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| No and Yes Kaspars Groševs, Artist No New York (Lilith, 1978) Zs – New Slaves (The Social Registry, 2010) | |
 D.N.A. | |
| No New York (Lilith, 1978) A wave-like return to the past continually washes up both the first shoots of mass culture phenomena as well as dusty nuggets of the pure stuff . It seems that finally we have grown weary of the most pernicious brands of the eighties, while the manifestations of the more marginal music and culture are gradually becoming more and more valued. In the last few years, largely thanks to internet streams, forgotten post-punk heroes, treasures of Minimal Wave, the early recordings of industrial music, etc., are being dragged out into the daylight. Alongside the glitter, synthetics and disco rhythms, these trends chiselled out their path in the first half of the 1980s, giving rise to countless musical experiments and the corresponding swearwords of the genre. The number of participants expanded rapidly, and what added fuel to the fire was easier access to the technologies of music creation. No Wave was identified as a movement practically at the end of its existence, and it is not infrequently associated with the roughest noisemakers and deconstructing jumblers of rock music. The beginning and the end of No Wave in fact can be marked by the release of the compilation No New York, as the groups represented in the album were not united by a common manifesto, nor similar methods or sound. Possibly the only common feature was their attitude towards music and the events around them. Lydia Lunch, the leader of the group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was once asked in an interview if she played new wave music. To which the ever acerbic artist replied with a smirk: “More like no wave.” In the spring of 1978, while on a visit to New York, the British musician Brian Eno attended a fairly anonymous festival which was advertised by an announcement that GROUPS are going to participate. What Eno saw and heard left a deep impression on him – the New York groups, as opposed to British punks, were much freer and daring in their experiments. The ability to play wasn’t always the top priority: instruments were often in the hands of people involved in other art forms, and the lyrics were quite fierce, at times even naïve, but in the city where once the artists of Fluxus had raged, a new generation had appeared, ready to say a hearty NO to everything and everyone. Eno convinced Island Records to release a compilation of the best of the Manhattan musicians, in the final result including four groups: The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars and D.N.A. In terms of the sound, the uniting element is directness and even a certain brutality, often pouring dissonant noises and shrill cries over hypnotic and repetitive rhythm structures. The music of Teenage Jesus, among other things, sounds like the banging of musical instruments worthy of cavemen, pierced by the shrill vocals of Miss Lunch, while The Contortions with the apparently gallant group leader James Chance is reminiscent of a derailed James Brown backing group wrestling with a squealing saxophone and a cutting guitar. This group turned out to be the most long-lived, developing its unusual sound and immortalizing it into a couple of excellent recordings. On the other hand, the group Mars sounds like a natural disaster, with guitars, chaotic vocals and the deep thuds of drums mixed up into an amorphous mass. The compilation is concluded by the trio D.N.A., with its leader Arto Lindsay uttering unintelligible wordless shrieks and out of tune guitar, wobbling along over the powerful but somewhat awkward rhythm constructions of Ikue Mori. The recording, of course, aroused indignation and also ensured the “immortality” of the artists involved, although the most of No Wave groups soon broke up. The Contortions and D.N.A. did appear in an equally legendary film ‘Downtown 81’, starring Jean-Michael Basquiat, about the solitary life of Manhattan artists and musicians. The main value of the film is its documentation of the environment in which the colourful New York artists lived – it brings together the music of the No Wave groups which were still active and early hip hop, with its directness and primordiality, traits which could be attributed to the burgeoning neo-expressionism at that time. The album is available for purchase at amazon.com and elsewhere. | |
 Zs | |
| Zs – New Slaves (The Social Registry, 2010) More than twenty years later there is still a whole bunch of artists working in that same city, constantly seeking new horizons. The slogans are no longer as loud, but over the last decade the experimental music created in New York seems to have gained fresh impetus, the word “No” resounding once again (one of the major festivals of the last few years is called ‘NO FUN’, although its founders have now turned to the management of a music record label). The group Zs has been together for almost 10 years, slowly but thoroughly refining their sound. The first recordings by the Zs are characterized by precision and convincing musicianship, often fusing rhythmically complicated melodies with the deceptively chaotic energy of free jazz. This synthesis is most prominently evident in the album Arms released in 2007, which offers the listener compositions which are rather hard to digest, even earning the jibes of popular American radio DJ Howard Stern in his show. Last year Zs surprised their listeners with a completely different recording Music of the Modern White, which did not have any of the clean sound and mathematically ordered compositions, instead offering rough and even shrill noise, sounding more like the earliest No Wave groups. The hollow sound of the drums was blended with the howling of the saxophone and the hissing sound of guitars. The recently-issued album New Slaves still sounds a bit raw, organically fusing the characteristic precision of the first albums with lively noisiness. Many of the pieces are based on minimalist constructions, in which new layers are slowly revealed. At times, the saxophone and guitars sound like percussion instruments, especially in the second track Acres of skin. With each next track the album becomes harsher, until it suddenly sinks into the hollow droning of Masonry, with African percussion instruments dominating the composition. This is followed by the title song, 20 minutes long, in which the group vehemently and ruthlessly repeat one and the same loop, with fragmentary scratchy guitar noises. Occasionally the basic theme is substituted by even shriller siren-like beats, gradually developing into diverse rhythmic variations which are pierced by the sharp sounds of the saxophone and the guitar, with an ever growing intensity, until the sounds of these instruments, both forming a dense noise, interrupt the constant, pulsating rhythm before a grand culmination. At the close of the album, the rhythm completely disappears: what remains is a hollow droning and meditative soundscapes of the saxophone, at times interweaved with city noises and hard-to-discern dialogues, possibly from a movie. As strange as it may seem, given such noisy and even savage music, it is difficult to put into words the overall feeling and the evident lightness of this album. However, to refrain from speculative statements about its significance, it is satisfying that such music is still being created – music which is simultaneously captivating and innovative. The stridency of Zs’ music seems to be natural and unconstrained, this can be observed in a video of an intimate garden performance by the group (to be found on the group’s website www.zzzsss.com). It seems that the primordial directness of No Wave music has not disappeared anywhere, but instead has gained a more definite direction and purpose. The album can be purchased at http://www.thesocialregistry.com. /Translator into English: Vita Limanoviča/ | |
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