REVIEWS:

From no to new wave

The NYC underground, then and now
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

“After two decades of relative neglect, the funked-up sounds that followed punk-as-such into the New York underground are back in favor. The center of gravity has shifted from Lower Manhattan to Williamsburg, and hip-hop has replaced disco as a catalyst, but labels like Death from Above (home to the Rapture’s recent Echoes and the four-artist DFA Compilation #1) and bands like the Liars and Out Hud are bent on updating the noise-you-can-dance-to formula pioneered by Ze Records and 99 Records on the cusp of the ’80s. Another regional sampler, Yes New York (Vice), twists the title of 1978’s Eno-produced No New York, despite including bands (the Natural History, Ted Leo) who ride waves more "new" than "no."

The only available reissue of No New York is a pricy Japanese CD, but the artists who inspired the current scene are well represented on three other recent compilations (all European, but well distributed). New York Noise is the thorough, crate-digging overview one expects from British soul-and-reggae specialist label Soul Jazz. N.Y. No Wave and Mutant Disco are the first visible signs of the relaunch of the above-mentioned Ze Records, the Franco-American imprint responsible for early releases by Was (Not Was) and Kid Creole & the Coconuts, among others. The discs do share some territory. "Contort Yourself," credited variously to the Contortions and James White & the Blacks, appears on all three — and deserves to. White’s career-defining song has it all: Pat Place & Jody Harris’s slippery, atonal guitars, White’s reed-biting sax squeals, and his dislocated, James-Brown-meets-Richard-Hell exhortations: "Contort yourself two times!" Mutant Disco features the song’s club version, which buttresses the same elements with brighter guitar sounds and a cracking snare for seven sweaty minutes.

But it’s New York Noise that gives the fullest sense of the moment’s hybrid energies. There are all-or-mostly-female bands who might not have arisen before punk’s anyone-can-play permissiveness (the Bloods, ESG), all-or-mostly black groups displaying fierce funk chops (Konk, Defunkt), and one track — the Dance’s "Do Dada" — from a band whose membership crossed both color and gender lines. There’s also a sign of rap’s growing influence, circa 1981: "Beat Box," by first-generation MC Rahmelzee (more often credited as Ramelzee) and K.Rob, heavy on percussive clatter and dramatic vocal treatments, serving as a reminder of the stark lo-tech of early hip-hop.

The two Ze releases are tailored for those ready to explore a smaller (but still well-populated) corner of this broad canvas. Founded by critic Michael Esteban and French designer Michael Zilkha (the latter is now half-owner of Houston-based windpower providers Zilkha Renewable Energy), Ze in its original incarnation ran roughly from 1978 to 1986, before the usual major-label cherry picking depleted the stable. N.Y. No Wave and Mutant Disco divide the catalogue into "arty" and "danceable" slots, respectively. It’s not an entirely artificial distinction. On N.Y. No Wave, tracks by various Contortions-related outfits, or by French counterparts Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Rosa Yemen, straddle the punk-funk line. But Teenage Jesus & the Jerks’ spastic "Empty Eyes," with Lydia Lunch, and Mars’ "3E," with its pre-Swans thud, are guaranteed floor clearers. More striking, in retrospect, are cuts from the lone EP by Arto/Neto (DNA’s Arto Lindsay and theatrical designer Seth Tillett). The best, "Pini, Pini," combines barely-there beats and shards of guitar with a magic-realist vignette about a woman who weds "a bool-cow" instead of a man.

Mutant Disco veers in the opposite direction. It’s no surprise that the label’s club-oriented releases are more DJ- than listener-friendly, and two full discs of 12-inch mixes may overestimate how much of their output was top-shelf. All six tracks from 1981’s key Seize the Beat collection appear, and other outstanding selections (the Waitresses’ "I Know What Boys Like," Kid Creole’s "Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy") are readily available. But one isn’t: 1978’s "Disco Clone," the debut single by Cristina, a Betty Boop–voiced proto-Madonna who was Zilkha’s wife. This brilliantly produced mix of live strings and salsa rhythms finds a male observer, voiced by the then barely known Kevin Kline, drooling over a hottie’s moves. Apparently used to this, she assures him, "There’s enough to go around," before at least a dozen Cristinas appear for the chorus: "If you like the way I shake it/And you think you want to make it/There’s 50 just like me/I’m the disco clone." Shallow, trivial, and painfully catchy, the song combines science fiction and pre-HIV sexual ease with the innocent optimism of an old stack of Omni magazines. Current musicians may revive the component sounds, or even improve on them, but none is likely to recapture this kind of quaint decadence.”

"No wave," they called it, and there couldn't have been a better name. It wasn't new wave, really, although it happened at the same time. It wasn't a wave at all: it was a ripple that started in New York, and kept rippling, and never built up to much more than a ripple. And it said no no no no no to everything. No to the idea of being a movement: all of its constituent bands sounded like themselves, and like not much before them, and not like each other except inasmuch as they actually shared personnel. No to the idea that music made with pop instruments had to sound like pop songs. No to the idea that music had to be made by people who even tried to play instruments the accepted way, in fact.

As a ripple, it glimmered on the surface of a tiny area for a little while. The central artifact of no wave was the No New York compilation, recorded by Brian Eno and released in 1978. That remarkable album, probably more talked about than heard, featured four songs apiece by the Contortions, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars and D.N.A. There were more than a few other bands in the same orbit – the Theoretical Girls and Red Transistor jump to mind – but those four made it onto the record, and the record made it into stores, and there's your de facto central canon. No New York is now hopelessly out of print, except as a Japanese import CD, but two new compilations circle in its orbit: New York Noise (Soul Jazz) and N.Y No Wave (Ze).

The latter is subtitled "The Ultimate East Village 80's Soundtrack," which is curious, since all but three of its 22 songs have 1978 or 1979 copyrights. What it actually is is an overview of Ze Records' no wave period, during which most of the No New York contributors made records for them. As a no wave overview, it's a bit lacking – check out http://nowave.pair.com/no_wave for a more complete idea of who was who – but most of its contents are hard to argue with. N.Y No Wave's highlights include both sides of the astonishing first Mars single, "11,000 Volts"/"3E", probably the most songlike record they ever made, which is still not saying much. Mars were the darkest and most fucked-up no wave group, a band with no musicians in the conventional sense. They were two actors and two visual artists, who wrote garbled crumples of songs – even their instruments slurred, as if there were something terribly wrong with them.

The non-No New York-related pieces here are four tracks involving Lizzy Mercier Descloux, who turned a bored French accent into a minor disco career, and two by Suicide, whose fuck-you-all-anyway attitude anticipated a lot of what the no wavers were up to by a few years. But N.Y No Wave really is a document of a scene – more than Yes New York or any number of other local compilations from the last few years. The central no wave bands all knew each other, played together, collaborated on records. The same names keep turning up on all of their records; they weren't exactly a collective, but it was pretty clear who was inside the circle.

One side of no wave that isn't mentioned very often but features prominently on N.Y No Wave: the bands' sense of humor. "Pini Pini," credited to Arto/Neto (that would be Arto Lindsay of D.N.A.), is a bizarrely funny little spoken-word-and-beats piece; if there were any doubt that James White/Chance/Siegfried's "Contort Yourself" was meant as some kind of goof on dance-instruction songs, it's dispelled by the ridiculous cover of "That's Where Your Heartaches Begin" that he recorded with Pill Factory. At the same time, it appears that these dry, guarded attempts to be funny were the no wave bands' first real attempt to break out of the tightly circumscribed "no" they'd built for themselves: as shockingly fresh as their early records were, they were also ascetic, which made their early style some kind of cul-de-sac.

If Ze carried the no wave torch at the end of the '70s, they handed it off to 99 Records for the early '80s, just as the artists who'd come up in the scene realized that dancing and pleasure weren't entirely anti-art. (Material released on a third important early label, Lust/Unlust, mostly hasn't been reissued yet.) 99's discography is smaller than you'd guess from its reputation, and in fact only a handful of tracks on New York Noise (by Liquid Liquid, ESG and Glenn Branca) originally appeared there, but most of the compilation follows from the core of 99's philosophy: the transforming strangeness of no wave, mutating the beat that had leaked in from the discos.

At the same time, the family trees of no wave blossomed. The Contortions spun off guitarist Pat Place to the Bush Tetras and keyboardist Adele Bertei to the Bloods. The Theoretical Girls' Glenn Branca went on to his solo career. Sonic Youth's early drummer Richard Edson joined Konk, along with Shannon Dawson, formerly of Gray, which had included painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who produced Rammelzee's "Beat Bop," from which the Beastie Boys (who were youngsters hanging out in the same clubs) picked up the line "B-boys making with the freek freek." And so on. The results of the diaspora make up New York Noise; the family resemblances are more distant, but they're still there.

Besides having a similar cast of musicians, the two comps share a couple of songs – Lizzy Mercier Descloux's inconsequential "Wawa" and versions of "Contort Yourself" by the Contortions (on NYN) and James White & the Blacks (on NYNW). But they couldn't be much more different. N.Y No Wave is bracing, harsh, cruel; New York Noise is a straight-up party record. It includes a couple of ringers, like Mars's forbidding "Helen Fordsdale" (which actually appeared on No New York), but it's subtitled "Dance Music from the New York Underground 1978-1982," and that's what it mostly is.

Nothing wrong with that. Even the most groove-crazy of the bands on New York Noise, Liquid Liquid (wisely represented by "Optimo" instead of the overfamiliar "Cavern", whose groove later became Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines"), came from a distinctly messy background – they'd released a couple of art-noise singles as Liquid Idiot, and then the Idiot Orchestra. There's lots of disco-derived stuff here; what's interesting is that it's unsweetened by commercial interest – or, rather, these artists let commercial interest come to them. Some of them never quite got the hang of fun (Glenn Branca's electric-guitar storm "Lesson No. 1" is grand and powerful, like a monumental statue), but some genuinely did. Chief among the dance artists who emerged from the no-wave aesthetic was Arthur Russell, who's represented here by Dinosaur L's "Clean on Your Bean #1"; the records he made during his peak years (under names like Loose Joints and Indian Ocean) are glorious chimeras that end up someplace very different from where they start. (There'll be a series of compilations of Russell's work coming out on the new Audika label, starting this fall; it's about time.)

The diaspora continued from the point documented on New York Noise, and by the mid-'80s the ideas that had germinated with no wave seeped into the musical culture at large – attempting a compilation that would continue the chronology of these two would make no sense. Ze released hits by the Waitresses and Was (Not Was), who took some of their cues from the New York Noise generation. Bits of the scene's DNA (no relation) turned up in Sonic Youth and their offspring, in dance music that shook off the yoke of the pop song, in every hip hop artist who ever sampled ESG or Liquid Liquid. Later on, no wave's admirers and revivalists (Erase Errata, the Flying Luttenbachers, Numbers, and on and on) picked up on its ideas and, sometimes, its signature sounds; after a few years of being deeply unfashionable, the New York Noise period has some high-profile admirers again, too (hello, DFA). The original ripple became invisible, but the motion it started hasn't stopped.

By Douglas Wolk