No Wave

LARGEHEARTED BOY / WTJU

2008-06-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks again to everyone who's visited this blog, and apologies for our still-sparse content. One of these days, when the government finally mandates a 25-hour day, we'll get on a roll with No Wave ephemera and such...but for now, a couple of pieces of news:

- as part of the great Largehearted Boy blog's Booknotes series, I've offered a sampling of some of the more out-there No Wave tracks. There's also an accompanying muxtape mix, so you can listen along.

- I will be on Dominic Devito's "Pure Easy Listening" show on UVa's radio station, WTJU (where I once DJ'd myself!), next Wednesday from 2 to 4 pm. Dominic and I will be discussing the book, playing No Wave music, and probably saying a lot of "um"s, "yeah"s, and "you know"s. Tune in!

More soon...

BAY AREA NO WAVE EVENTS

2008-05-19T21:52:00.001-07:00

OK, so if you're in the Bay Area, I'll be in town this weekend, doing some NO WAVE events with Weasel Walter. These should all be a lot of fun and each event will be different, so hope to see you there...

Saturday May 24, 2pm - FREE
@ Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight St., S.F.
NO WAVE book signing and DJ set w/Marc Masters & Weasel Walter

Saturday May 24, 9pm - $6-10 donation
@ 21 Grand, 416 25th St, Oakland
NO WAVE reading, discussion, and music w/Marc Masters & Weasel Walter
plus performances by DEATH SENTENCE: PANDA and ETTRICK

Sunday May 25, 5pm - 7pm, $6
@ ATA, 992 Valencia St at 21st., S.F.
NO WAVE reading and videos w/Marc Masters & Weasel Walter

NO WAVE CELEBRATION IN LONDON, MAY 21

2008-05-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

First off, apologies for the sparseness of this blog so far. Life has intervened, but we're not abandoning our original mission to fill this blog with NO WAVE info, outtakes, and ephemera...just delaying it a bit. Until then, here's some info about an event in England this week celebrating the book and NO WAVE in general:

Decasia and Brave Exhibitions present
A Celebration of NO WAVE
Featuring Live Covers from N,N Minus, New Black Light Machine, Eve Black/Eve White
Plus A Lydia Lunch Sound Retropsective, Films from the Cinema of Transgression, and discounted copies of NO WAVE the Book, and DJs spinning No Wave!

Weds May 21
@ The George Tavern, 373 Commercial Road E1, London, UK

more info:
myspace. com/decasia
myspace. com/braveexhibitions

I won't be able to be there personally, as I'll be in the Bay Area for some NO WAVE events of my own...watch this space tomorrow for more details about those...if you're in S.F. or Oakland, I hope to see you next weekend...

POP RECON REDUX

2008-04-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

OK, so we fibbed a little bit when we said we'd be back soon...we're still under a bit of a rock here at No Wave Blog HQ, but we're really close to getting out from under it, we promise.

In the meantime, the Pop Recon interview with Maria T that I mentioned last time will be rebroadcast tomorrow (Wednesday, 4/16) at 8pm. So check it out if you missed it when it premiered, by going over to WPRB's website.

We'll be back soon with some No Wave related matter. For now, check out this review of the book by one of the underground's foremost rock historians, Chris Stigliano. He's a true No Wave expert - and his legendary zine Black To Comm was a major source of info for the book - so I'm thrilled to find out that he likes the book (and agree with him that it should have included more - if only I had the time and space!). If I'm ever lucky enough to be able to write a sequel, everything Chris mentions will be in it, I promise...

More soon!

POP RECON NO WAVE INTERVIEW

2008-03-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

OK, so here's a quick note to let you know we're still here, and will be updating this blog much more frequently now that our daily life has calmed down a bit. Look for interview outtakes and some choice No Wave audio and video here in the coming weeks. Until then, a couple links of interest:

POP RECON:
Maria T's new radio show on Princeton's WPRB is "an hour-long arts & culture interview series" that airs on the last Friday of the month. It debuts tomorrow at 7pm, with an interview with No Wave author Marc Masters (i.e. me), and you can listen to it on the web via WPRB's website. The show itself has a Facebook page for info and upcoming shows, check it out here.

MUXTAPE:
We've set up a site on muxtape, which I'll be loading up with No Wave tracks both familiar and rare, and changing often. Check it out at hairwaves.muxtape.com

We'll be back next week with more No Wave stuff!

READING TONIGHT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

2008-02-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the late notice, but I will be reading from No Wave tonight in Washington, D.C., at the Electric Possible experimental music series at George Washington University. Here's the info:

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 3, 8 PM
NO WAVE BOOK READING AND SIGNING (Sorry, Superbowl!)
Plus performances by Safe, and Pierce, Putter & Rumble

At the ELECTRIC POSSIBLE @ George Washington University
Phillips Hall, 801 22nd St, NW
Rm B 120 (in the basement)
(Metro: Orange and Blue to Foggy Bottom/GWU)

The Washington City Paper ran a preview/review of the event here, and a blog interview with me here.

We are also having a book release party next weekend, on Saturday February 9, at the Velvet Lounge in D.C. Here are the details for that - hope to see you there!

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 9, 9 PM
NO WAVE BOOK RELEASE PARTY
With a performance by Kohoutek, DJ-ing by Mark C. of original No Wave legends Live Skull, plus more TBA

At the VELVET LOUNGE
915 U St NW WDC
202-462-3213
(Metro: Yellow and Green to U St)

ROY TRAKIN

2008-01-21T22:35:00.000-08:00

One of the major factors in No Wave's lasting legacy is the press coverage it got at the time. I was happily surprised to find that there was so much written at the time about No Wave, and I'd conservatively estimate that more than half of what I found was written by Roy Trakin. Trakin primarily wrote for New York Rocker and The Soho Weekly News, literally covering every major No Wave event and figure. The sampling of headlines pictured above - from Roy's hilarious interview with James Chance, his review of No New York, and his review of the Artists' Space Festival that itself spawned No New York - is just the tip of the iceberg. Trakin's stuff was sharp, perceptive, and tireless; it blew my mind how many times his byline popped up during my research, and I really could have quoted him on every page of the book.

This week, Trakin posted some reminiscences of No Wave, and his impressions of our book, at the site he currently writes for. Check his thoughts out by clicking here and scrolling down to entry #3.

Here's an outtake from my interview with Roy, detailing what attracted him to No Wave:

"I thought it was an advance on what was called Punk Rock at the time, because it was also incorporating a lot of downtown art and avant-garde elements. That was what excited me, because I saw it within the tradition of stuff like the Velvet Underground with Andy Warhol, and Suicide. I saw it as the logical progression of what was going on, and a real statement about commercial music and about music as art. I don’t know if anyone really thought that this would be a commercially viable genre, but you could tell it was something that was going to be influential at the very least. We were all flushed with the Do-It-Yourself attitude and deconstruction was big. No Wave encapsulated a lot of my influences which were movies of the French New Wave and movies as art and music as art. It really was a big middle finger towards commercial music or melodies or verses and choruses. It was compelling for that.

The bands were chaotic to listen to; they completely abandoned any pretense to any kind of Western musical mores. But there was an excitement there, and a kind of intellectual over-reaching combined ultimately with an attitude which branded it punk. It was antagonistic and it was nihilistic, but there was a vulnerability to putting yourself out there that to me was kind of seductive. And there was a real offbeat humour to it that people mistook for arrogance and nihilism, but ultimately the No Wavers were romantics. They had a very idealistic view of the possibilities of music in terms of changing people and changing attitudes towards what pop music is, how it works."

EXCERPT FROM NO WAVE, UP TODAY AT PITCHFORK

2008-01-15T06:53:00.000-08:00

An exclusive excerpt from NO WAVE is up today at pitchforkmedia.com. You can check it out here. It's a slightly condensed version of Chapter One, exploring the origins of the movement, its musical inspirations, and the conditions in New York at the time that allowed this loose collective of artists to live on practically nothing - freeing them to form bands, play shows, and influence each other. This is the most quote-heavy section of the book, so I hope it gives everyone a pretty good feel for all the voices and characters who played key roles in No Wave.

For anyone curious about what the rest of the book covers, here's a chapter rundown:

ONE: NO!: The Origins of No Wave
TWO: From Ten to One: Mars and DNA
THREE: Dissatisfied: Lydia Lunch and James Chance
FOUR: Theoretical Music: The Soho Contingent (Theoretical Girls, Gynecologists, UT, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, and more)
FIVE: The Offenders: No Wave Cinema
SIX: Too Many Creeps: The Aftermath of No Wave (Lounge Lizards, Don King, Bush Tetras, ESG, Sonic Youth, Swans, Live Skull, and more)

Sprinkled in between chapters are sidebars delving in more detail into some fascinating crevices of No Wave. These include sections on Dark Day (Robin Crutchfield's post-DNA band), Lydia Lunch's surreal solo album Queen of Siam (which included ~~compositions~~ arrangements by the guy who wrote the Flintstones theme!), the psychotic trio Red Transistor (featuring Von Lmo and Rudolph Grey), the No Wave-ish cable access show TV Party, and the sub-No Wave scene based around NO Magazine and Tape #1 (including criminally underappreciated bands like Information, Blinding Headache, and Mofungo).

Also included are a foreword by No Wave archivist/expert Weasel Walter, and a ton of photos like the ones seen on Pitchfork today - we have illustrations on every page including live pictures, flyers, film stills, film scripts, and all other types of images, many never seen in a book before. Watch this space for samples of those in the coming months...

GREETINGS

2008-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Hi, and thanks for visiting - you've reached the blog for NO WAVE, a book on the radical music and film movement in New York in the late 1970's. The book was written by Marc Masters, a contributor to the Wire, Pitchfork, and others, with a foreword and invaluable assistance from No Wave expert Weasel Walter, and the editing expertise of Ziggy Hanaor and Rob Young of Black Dog Publishing, the British imprint which is releasing the book.

Flashing through the New York underground in the late 1970s, No Wave was the ultimate anti-movement. Its bands consisted of artists and poets untrained in music, looking to explode rock and disappear before the smoke cleared. The primary perpetrators – Lydia Lunch’s howling Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance’s skeletal Contortions, the dark-noise groups Mars and DNA – all drew on primitivism, performance art, and the avant-garde.

NO WAVE traces the history of this noisy and uncompromising genre, from its most famous names down to its many offshoots and sidetracks - from early pioneers like Suicide, to forgotten treasures like Red Transistor and Bush Tetras, to descendents like ESG and Sonic Youth. The book also delves into No Wave cinema, where pioneers like Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, and Beth and Scott B. translated the aggression and innovation of No Wave music to the screen. Illustrated with concert photos, record covers, and other ephemera of the times, and featuring over 30 exclusive interviews, NO WAVE is the definitive guide to a genre whose sounds and ideas still vibrate through alternative culture today.

NO WAVE is already available in the UK (you can order it there by clicking here), and can be pre-ordered in the US by going here. We're just getting this blog started - stay tuned for photos and passages from the book, interview outtakes and other material that we couldn't include in the book, links to reviews and No Wave-related news, and hopefully (rights permitting) video and music from the time period.