I've been looking for this for years........

[french_disko]

..and it's finally reissued, 27 years later!

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/comp/lilith/no-new-york.shtml

Various Artists

No New York

[Antilles; 1978; r: Lilith; 2005]

Rating: 8.3

Historical reissues plug timelines and help unpack tendencies during eras of revival, but without the original contexts in place, the full-fledged whallop of revelation just isn't there. Even if the listener's approaching the sounds for the first time, they've ineluctably heard the ingredients' echoes. To at least maximize the effects of an aesthetic overlap, the timing of the reissue ought to be dead-on. So, though welcome and much appreciated, thank you, Lilith's officially licensed reissue of Brian Eno's 1978 No New York No Wave sampler, which he did for the Island subsidiary Antilles, has appeared a tad late. (It's more than surprising that sans some Japanese bootlegs, the compilation hasn't yet been given the royal treatment-- hey Rhino, where were you?)

Yes, bands are still exhibiting No Wave tendencies (and thanks to labels like Audika, Acute, and Table of the Elements classic Lower Manhattan music of all sorts is making the rounds again), but it was circa 2002 that the post-No New York moment bubbled most briskly. S.A. Crary's 2004 documentary, Kill Your Idols, covers that time period, pairing grainy live footage and interviews with the old guard (Suicide's Marvin Rev, Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, DNA's Arto Lindsay) and '80s noisemakers (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Michael Gira) with newer technicolor footage and Q&A's with 2002's acolytes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars, et al. If you missed the film, you still might've caught some of this via the call-and-response of Vice's Yes New York compilation. Also around that time, the resuscitated Ze Records reissued its 1981 Mutant Disco compilation and other samplings on N.Y. No Wave and various James White/Contortions reissues. Soul Jazz provided the even more extensive (and less disco-flavored) New York Noise, 1979-1982 and last year No More Records' popped-up to offer the definitive 32-track DNA on DNA, which includes all of the DNA tracks from No New York. Ditto for Mars' The Complete Studio Recordings: NYC 1977-1978, out on G3G/Spooky Sound in 2003.

No Wave itself sprung up namelessly circa 1977 as a reaction to punk, new wave, and New York City itself. One of No Wave's more outspoken progenitors, Lydia Lunch famously dissed punk as no more than "sped-up Chuck Berry riffs". James Chance has said that "No Wave" came from the name of the compilation, but it's also supposedly first coined by the Soho Weekly News, the "no" turning "new wave"'s glossy dance party into nihilistic shorthand. Whatever the proper christening date, Eno was taken by the scene and compiled and produced No New York, which featured four tracks each from four bands-- James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. Eno recorded it lo-fi and cracked to fit with the bands' on-stage ravages. In the original pressing, the lyrics were hidden on the inside of the record sleeve, so you had to take the sleeve apart if you want to sing along. Stylistically, the bands scowled through a paranoid blitz of spastic free-jazz, art noise, jarring vocals, anti-melody, sweaty sexuality, shredding guitar, a technically adept amateurism, and Dadaist deliveries that fucked with disco (check out DNA's synth) and funk to create a sort of mangled punk avant-garde.

When held up to close scrutiny, No New York's stars are more different musically than genre masturbators would have you believe, but they were connected through friendships and shared hangouts like CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. Original DNA member Gordon Stevenson left the band to play bass for Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. DNA's named came from a song by Mars. Lydia Lunch and James Chance were dating-- he quit Teenage Jesus in '78 to do his own thing. Bands who weren't as intrenched in the loop-- Red Transistor, Static, Theoretical Girls-- were left off the comp. The whole thing didn't last very long or produce much of a paper trail. Sumner Crane's brilliant boy/girl quartet Mars released a 1980 live EP and a 1986 compilation, 78+, though the band had dissolved by 1978. Besides last years' compilation-- and impossible-to-find 7"'s-- DNA had only one 10-minute full-length, 1980's A Taste of DNA. Lydia Lunch and James Chance have been better represented, especially Lunch who became a regarded spoken-word artist and author.

This compilation begins with the most accessible participants, James Chance & the Contortions. Skronking through sax-based punk-funk, Chance is often compared to James Brown, but I'd rather look into my magic ball and say "Jon Spencer." Sporting a pompadour and Was (Not Was) suits, he made a suitable poster boy for the movement, and appeared on the cover of the first issue of the East Village Eye. As a performer, he was known for being confrontational, which got him rejected from straight-up jazz circles. Musically, he tends to grab an idea and stick with it, as on "Dish It Out"'s unrelenting bass, drums, guitar, organ, and sax overlay. "Jaded" delves into freer jazz implosions and "Flip Your Face" shreds sounds over mid-tempo beat. His signature tune, "Contort Yourself", isn't here, but Eno's production makes these tracks some of my favorite in the Chance/White/Black oeuvre-- some of the later material felt too slick.

Darker and less colorful, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were fronted by vocalist/anti-guitarist Lydia Lunch, who was 16 when she joined the band in 1976. Early reviews dismissed Lunch as dreadfully amateur; nowadays, she sounds pretty tuneful screaming her gritty, anti-suburbia salvos. Teenage Jesus was known for frantic, tossed-off 10 to 15-minute sets, but here they keep it molasses slow, Lunch screaming her vocal lines over tribal drumming and minimal fuzziness. The pace pick up for the excellent 34-second rampage, "Red Alert", but otherwise expect a claustrophobic plod.

One of the more intriguing sets comes from the least known crew, the boy/girl quartet Mars. The band's founder, Sumner Crane, who died from Lymphoma in 2003, was one of the true visionaries of this period. You'll find Daydream Nation and Lightning Bolt hiding out in the moody guitar riffs of the excellent opener "Helen Fordsdale"; "Hairwaves" drifts to China Burg's ambient vocals over a fractured and spacious backdrop; "Tunnels" is a Crane-like static; "Puerto Rican Ghost" is shouting, repetitious drum rolls, and all sorts of chaos.

DNA shows up in early guitar/drum/synth form. Later, when Robin Crutfhfield left to form Dark Day, he was replaced by Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright, and the group became both sturdier and more fucked up. These pieces hit like shrapnel, though Lindsay doesn't display the more crazed (and autistic) vocal exercises of A Taste of DNA's "Blond Red Head" or "Lying on the Sofa of Life" or Mori's drumming-to-something-else-in-a-different-room percussion. On "Egomaniac's Kiss" Lindsay scowls ("trying to eat that self real slow") and rattlesnake shushes along with catchy synth, simple drums. More caustic, "Lionel" and "Size" ride regurgitated synth-- the instruments shift focus halfway through, as if following the fissures of a non-demarcated fault-line. "Not Moving" is Joy Division stuck in a factory cog, slowly quartered.

The most remarkable quality on these recordings is this unselfconscious feel, something painfully lacking in the star-fucking neo-No Wave groups. In Kill Your Idols, it's interesting to see Lunch, Lindsay, and others speak so eloquently about what it was they were trying to do. They have the benefit of hindsight, but as it unfurled and quickly disappeared, No Wave was still a real reaction plugged into a time/place. In part because there's less product, No Wave hasn't been as festishized as punk. Around 1982, bands had disappeared or sub-divided and different fragments of No Wave ended up in places like the Downtown jazz scene of John Zorn, Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, and Elliott Sharp; the noise crews of Swans, Sonic Youth, Live Skull; and dance-punk disco via Bush Tetras, Golden Palominos, Konk, Liquid Liquid, Arthur Russell, and ESG. Compare that and that to Yes New York's already dated cast of the Strokes, Radio 4, Longwave, the Natural History, and the Fever, and you'll realize New York really hasn't seen anything of the likes of these folks (and that includes No Wave's neighbors and offspring) since the last bits of that early, less gentrified Lower Manhattan feedback dried up.

-Brandon Stosuy, November 16, 2005