»There are no new waves,« Jean-Luc Godard is reported to have said once, »only the ocean.« Whether this bon mot was really behind the name given to the New York music, film and art movement at the end of the 1970s, or whether the term »No Wave« stemmed rather from the pronounced spirit of negation embodied by Lydia Lunch, James Chance and Co is a matter of conjecture. Beyond dispute is the fact that the large ocean sometimes produces relatively calm waves, and sometimes ones that are less calm, and that the period after 1977, when punk was already past history, went through much stormier weather conditions than in previous years. At least with regard to the aesthetic approach of a group of people who, mostly coming from the field of art, lived out their highly conceptual attitude of denial and destruction mainly in music and film. Equally indisputable is the fact that, in the wake of Richard Hell, The Ramones & Co, who all still operated within the framework of classical rock’n’roll schemes, the big »no« hung in the air, waiting for an adequate artistic rendering. Something which then fell to the part of the still younger generation, whose programmatic manifestation was the record »No New York« (1978), produced by Brian Eno, which to many also ended the movement, as far as it could be called one at all.

This, at least, is the way Marc Masters, in his explicit study »No Wave«¹, reconstructs the short span of an explosively compressed history whose volatile impact still echoes on today. Masters concentrates his chronicle on those same four groups that were featured on »No New York« (Contortions, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, DNA) – as well as its significant omissions, such as Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls or Rhys Chatham, who even then had already carried out his style-forging fusion of guitar punk and minimal music (something from which Branca, above all, was to profit later in grand style). Not until the last chapter, after a rather abrupt digression about the – admittedly still under-appreciated - No-Wave cinema, are all the others mentioned: those such as Bush Tetras or ESG who were to introduce a completely new chapter in Dance Underground; or Sonic Youth, who after all played a large role in the way »Noise« gradually mutated to »Alternative« and finally to »Mainstream«. Master’s order of priority makes sense inasmuch as the short phase around 1978 during which the canonical »No New York« bands were active has not been properly examined to this day. At the same time, the rather cursory notes on important projects like Red Transistor and Dark Day reveal that, in the shadow of those who today are considered the »greats«, there were parallel activities taking place that were not to be overheard – productions that were only subjected to critical examination much later or not at all.

The London label Soul Jazz Records has dedicated itself – alongside archivistic projects like Atavistic² and the revived ZE Records³ – to this kind of critical examination, having issued to date three editions of its series »New York Noise«⁴. The historical scope is obviously much larger here and extends up into the mid-1980s, when the crude, cacophonic experiments of the »No Wave« era had long since split into well-behaved sub-genres like Dancefloor, Lounge Jazz or, as mentioned, Noise. Owing to this wider-ranging approach, gems like the project impLOG. and some of the more obscure publications by the minimal/dance composer Arthur Russell have been dug up. This approach also accords to a historical search mode that aims to throw a spotlight precisely on that which crossed scenes and genres during this period, something which has now found a visual rendering in the coffee-table picture book of the same name, »New York Noise«⁵. However, Paula Court’s lavish scene photographs, which are printed on a large scale next to scattered verbal offerings of protagonists from the period, do not so much reveal the specifically cross-disciplinary and category-destroying qualities of the »No Wave« period. Rather, they themselves draw on the emerging celebrity principle of the East Village or downtown scene that gradually started creating a furore from the beginning of the 1980s. Thus all the faces that were later to be seen as paradigmatic for this conglomerate (although their productions are kept discreetly in the background) are paraded alongside the notorious duo Warhol/Basquiat: from Keith Haring to Julian Schnabel, from Cindy Sherman to Laurie Anderson, from Jim Jarmusch to David Byrne.

One has to give the volume »New York Noise« credit for giving at least an inkling of how the cross-over and artistic debordering principle may have functioned from the end of the 1970s. How Arto Lindsay worked on his guitar with conceptual devices, how Robert Longo appeared as a wavy singer, or how the »angularity« and stuttering of music back then found its way into painting. All of this may not have produced any new waves. And yet the ocean seems briefly to have seethed.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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