy on the ears to boot. Other modern bands influenced by the No Wave scene, and all worth checking out, include Liars (particularly “Drum’s Not Dead”), Les Georges Leningrad and Erase Errata.
So if you like your music to be challenging and inventive, often difficult but ultimately rewarding, then you could do much worse than checking out this remarkable period in post-punk music history. Sometimes it is better just to say “No”."

Horatio x