[Moshe]

http://www.saucerlike.com/index.php


No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980
December 4, 2007

 

Abrams Image Books will publish a new book by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley on June 1st 2008. The hard cover book which is titled "No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980" is the first book to visually chronicle the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. This in depth look at punk rock, new wave, experimental music, and the avant-garde art movement of the 70s and 80s focuses on the true architects of No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca, as well as the luminaries that intersected the scene, such as David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Richard Hell.

This rarely documented scene was the creative stomping ground of young artists and filmmakers from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jim Jarmusch as well as the musical genesis for the post-punk explosions of Sonic Youth and is here revealed for a new generation of fans and collectors.

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have selected 150 unforgettable images, most of which have never been published previously, and compiled hundreds of hours of personal interviews to create an oral history of the movement, providing a never-seen-before exploration and celebration of No Wave.

 

Moshe

[toxic johnny]

Now this is gonna be special...

Really looking forward to this one.

[uhler]

i already preordered it from amazon.com.

[whorefrost]

The book I always wanted to be made, hell, when I was at uni I conceived of such a title edited by Thurston for a class project..

[val-holla-ing]

i'm gonna have to get this. hopefully it won't be horribly expensive, though.

[uhler]

Originally Posted by val-holla-ing

i'm gonna have to get this. hopefully it won't be horribly expensive, though.

i preodered it for around 20 bucks (not including 4 dollars shipping) off amazon.com. you won't even get charged until when they send off the book, which is many months from now. i reccommend preodering it now to save money.

[val-holla-ing]

that's it!? looks like i'll have to jump on the preorder bandwagon, too.

[uhler]

Originally Posted by val-holla-ing

that's it!? looks like i'll have to jump on the preorder bandwagon, too.

also, if the final price is cheaper than it is now you'll get it for that price.

[val-holla-ing]

but if it's more expensive, i'm sure you have to pay more, too.

[uhler]

Originally Posted by val-holla-ing

but if it's more expensive, i'm sure you have to pay more, too.

no. you pay whatever you agreed to pay when you first preordered the book.

[uhler]

it's $18.45 right now. it's list price is $27.95. so no matter what you'll get it for $18.45 (plus shipping) if you preorder it right now. you can also buy something else and if the end total comes to over $25 you'll get free shipping on whatever else you buy now and then in june you'll get free shipping for the book.

[Iain]

Meh, this looks okay but it's frustrating that the few books coming out about this period (this and the souljazz one) are coffee table picture books. I'd rather 300-500 pages of writings. That i'd go for. This I will probably give a miss.

[uhler]

Originally Posted by Iain

Meh, this looks okay but it's frustrating that the few books coming out about this period (this and the souljazz one) are coffee table picture books. I'd rather 300-500 pages of writings. That i'd go for. This I will probably give a miss.

are you talking about this one: http://www.amazon.com/No-Wave-Marc-Masters/dp/190615502X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196798511&sr= 1-1?

it's looks pretty short also, but i think it reads like a normal book. it says it came out nov. 7th but amazon.com has it for preorder only. maybe they mean it was only released in the uk at that time. anybody have any info?

[Moshe]

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=6&title=new_books_by_thurston_moore _and_mark_koz&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

New Books By Thurston Moore And Mark Kozelek

2008-04-09 12:55:34
A couple of interesting books turned up in this morning’s post. Mark Kozelek sent me his collected lyrics, “Nights Of Passed Over”, which also comes with a CD of live and rare recordings, a nice complement to the excellent Sun Kil Moon album which I blogged about last week.
Continued...
I’ll have a proper look at this in the next day or two and report back, though a quick skim of the intro reveals some awful news: Katy, the subject of many Red House Painters songs, who I mentioned in that last blog, died of cancer a few years ago. Thanks, and belated condolences, to Mark.
I’ve spent the morning, though, leafing through “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980”, a fantastic volume by Thurston Moore and the fine rock journalist Byron Coley. No Wave is a meticulous document of that subterranean downtown scene which transformed the city’s punk scene into a volatile mix of avant-garde noise and art grad antics, laying the foundations for both a rethink of classical music – in the shape of uncompromising composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham – and a new generation of adventurous rock bands, epitomised of course by Moore’s own, enduringly remarkable Sonic Youth.
I guess on paper a book like this can look pretty forbidding, if you’re a little nervous at the prospect of an academic tome on the likes of Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay and James Chance. But while Moore and Coley never try to cover over the intellectual ambitions of the No Wave scene, they also are keen to capture the chaotic, often confrontational aspects of the artists involved.
In this way, “No Wave” almost emerges as a sort of sequel to Legs McNeill’s “Please Kill Me”, using the same oral history format to tell the stories of these weird and compelling figures. There are stories of Lester Bangs playing gigs, out of his mind, with Robert Quine and Jay Dee Daugherty. There’s a great yarn by the avant-jazz guitarist Rudolph Grey about his brief tenure with Von LMO, a performance artist loosely affiliated to Suicide who would spend most of every gig dismantling his keyboards with a chainsaw or a pickaxe.
Grey recalls a terrible night supporting The Stranglers, of all people, in New Jersey, a story which involves LMO destroying his gear in a handful of minutes and being heckled offstage, leaving the rest of the band to try and play songs about the Baader-Meinhof gang committing suicide for long enough to secure their pay at the end of the night.
The book is also filled with some incredible shots of the bands and scenesters, largely featuring James Chance either launching himself at audiences or mingling with various NYC untouchables like Debbie Harry. Eno appears with a chest expander, smoking. Iggy slouches on a bar. Richard Hell, The Cramps and Suicide lurk in the shadows. Jim Sclavunos, currently handling percussion in the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, appears to have been involved with every band on the scene.
And the whole thing looks tremendously alluring, this collision of high-concept fashion punks, passing artists like Basquiat, and a bunch of scholarly but invigorated noise nerds, all coming together to make a racket that resonated far beyond the squalid dives in which they played. I must dig out those “New York Noise” comps on Soul Jazz tonight; like all the best music books, even a brief glance at “No Wave” makes you desperately want to hear the music which it so vividly describes.
John Mulvey

[Visaforviolet]

 

Warped Reality Magazine: NO WAVE CONTEST
Enter to win a copy of the new book by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have just released NO WAVE [Abrams Image], a widescreen visual chronicle of NYC's downtown experimental music scene circa 1976-1980. The book brings the era to vivid life, through a great mix of visuals —from club flyers to posed portraits and candids taken in skuzzy clubs and on crumbling tenement rooftops. Thrumming with the same kind of vibrant, often confrontational energy as the music itself, the books paints a wonderfully complete portrait of a movement that happened to be an anti-movement, "a wave that didn't ride in on a wave," to paraphrase Dark Day's Robin Crutchfield.

To celebrate, Warped Reality has two signed copies of the book to give away.

The prize drawing will be on Friday, June 13, just in time for the book release party in NYC. (Fittingly, the Friday the 13th release party will also mark the one-time only reunion of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Lydia Lunch's merry band of enfants terribles. Rumor has it that Mr. Moore himself will step in to complete the lineup.)

All you have to do to enter the contest is answer the following question:

Which former member of Sonic Youth ended up doing performance art (among other things) at legendary NYC performance space the Kitchen?

Email your answer to: warpedrealitymagazine(at)gmail.com.


Check Warped Reality often throughout early June for a slew of No Wave rarities, even rarer visuals, and interviews from the archives, culminating on June 13th with an interview with Byron Coley.

Warpedrealitymagazine.com
"Hi-fi, lo-fi, no-fi and everything in-between."
warpedrealitymagazine@gmail.com

[dionysusundone]

I read it, it was pretty good. Real quick read though.

[luisxvi]

This looks pretty amazing. Thanks Mr Moshe.

[agoston]

we're working to have it on sale at the knitting factory during the teenage jesus show - i know there will be exclusive free posters and t-shirts for the show too. hoping to make it a cheap 20.00 for the book if at all possible. fyi

[batreleaser]

jim sclavunos is the most underrated drummer ever. hes been in more legendary bands than one can count.

[Moshe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/books/12nowa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=music&pagewanted= print

June 12, 2008

A Brief, Noisy Moment That Still Reverberates

By BEN SISARIO
Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.
Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.
But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.
On Friday the book will be celebrated with an exhibition opening at KS Art, at 73 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, and, across the street at the Knitting Factory, the reunion of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, whose blunt, aggressive songs had instrumentation so minimal that on its records the percussionist was sometimes credited as playing simply “drum.” Lydia Lunch, the former lead singer, is flying from Barcelona to play the show.
In the last year two other books have been published on no wave and overlapping periods of downtowniana: Marc Masters’s “No Wave” (Black Dog) and “New York Noise” (Soul Jazz), a collection of photographs by Paula Court.
“It was a little, blippy scene,” said Mr. Moore, the Sonic Youth guitarist and historian of underground rock. “It came out of the gate finished.”
With crisp black-and-white photographs and interviews with musicians and visual artists, the book is a loving reminiscence of a largely unheard period, as well as a look at a seedy, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. Most groups in the no wave scene — which also included Mars, the Theoretical Girls and the Gynecologists — left behind few recordings, and the compilation album that defined the genre, “No New York,” produced by Brian Eno in 1978, has never been legitimately issued on CD in the United States.
Despite its brief, blippy existence, no wave has had a broad and continued influence on noisy New York bands, from Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore in the 1980s to current groups like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Liars. But the original no wavers saw themselves not as part of any rock continuum but a deliberate reaction against such an idea.
“A guitar player like Lydia Lunch was somebody who clearly was not coming out of any kind of tradition,” said Mr. Coley, a veteran rock critic. “She didn’t have a Chuck Berry riff in her.”
The rebelliousness came out in many ways, from song composition — nasty, brutish and short — to the movement’s name, a cynical retort to “new wave,” then emerging as a more palatable variation on punk. The looks were nerdy and androgynous (or, in Ms. Lunch’s case, menacingly oversexed).
The sound reflected the squalor and decay of downtown New York in the late ’70s.
“New York at that moment was bankrupt, poor, dirty, violent, drug-infested, sex-obsessed — delightful,” Ms. Lunch said by phone. “In spite of that we were all laughing, because you laugh or you die. I’ve always been funny. My dark comedy just happens to scare most people.”
Mr. Moore and Mr. Coley’s book emphasizes the major role that women had in the scene. Besides Ms. Lunch, they included Pat Place of the Contortions, Ikue Mori of DNA and Nancy Arlen of Mars, as well as impresario-scenesters like Anya Phillips. Many photographs were taken by women, among them Julia Gorton and Stephanie Chernikowski.
Ms. Gorton, who was a student at the Parsons School of Design in the late ’70s and now teaches there, said that everyone in the no wave circle knew one another. “There were a lot of late nights, a lot of pitchers, a lot of Polaroids,” she said.
The book’s genesis was two years ago when Mr. Moore heard that Abrams, which published “CBGB & OMFUG: Thirty Years From the Home of Underground Rock” in 2005, was considering a book on no wave, with a broad and multidisciplinary approach.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Coley, who said they had been considering a no wave book for years, rushed to the Abrams office to pitch their idea, which would instead have a narrow focus, excluding everything that did not meet their strict definition of no wave.
A restrictive approach to one of the most obscure periods of rock music would seem to limit a book’s audience. But Tamar Brazis, who edited both books, said there was enough interest in the period to justify the “No Wave” book, and that the depth of Mr. Moore and Mr. Coley’s knowledge bowled her over. The CBGB book, she said, has sold nearly 40,000 copies, an impressive figure for an art book, and she added that Abrams has similar expectations for “No Wave.”
Mr. Moore said that only a narrow definition would fit the genre, which was so contrary in its sound and attitude that too much outside context would dilute its impact.
“We liked the absurdity of how small it was,” he said. “We kept our parameters really tight. We needed a cut-off point, and we cut it off as soon as anybody played any semblance of rock ’n’ roll. Any kind of traditional aspect of rock, it’s over.”