FIRST A FEW LINKS;

If you have an internet connection and time on your hands, you could do a lot worse than spend it reading this article on The Blues by Chris Summerlin. It's the best fucking music article I've read in an age.

Following that, anyone in the UK in search of a good source for new avant-psychedelia / "sub-underground" type records is hereby directed towards Volcanic Tongue. Click 'catalogue', 'browse by artist', and proceed to eat your own head.

That achieved, you might like to read the following bit I've written about Suicide and No Wave music. I wrote it back in January I think, but didn't get a chance to post it then, and thought I'd dig it up now in honour of the fact that some of the principal artists discussed will be bringin' it to the people at ATP in a couple of weeks. Enjoy.


LET’S HEAR IT FOR MARTIN.

I’ve been listening to Suicide’s first album again a lot recently. I dunno why really, it just suits my mood I guess. Beyond just the uncompromising minimalist aesthetic that makes it instantly worthy of punk canonisation, I’m starting to gain a better understanding of just what a great album it is.

I finally get that the genius doesn’t lie in the words Alan Vega says, it lies in the impressions that are forced into your mind in the spaces between what he says, and in the way Martin Rev’s rough-as-fuck accompaniment aids the process. It can easily be mistaken for caveman primitivism, but this is precision stuff - check the way Rev subliminally shifts the tone from utter inhuman alienation to trance-like sensual paradise and back again with little more than a glitch in that crazy sounding DIY drum machine and a quick wash of distorted organ noise. Check out ‘Che’, where it’s easy to miss Vega’s bitter key line (“said he was a saint / but I know he ain’t”), but the suffocating entropy and disillusion conveyed by the music makes the point impossible to ignore.

It’s a great album for listening to whilst walking around town, one of those ones that can completely change your perception of the world without you even noticing – try it out. It works especially well in conjunction with the stupidly-massive-bass setting on my CD walkman. Mmm - cavernous.


NO WAVING AND DROWNING.

On a vaguely similar tip, I now find myself able to compare and contrast several compilations put together to tie-in with the recent resurgence of interest in the New York No Wave scene. It seems bizarre to me now that that whole genre/era seems totally over-exposed and hipster-soiled. I remember reading about all the No Wave stuff a few years ago as a spin-off from my interest in Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch, and thinking it sounded like the most cool, arcane, frightening shit ever. I spent a while searching out every scrap of information I could, and wishing I could listen to Mars, DNA et al, and imagining what they might have sounded like – I was (and still am) fascinated by the concept of taking the ‘unmusical’ nature of punk one step further into actually being ANTI-musical, and seeing what emerged.
But by the time the opportunity to hear much of this music actually arose (via downloading, reissues etc.), my tastes had moved off in completely the other direction, toward psychedelia, metal and weird romantic excesses, and I kind of lost interest. But now pent-up urban frustration is predominating once more, and I’m back on track to really getting into this stuff… and a couple of compilations I’ve hi-jacked from the library are helping matters…

Despite originating on a label that was intimately connected with the whole business, N.Y. No Wave on Ze Records bares the hallmarks of being cobbled together quickly, and takes a pretty cavalier attitude to the inclusion of material. Could Mister Ray-era Suicide and Lydia Lunch’s ‘Queen of Siam’ really be said to constitute “the Ultimate East Village ‘80s Soundtrack”? And -‘80s?? Really? Most of the tracks I’m able to confidently date here are more like ‘77-’80, surely? But it’s just this misguided tagline that sticks in the craw really – if you look at this collection more as a sampler of music released on the Ze label, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. The bulk of the content comes from the label’s big hitters – Lydia, Suicide and James Chance, and the complete lack of sleeve notes renders some of the remaining lesser known tracks pleasantly mysterious (to me anyway). Who is this Lizzy Mercier Descloux? And how much of her record ‘Wa Wa’ – a superb slice of spidery disco-punk during which she sings about two words – did she actually make? Ditto Rosa Yemen, whose ‘Herpes Simplex’ is a thoroughly distressing confection of mangled vocalisations, clanging sheet metal guitar and hysterical heavy breathing. What’s with these strange European ladies hanging around in New York making whacked out horror movie avant-funk records? It’s probably more fun to leave it to the imagination.

Most interesting tracks for my money though come from Arto/Neto – Arto being DNA guitarist Arto Lindsey, instantly recognisable by his unique freeform skronk, and Neto being… well I admit I’m at a loss, but he appears to be a soft-spoken gentleman with an African(?) accent. Their track ‘Penny’ is great – Mr. Neto (I assume) recites a bizarre, linguistically mangled folk tale, the logic of which appears to have been lost in translation (key line: “Penny my love, you married a Bull-Cow!”), accompanied by chaotic violin abuse and a broken drum machine. I can see it becoming a future mix CD classic. Also of note are alternate versions of several Teenage Jesus & the Jerks songs where Lydia’s terrifying destructo-guitar is toned down and paired with Contortions-style saxophone. Which is interesting, but distracts somewhat from the still unequalled skull-crushing assault of the sax-less takes available on the Teenage Jesus reissue CD.


DANCE DANCE DANCE, TALK TALK TALK

Top dollar as all this may be though, the Ze disc is still rather put in the shade by the Soul Jazz compilation New York Noise, a more thoughtfully assembled and comprehensive collection of music produced within the No Wave milieu which, as you might expect from Soul Jazz, does a fantastic job of exploring the unlikely cross-pollination between jagged, deconstructionist white art rock and floor-filling black disco/funk. Billed as “dance music from the New York underground”, it pushes this point rather heavily in places, and it’s sometimes difficult to fathom exactly what the connection is between the smooth, lyrical grooves of Defunkt and Dinosaur L and the anti-music, anti-fun noise tantrums of Mars and Theoretical Girls, to say nothing of the comprehensive lack of even the vaguest dancing potential to be found in Glenn Branca’s (admittedly brilliant) avant-guitar collage, ‘Lesson #1’. But of course, the spark comes when we start to see these two distinct strains of parallel musical development bleeding into one another in the most joyous ways, creating an exhilarating middle ground between noise and dancing that god knows how many bands are still drawing on today in search of new electric thrills.

Material and 23 Skidoo stretch the skeleton of funk out into tout, paranoid soundscapes, reflecting the emergence of early industrial music via clashing factory discords, AM radio samples and generally menacing atmospherics. Liquid Liquid and Konk meanwhile simply twist the existing funk into new shapes, introducing poly-rhythms, skewed time signatures and overseeing the genesis of the DFA’s beloved cowbell-whacking along the way. The development of hip-hop is represented by Rahmelzee & K.Rob’s ‘Beat Bop’, and props go out to Jean-Michael Basquit for his neat dub-inspired production job. Spacious and languid with massive pools of echo and flashes of violin, classical guitar and windchimes floating in and out, but never obscuring the MCs’ flow. Sweet! The Contortions’ ‘Contort Yourself’ makes it’s inevitable appearance in it’s longest, wildest and generally best version (how many versions of this track did they do anyway? I’ve got at least three on different compilations…), and as befits its status as the eureka moment that introduced many to the mercurial possibilities of a disco/noise/free jazz car crash, it still sounds fucking fantastic. ‘Wa Wa’ also rears its head again, with the otherwise comprehensive Soul Jazz sleeve notes not giving us much information on Lizzy Mercier Descloux beyond the fact that she was indeed ‘a singer’. So there you go.

Choice cuts are also provided from the archives of the ‘pure’ No Wave bands - DNA’s ‘5:30’ gets into the spirit of things by tying Arto’s frenzied guitar combustions to a ramshackle disco groove, while Theoretical Girls ‘You Got Me’ rejects all such compromise, painstakingly dragging maximum tension out of a one note and one bang ‘riff’, constructing a vile, crawling hunk of serial killer anxiety that’ll have you waking in a cold sweat and reaching for the razor blades. Mars’s hallowed ‘Helen Fordsdale’ meanwhile presents us with an almost autistic alien noise that defies any attempt to impose meaning or structure upon it. Rock so brutalised and misshapen you’re hard pressed to even tell what the instruments are -it’s the full realisation of the alienated nastiness that’s creeping around the edges of all of these tracks, giving them that wired, unpredictable edge that sets them apart.

Best of all though are the absolutely killer tracks by several female led post-punk bands who (to me) represent the absolute perfect synthesis of the music and attitudes this CD investigates – ESG, the Bloods and the Bush Tetras all totally kick it on short, sharp, irresistibly bad-ass songs that bridge the gap between CBGBs and Studio 54 like it was the most natural thing in the world and end up too fucking cool to be associated with either. Holy shit man, the Bush Tetras! They made awesome records, they looked cool as fuck, they wrote great songs with killer dancing grooves – why am I sniffing around one or two tracks on obscure compilations rather than sticking on the fifth reissue of their greatest hits?? Oh yeah, life’s unfair etc.

This compilation collects some of the coolest, most exciting pop music of all time, and it will continue to be so long after the hipsters have turned their eyes elsewhere, so, er… you can probably see this bit coming, but nonetheless, I'll say it anyway.. this is essential!! Get it now!