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No wave was an avant-garde music and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise music, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-Rock music genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilism worldview.
The movement was short-lived but highly influential in the music world. The 1978 compilation No New York is often considered the quintessential testament to the scene's musical aesthetic. Aside from the music genre, the no wave movement also had a significant influence in independent film (no wave cinema), fashion, and visual art.
There were, however, some elements common to most no-wave music, such as abrasive Atonality sounds; repetitive, driving ; and a tendency to emphasize musical texture over melody—typical of La Monte Young's early downtown music. In the early 1980s, Downtown Manhattan's no wave scene transitioned from its abrasive origins into a more Dance music-oriented sound, with compilations such as ZE Records's Mutant Disco (1981) highlighting a playful sensibility borne out of the city's clash of hip hop, disco and punk styles, as well as dub reggae and world music influences.
No wave music presented a negative and nihilistic world view that reflected the desolation of late 1970s Downtown New York and how they viewed the larger society. In a 2020 essay, Lydia Lunch stated there were many problems in the years that led into the 1970s, and that calling 1967 the Summer of Love was a bald-faced lie. The term "no wave" might have been inspired by the French New Wave pioneer Claude Chabrol, with his remark "There are no waves, only the ocean".Kalat, David. "Ch 20 The Story of Chabrol". The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005. not pag. Print.
The Velvet Underground, a 1960s New York City band, are also seen as early contributors to the no wave movement. As described by Pitchforks Marc Masters, "Mixing the noise rock leanings of Lou Reed, the minimalist drone music of John Cale (via his work with avant-garde pioneer LaMonte Young), and the art world influence of The Factory, this seminal band provided a comprehensive model for No Wave." Additionally, other '60s New York-based avant-garde music artists like Yoko Ono, Cromagnon, and the Godz were also later recognized as precursors to no wave.
New York band Jack Ruby, formed in 1973 in Albany, became early pioneers of the aesthetic, philosophy and sound of no wave as well as an influence on Sonic Youth. Members included Randy Cohen on drums and synthesizer as well as Boris Policeband, who played viola through an FM transmitter and strapped police Walkie-talkie around his waist. Subsequently, bassist George Scott III joined no wave group James Chance and the Contortions and collaborated with Lydia Lunch in 8 Eyed Spy. Thurston Moore said of Jack Ruby: "This was a band whispered about from the most inner circle of no-wave knowledge, as they pre-dated a lot of the aesthetic weirdness and wild style of so much of that scene."
In 1978, Rhys Chatham curated a concert at The Kitchen with two electric guitar noise music bands that involved Glenn Branca (Theoretical Girls and Daily Life, performed by Branca, Barbara Ess, Paul McMahon, and Christine Hahn) and another two electric-guitar noise music bands that involved Chatham himself (The Gynecologists and Tone Death, performed by Robert Appleton, Nina Canal, Chatham, and Peter Gordon). Tone Death performed Chatham's 1977 composition for electric guitars Guitar Trio, that was inspired by La Monte Young's minimalist composition Trio for Strings and Chatham's exposure to The Ramones at CBGB via Peter Gordon. This proto-No Wave concert was followed a few weeks later when Artists Space served as a site of concrete inception for the No Wave music movement, hosting a five night underground No Wave music festival, organized by artists Michael Zwack and Robert Longo, that featured ten local bands; including Rhys Chatham's The Gynecologists, Glenn Branca's Theoretical Girls, Rhys Chatham's Tone Death, and Branca's Daily Life.
The final two days of the show featured DNA and the Contortions on Friday, followed by Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on Saturday. English musician and record producer Brian Eno, who had originally come to New York to produce the second Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food, was in the audience. Impressed by what he saw and heard, and advised by Diego Cortez to do so, Eno was convinced that this movement should be documented and proposed the idea of a compilation album, No New York, with himself as a producer.
By the early 1980s, artists such as Liquid Liquid, the B-52's, Cristina, Arthur Russell, James White and the Blacks and Lizzy Mercier Descloux developed a dance-oriented style described by Lucy Sante as "anything at all + disco bottom". Other no-wave groups such as Swans, Suicide, Glenn Branca, the Lounge Lizards, Bush Tetras and Sonic Youth instead continued exploring the forays into noise music abrasive territory. For example, Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show.Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984 (2006) Penguin
The Noise Fest inspired Speed Trials, the noise rock five-night concert series held May 4–8, 1983, that was organized by Live Skull members in May 1983, also at White Columns (then located at 91 Horatio Street). Among an art installation created by David Wojnarowicz and Joseph Nechvatal, Speed Trials included performances by the Fall, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Mofungo, Ilona Granet, pre-rap Beastie Boys, 3 Teens Kill 4, Elliott Sharp as Carbon, Swans, the Ordinaires, and Arto Lindsay as Toy Killers. On May 10, the San Francisco noise-punk band Flipper closed the series out with a live concert at Studio 54. This event also included performances by Zev and Eric Bogosian and a video presentation by Tony Oursler. Speed Trials was followed by the short-lived after-hours audio art Speed Club that was established by Nechvatal and Bradley Eros at ABC No Rio that summer.Carlo McCormick, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984, Princeton University Press, 2006
Avant-garde filmmakers like Andy Warhol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Pierre Melville, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jack Smith were notable influences, as was French Nouvelle Vague cinema, Italian neorealism, early 1970s intimate low budget European films, such as Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, and a general interest in the history of film noir. Handheld Super 8 film cameras were initially the means to shoot the films often in the street, in downtown nightclubs, in cars, or apartments using available light.
The first No Wave film was Ivan Kral and 1976 film The Blank Generation that explored the No Wave music scene in CBGB's with the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie and Patti Smith, among several others. No Wave filmmakers included Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Scott B and Beth B, Jim Jarmusch, Jamie Nares, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Diego Cortez, Charlie Ahearn, Tom DiCillo, Lizzie Borden, Susan Seidelman, Vincent Gallo, Charlie Ahearn, Adele Bertei, David Wojnarowicz, Vivienne Dick, Kiki Smith, Michael McClard, Andrea Callard and Seth Tillett. Eric Mitchell's 1985 film The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues is considered the climatic apogee of low-budget production values of no wave filmmaking as the film's dialogue track was dubbed over the 35mm film in editing.[1] The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues at MoMA
For many years the scene was centered around the Mudd Club and Colab's New Cinema Screening Room on St. Marks Place in the East Village. No Wave Cinema actors included Patti Astor, Steve Buscemi, Cookie Mueller, Debbie Harry, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, Rockets Redglare, Vincent Gallo, Duncan Hannah, Anya Phillips, Rene Ricard, Arto Lindsay, Tom Wright, Richard Hell, and Lydia Lunch.
Important exhibitions of no wave visual art were Barbara Ess's Just Another Asshole show and subsequent compilation projects and Colab's organization of The Real Estate Show, The Times Square Show, and the Island of Negative Utopia show at The Kitchen.Goldstein, Richard, "The First Radical Art Show of the '80s", Village Voice 16, June 1980, pp. 31–32
No wave art found an ongoing home on the Lower East Side with the establishment of ABC No Rio Gallery in 1980, and a no wave punk aesthetic was a dominant strand in the art galleries of the East Village (from 1982 to 1986).
I began to express myself musically in a way that felt true to myself, constantly pushing the limits of idiom or genre and always screaming "Fuck You!" loudly in the process. It's how I felt then and I still feel it now. The ideals behind the (anti-) movement known as No Wave were found in many other archetypes before and just as many afterwards, but for a few years around the late 1970s, the concentration of those ideals reached a cohesive, white-hot focus.
In 2004, Scott Crary made the documentary Kill Your Idols, including such no wave bands as Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and Glenn Branca as well as bands influenced by no wave, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Foetus and others.
In 2007–2008, three books on the scene were published: Stuart Baker's (editor) Soul Jazz Records New York Noise (with photographs by Paula Court), Marc Masters' Black Dog Publishing No Wave (with a foreword by Weasel Walter), No Wave , with a foreword by Weasel Walter (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), . and Thurston Moore and Byron Coley's Harry N. Abrams No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976–1980 (for which Lydia Lunch wrote the Introduction).
Coleen Fitzgibbon and Alan W. Moore created a short film in 1978 (finished in 2009) of a New York City no wave concert to benefit Colab titled X Magazine Benefit, documenting performances by DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, and Boris Policeband. Shot in black and white and edited on video, the film captured the gritty look and sound of the music scene during that era. In 2013, it was exhibited at Salon 94, an art gallery in New York City.
In 2023, the No Wave movement received institutional recognition at the Centre Pompidou with a Nicolas Ballet curated exhibition entitled Who You Staring At: Culture visuelle de la scène no wave des années 1970 et 1980 ( Visual culture of the no wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s). Musical performances and three recorded conversations with No Wave artists were included as part of the exhibition.[3] Who You Staring At?: Visual culture of the no wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s February 1 – June 19, 2023, Film, Video, Sound and Digital Collections
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