OPO: no wave songs

sonic youth is not. bush tetras might be, lizzy m-d might be.

I'm going with "I Can't Stand Myself" by James Chance & the Contortions.

or

Too Many Creeps: Bush Tetras!!

Fist "no-wave" song I thought of: Lake of Dracula's "Plague of Frogs".

Tough to decide. I hear "Helen Forsdale" and "Not Moving," too. I'd go with "Not Bite" over "We're Not Crazy," I think. Was tempted to vote for something off of the Mars EP, too.

If I had to pick another, it'd be a Contortions track off No New York. Or maybe some ESG. This is too hard.

best no wave song...man I dunno, its all so good

Does Ut count? If so, then "Evangelist."

also scored the dna 45 for pennies

Gygax: Cool. No, there's not much online. Someone once typed all the Fall album reviews from the back issues into the news section of "the official Fall website" years ago--lots of typos, though. I think those are archived on there. Here's my blog site , at least, if you haven't seen it.

Helen Fordsdale
Blonde Redhead

Lovin in the Red by the Theoretical Girls

ut - evangelist
v-effect - feet first
sonic youth - inhuman
liquid liquid - optimo
love of life orchestra - beginning of the heartbreak/don't don't

I'm listening to the Theoretical Girls CD I put out for the first time in like a year right now and damn if it isn't totally awesome. I highly recommend you all go out and buy it and continue to line my pockets with no wave dollars.

Acute has 1 CD coming out next month-Doctor Mix and the Remix's Wall of Noise compilation, has 1 CD definately in the planning stages for fall and at least 7 CDs in the possible/potential planning stages.

I'd like to change my mind. Best song:

Theoretical Girls - U.S. Millie

first heard on the ROIR NY Singles Scene compilation.

Howard Johnson, Puerto Rico, Texaco Co, Jews For Jesus, Ms. Magazine, Danon Yogurt, Scientology, East Germany,

And if V-Effect count, then Boyce Life.

It's really a comedy record. The fact that people from Mars and DNA made a comedy record at all is awesome, of course. It was conceived by Sumner Crane of Mars. I think it's brilliant, personally. Donesn't sound like Mars or DNA. The lineup is:

Sumner Crane: vocal, 3-string guitar, piano, percussion
Don Burg-bass clarinet, vocal
Mark Cunningham-horns
Ikue Mori-strings, percussion
Arto and Duncan Lindsay-percussion

re: the Desperate Bicycles, don't hold your breath...and if it does come out it'll probably be on Cherry Red or some version of Omplatten or god knows. Or maybe they'll, ummm, do it themselves? I hear they're not agreeing with each other. The next issue of Swingset magazine features an article I wrote about them. My mind wasn't fully functioning at the time, but it's not without worth.

MC: I could probably fill my own book with stories and thoughts about this but I4ll try to be brief. tho i have to start from the beginning, and use my own story as a microcosm of the moment. I grew up in the jersey suburbs and spent my teenage late sixties years tripping out in the village at the electric circus and the fillmore east. From 70 to 74 I went to college at a freak school in st. pete florida that was probably like a lot of other arty type schools of the time. my first day there I met Arto Lindsay, this strange kinda nerdy looking kid from virginia who had grown up in brazil, We immediately conspired to get rid of our assigned roommates and roomed together for the following four years and soon hooked up with other like minded music and word freaks and started jammin. we had no technique and no rules, worshipped the beats and Miles, warhol and the velvets... Later additions to the scene were Mark Pauline, Connie Burg (aka China, etc), Gordon Stevenson (Teenage Jesus bassist), Mirielle Cervenka, (Exene4s sister), and Liz and Bobby Swope (Beirut Slump)... in 74 several of us decided to head for NY, like so many other college grads and dropouts of the time. We knew something had to be happening there. It didn't take us long to find cbgb4s. We hit it for one of the first Television shows and it blew us away. We became regulars and saw the beginning of that whole generation of bands.Iin 74 and 75 it was really just a local underground scene but as Talking Heads and Patti Smith, The Ramones and Television released albums it started to get a lot more popular and the bands lost some of their original energy going for whatever formula they felt they had found. So at this point we all started thinking we could give that new blast that the scene needed. Then on the one hand you had the burgeoning punk scene which included a lot of boring rock bands and on the other this new bunch of very amateur groups looking for any sound that was different and cool. Mars started really in december 75 but we spent a year playing in a loft before we went public as China. Sometime in 77 we started sharing a rehearsal space with Teenage Jesus, the Cramps, and later DNA and the Contortions. So there was a lot of mixing and jamming and feelings in common, but we never decided to be a movement. My own feelings were that the bands before us had stretched rock to its limits and that punk wasn't offering anything new musically, that there wasn't anything new possible in the rock formula so we could only try to break that down and fuck around with the most primitive raw elements of the guitars and electricity and rhythms, which led us to the noise thing. At the same time there was the soho scene with a bunch of other bands following a similar evolution but with a more conceptual outlook and even more of an art school background. A lot has been said about tensions between these two scenes but all I can remember is that they were fairly separated by neighbourhoods.

I like this last quote from an interview with Weasel Walter about the seperation btw the E. Village bands (Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus, Contortions) and the Soho bands (Static, Theoretical Girls, Gynaecologists and various permutations of Jeffrey Lohn, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham bands). The old rumor is the No New York was to have all those bands but Lydia Lunch convinced Eno to fuck the Soho bands due to some petty dispute. Just a rumor though.

I saw James Chance play last night...introduced by Glenn O'Brien at the Downtown for Democracy benefit. As per usual he played one or two hot numbers and lots of lounge jazz type that wasn't quite as interesting. Gang Gang Dance was completely amazing, however.

I didn't know Mark Pauline was a part of the "scene." The Survival Research Laboratories guy, right?

Mark Pauline's an interesting connection. Maybe he's not one who moved to NY, though I've seen flyers for an early SRL show at Danceteria. I can only imagine seeing them in a small club.

today it is teenage jesus and the jerk's 'orphans'.

i won't be here tomorrow so that one'll be 'dish it out' by the contortions.;

Yesterday I watched the highly entertaining documentary No Wave. Underground 80s: Berlin-New York.

There was one song featured in it that I've been trying to find but without any luck. The band name supposedly was 'OK OK', and the accompanying video consisted of a man hanging upside down as a wrecking ball on a crane, moving through the air, grey buildings around, a very bleak Berlin as backdrop. If I recall correctly the music was quite lamenting, a sad sort of symphonic music, intercut with industrial sound.

I tried AMG/Google/IMDB etc: no dice. Does anyone have any idea what song this could be, by what band?

Oh, there was in fact a repeated singing of 'Ok ok ok, ok ok ok' at the beginning of the song.

Anyone?

CONTORT YOURSELF is def my favourite.

I don't know, but there's a video piece by Bruce Nauman that goes "okay okay okay...etc."

the director of the documentary you saw did an art film in 1980 called "OK OK - the Modern Dance"

Here's a description of the film: OKAY OKAY. The Modern Dance, produced at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (dffb), travels through a manmade world void of people: waste sites, parking garages, industrial chimneys, and rundown housing blocks. The timeless selection of songs by Pere Ubu, The Residents, Wire, Throbbing Gristle, Ultravox, James Chance, among others, not only underscores these images of post-apocalyptic landscapes and urban decay, it forms the core of Dreher and Mühlenbrock’s outstanding film: a radical approach to contemporary life profoundly influenced by punk, post-punk and new wave.

Guess I'm wondering whether it was a discrete song or soundtrack material ...

Oh my... that must surely be it! The images of post-apocalyptic and urban decay is what I described as the bleak grainy Berlin backdrop. I'm gonna scour for that (although I believe there's no vhs/dvd release of it...)

Thanks much Sarahel!

I'm curious to see that documentary now. I'm more familiar with the New York scene tbh.

The documentary I saw last week is very much worth watching, but I don't know they'll be showing it anytime soon in the US? I'll try to get a hold of it for you.

... sounds like something I'd need to get from a torrent-competent friend ...

German/French art channel Arte will broadcast it again on August 31th and September 2nd, so I should be able to record it.

xp

Or that, yes :)

I've had various friends try to explain them to me, and somehow my brain does not process it.

If it airs on the 31th and I record it, it will not be a great deal to share it online.

awesome!

No prob, will get back to you on that!