Gavin B.'s Warehouse of Songs

Gavin B. · 07-07-2013, 10:14 AM

Look Back Anarchy
The No Wave Story Part II

Section One: A Selected No Wave Discography

Album Title: Blank Generation
Artist: Richard Hell and the Voidoids
Year of Release: 1977
Embedded Song: Blank Generation

__________________________________________________

Moderator cut: image removed
Album Title: Buy
Artist: The Contortions
Year of Release: 1979
Embedded Song: Contort Yourself

__________________________________________________ _

Album Title: Guitar Beat
Artist: Raybeats
Release Date: 1981
Embedded Song: International Operator

__________________________________________________ ____

Album Title: Shut Up and Bleed
Artist: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Release Date: 2008
Embedded Song: I Woke Up Dreaming

__________________________________________________ ___

Album Title: Boom In The Night
Artist: Bush Tetras
Year of Release: 1995
Embedded Song: Too Many Creeps

__________________________________________________ ___

Album Title: Theoretical Girls
Artist: Theoretical Girls
Year of Release: 2009

Album Title: A Taste of DNA
Artist: DNA
Year of Release: 1981

Album Title: Luncheone
Artist: 8 Eyed Spy
Date of Release: 1997

Album Title: The Lounge Lizards
Artist: The Lounge Lizards
Date of Release: 1980

Note: The forum rules only allow 10 images per post so the rest of the discography has no cover album images.

Title: Stranger Than Paradise (Film Soundtrack)
Artist: John Lurie
Date of Release: 1985

Title: The Big Gundown
Artist: John Zorn
Date of Release: 1984

_______________________________________

Section Two: Selected No Wave Anthologies

Title: No New York
Artists: The Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Producer: Brian Eno
Year of Release: 1978

Title: N.Y. No Wave
Artists: James Black and the Whites, Mars, Lydia Lunch, Suicide, The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Ross Yemen
Producer: Diego Cortez
Year of Release: 2003

Title: New York Noise
Artists: Arto Lindsay, Material, Liquid Liquid, James Chance, Glenn Branca, Bush Tetras, Defunkt, ESG, Theoretical Girls, DNA
Producers: Topper Headron & Jean-Michel Basquiat
Year of Release: 2003

Each of the three anthologies are interesting because of the different background of each anthology's producer.

No New York: Brian Eno more or less randomly selected the artists based on the bands he saw perform at the Artist's Space underground music festival. Eno was pretty much a dilettante to the No Wave scene and omitted a lot of worthy bands in his anthology. The narrowness of Eno's selections pissed off a talented No Wave bands who were worthy of being included on No New York.

NY No Wave: Producer Diego Cortez was a grassroots promoter of No Wave music from it's earliest beginnings at the Artist's Space. Cortez was Brian Eno's creative advisor on the No New York album in 1978. Cortez is also curator of a largest library of films, books, record albums, and memorabilia of the No Wave movement. This collection is the most inclusive of all the No Wave anthologies.

New York Noise: The New York Noise producers were Clash drummer Topper Headron and the celebrated visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The collection was put together shortly before Basquiat's death in 1986 but was never released until 2003, when there was a resurgence of interest in No Wave music. There is more of an emphasis on the early Eighties, post-implosion No Wave scene.

If you look at the release dates of many of the albums, you'll find that many were released several years after the 1977-1981 hey-day of No Wave. Many of the No Wave artists never released proper studio albums and didn't appear in album form until their singles were anthologized several years after the collapse of the No-Wave movement.

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth points out that by the time Eno's groundbreaking 1978 No New York anthology appeared, the No Wave in New York was beginning to implode. The music was so radical and extreme there was really nowhere to go with it except mainstream. By 1980, bands like the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the Raybeats had refined No Wave music into a form that wasn't a painful sonic assault on the ears of the listener.
____________________________________

Section Three: Films about No Wave:

Kill Your Idols (2006) is a documentary film about the downtown music scene in New York. It covers bands like Patti Smith, Television, Gogol Bordello and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but most of the screen time features interviews with No Wave icons like Lydia Lunch, Suicide founder Alan Vega, Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Swan's founder Michael Gira.

Stranger Than Paradise (1984) was the second full length feature directed by Jim Jarmusch who was linked with the No Wave movement. The movie is a satirical look at the mainstream culture and embodies the nihilistic values of No Wave. The leading man in the film is John Lurie who played in several No Wave bands. Jarmusch has gone on to achieve mainstream respectability and has won several awards for directing indie films like Broken Flowers, Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Down By Law.

_____________________________________________

Section Four: Books about No Wave

No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2006) The table top book provides a visual history by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and co-author Byron Coley.

No Wave (2007)- Marc Masters' is perhaps the best linear history of the No Wave movement. Masters' book traces the history of this influential genre from its most famous names down to its many offshoots and sidetracks. From early pioneers like Suicide and Glenn Branca, to forgotten treasures like Red Transistor and Bush Tetras, No Wave charts all the cracks and crevices of a surprisingly diverse movement.

New York Noise (publication date unknown) is a table top book collection of photos by Paula Court. It covers the entire development of the downtown N.Y. rock scene but a large portion of the book is devoted to No Wave.

The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (2005) Former Soho News reporter Marvin J. Taylor covers the downtown scene before, after and during No Wave phenomena. In the Downtown Book editor Marvin Taylor has selected a generous number of essays and reviews of the No Wave scene, as it unfolded, flourished and imploded in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

__________________________________________________ ____

Section Five: The Thurston Moore Interview

As a bonus treat I offer an full length question & answer session interview with ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore on the history of the No Wave scene in New York. This Q and A session was part of a book signing event at the McNally Robinson bookstore on July 11 2008. It's perhaps the single best interview I've come across on the No Wave scene. It has a long run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes but any No Wave fan will be fascinated by Moore's insider story as a participant in the No Wave movement.

I loved the part when Thurston Moore describes telephoning Brian Eno to get information on the No New York album he produced in 1978. Eno drew a complete blank and had a total loss of memory about the basic facts of the album.

_____________________________________________

Section Six: The No Wave Map

The No Wave Map which is a family tree the No Wave movement was too big to fit in the journal space but you can view it on this link:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3.../nowavemap.gif

Gavin B. · 07-08-2013, 10:36 AM

New Album Review

Album Title: Desire Lines
Artist: Camera Obscura
Date of Release: June 3, 2013
Genre: Alternative/Indie Rock
Gavin B.'s Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Okay I'll admit it... One of my biggest guilty musical pleasures is the bittersweet '60's influenced indie pop music of Camera Obscura. Camera Obscura hails from Glasgow Scotland and early in their career, they shared a lot of similarities with their close friends and big brother band, Belle and Sebastian. Their 2001 debut album Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi was produced by Stuart Murdoch, the front man for Belle and Sebastian. But over the past ten years, as Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell has become a more confident and self assured artist, Camera Obscura is sounding less and less like Belle and Sebastian, while Belle and Sebastian is beginning to sound more and more like Camera Obscura.

Camera Obscura's early album covers expressed their fascination with Sixties era geek chic.

I own 12" vinyl editions of Camera Obscura's earliest eps and albums simply because of anesthetic quality of their cover art. Their album cover photos reveals their stylistic fetish for an early Sixties sensibility. Nearly all their songs underscore their love of Brill Building pop, Phil Spector girl groups and the Burt Bacharach. The band members all dress in a similarly fashionably unfashionable thrift store clothing making them all look like lovable geeks.

Early on John Peel noticed them and proclaimed Camera Obscura as one of the biggest up and coming bands on the British Isles. They were recorded for a Peel session but that album has yet to be released in the United States. Now 12 years and 5 albums later, Camera Obscura is finally beginning to live up to Peel's early praise.

Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell at the 2010 Coachella Music Festival

Desire Lines comes after a two year period in limbo in which the band put all touring and recording activities on hold because illnesses and personal problems of band members. The album isn't a big change in course for the band but yet another benchmark in the bands evolution toward producing increasingly cool and self assured pop music.

My favorite album track is Troublemaker which has an element of synth pop with it's interlocking synthesizer lines and drum machine-like beats that meld with Campbell's sad-hearted harmonies and the more familiar Bacharachian percussion of previous albums. Embedded below is Camera Obscura's live performance Troublemaker before a noisy crowd at the SOhO club in Santa Barbara on June 16, 2013.

It's good to see Camera Obscura back out of the gate with a recording that is their most confident and consistent musical outing to date.

Gavin B. · 07-16-2013, 07:55 AM

I'm going to be putting Warehouse of Songs on hiatus for the time being in order to pursue some other musical interests.

Last week I started a thread on Outernational music in the Country, Folk and World Music forum which has gotten a pretty good response. I plan on posting 3 or 4 times a week there. http://www.musicbanter.com/country-f...nal-hi-fi.html

I'd also like to revive my reggae music journal which has fallen into disrepair since YouTube disconnected all my linked songs when they booted me for copyright violations. I've recently resolved the issue with YouTube and they've agreed to allow me to post certain copyrighted materials under the fair use doctrine.

07-07-2013, 10:14 AM	#51 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	Look Back Anarchy The No Wave Story Part II Section One: A Selected No Wave Discography Album Title: Blank Generation Artist: Richard Hell and the Voidoids Year of Release: 1977 Embedded Song: Blank Generation __________________________________________________ Moderator cut: image removed Album Title: Buy Artist: The Contortions Year of Release: 1979 Embedded Song: Contort Yourself __________________________________________________ _ Album Title: Guitar Beat Artist: Raybeats Release Date: 1981 Embedded Song: International Operator __________________________________________________ ____ Album Title: Shut Up and Bleed Artist: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks Release Date: 2008 Embedded Song: I Woke Up Dreaming __________________________________________________ ___ Album Title: Boom In The Night Artist: Bush Tetras Year of Release: 1995 Embedded Song: Too Many Creeps __________________________________________________ ___ Album Title: Theoretical Girls Artist: Theoretical Girls Year of Release: 2009 Album Title: A Taste of DNA Artist: DNA Year of Release: 1981 Album Title: Luncheone Artist: 8 Eyed Spy Date of Release: 1997 Album Title: The Lounge Lizards Artist: The Lounge Lizards Date of Release: 1980 Note: The forum rules only allow 10 images per post so the rest of the discography has no cover album images. Title: Stranger Than Paradise (Film Soundtrack) Artist: John Lurie Date of Release: 1985 Title: The Big Gundown Artist: John Zorn Date of Release: 1984 _______________________________________ Section Two: Selected No Wave Anthologies Title: No New York Artists: The Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks Producer: Brian Eno Year of Release: 1978 Title: N.Y. No Wave Artists: James Black and the Whites, Mars, Lydia Lunch, Suicide, The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Ross Yemen Producer: Diego Cortez Year of Release: 2003 Title: New York Noise Artists: Arto Lindsay, Material, Liquid Liquid, James Chance, Glenn Branca, Bush Tetras, Defunkt, ESG, Theoretical Girls, DNA Producers: Topper Headron & Jean-Michel Basquiat Year of Release: 2003 Each of the three anthologies are interesting because of the different background of each anthology's producer. No New York: Brian Eno more or less randomly selected the artists based on the bands he saw perform at the Artist's Space underground music festival. Eno was pretty much a dilettante to the No Wave scene and omitted a lot of worthy bands in his anthology. The narrowness of Eno's selections pissed off a talented No Wave bands who were worthy of being included on No New York. NY No Wave: Producer Diego Cortez was a grassroots promoter of No Wave music from it's earliest beginnings at the Artist's Space. Cortez was Brian Eno's creative advisor on the No New York album in 1978. Cortez is also curator of a largest library of films, books, record albums, and memorabilia of the No Wave movement. This collection is the most inclusive of all the No Wave anthologies. New York Noise: The New York Noise producers were Clash drummer Topper Headron and the celebrated visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The collection was put together shortly before Basquiat's death in 1986 but was never released until 2003, when there was a resurgence of interest in No Wave music. There is more of an emphasis on the early Eighties, post-implosion No Wave scene. If you look at the release dates of many of the albums, you'll find that many were released several years after the 1977-1981 hey-day of No Wave. Many of the No Wave artists never released proper studio albums and didn't appear in album form until their singles were anthologized several years after the collapse of the No-Wave movement. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth points out that by the time Eno's groundbreaking 1978 No New York anthology appeared, the No Wave in New York was beginning to implode. The music was so radical and extreme there was really nowhere to go with it except mainstream. By 1980, bands like the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the Raybeats had refined No Wave music into a form that wasn't a painful sonic assault on the ears of the listener. ____________________________________ Section Three: Films about No Wave: Kill Your Idols (2006) is a documentary film about the downtown music scene in New York. It covers bands like Patti Smith, Television, Gogol Bordello and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but most of the screen time features interviews with No Wave icons like Lydia Lunch, Suicide founder Alan Vega, Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Swan's founder Michael Gira. Stranger Than Paradise (1984) was the second full length feature directed by Jim Jarmusch who was linked with the No Wave movement. The movie is a satirical look at the mainstream culture and embodies the nihilistic values of No Wave. The leading man in the film is John Lurie who played in several No Wave bands. Jarmusch has gone on to achieve mainstream respectability and has won several awards for directing indie films like Broken Flowers, Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Down By Law. _____________________________________________ Section Four: Books about No Wave No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2006) The table top book provides a visual history by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and co-author Byron Coley. No Wave (2007)- Marc Masters' is perhaps the best linear history of the No Wave movement. Masters' book traces the history of this influential genre from its most famous names down to its many offshoots and sidetracks. From early pioneers like Suicide and Glenn Branca, to forgotten treasures like Red Transistor and Bush Tetras, No Wave charts all the cracks and crevices of a surprisingly diverse movement. New York Noise (publication date unknown) is a table top book collection of photos by Paula Court. It covers the entire development of the downtown N.Y. rock scene but a large portion of the book is devoted to No Wave. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (2005) Former Soho News reporter Marvin J. Taylor covers the downtown scene before, after and during No Wave phenomena. In the Downtown Book editor Marvin Taylor has selected a generous number of essays and reviews of the No Wave scene, as it unfolded, flourished and imploded in the late Seventies and early Eighties. __________________________________________________ ____ Section Five: The Thurston Moore Interview As a bonus treat I offer an full length question & answer session interview with ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore on the history of the No Wave scene in New York. This Q and A session was part of a book signing event at the McNally Robinson bookstore on July 11 2008. It's perhaps the single best interview I've come across on the No Wave scene. It has a long run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes but any No Wave fan will be fascinated by Moore's insider story as a participant in the No Wave movement. I loved the part when Thurston Moore describes telephoning Brian Eno to get information on the No New York album he produced in 1978. Eno drew a complete blank and had a total loss of memory about the basic facts of the album. _____________________________________________ Section Six: The No Wave Map The No Wave Map which is a family tree the No Wave movement was too big to fit in the journal space but you can view it on this link: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3.../nowavemap.gif __________________ There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff. Townes Van Zandt Last edited by Gavin B.; 07-07-2013 at 09:48 PM.

07-08-2013, 10:36 AM	#52 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	New Album Review Album Title: Desire Lines Artist: Camera Obscura Date of Release: June 3, 2013 Genre: Alternative/Indie Rock Gavin B.'s Rating: 4 stars out of 5 Okay I'll admit it... One of my biggest guilty musical pleasures is the bittersweet '60's influenced indie pop music of Camera Obscura. Camera Obscura hails from Glasgow Scotland and early in their career, they shared a lot of similarities with their close friends and big brother band, Belle and Sebastian. Their 2001 debut album Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi was produced by Stuart Murdoch, the front man for Belle and Sebastian. But over the past ten years, as Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell has become a more confident and self assured artist, Camera Obscura is sounding less and less like Belle and Sebastian, while Belle and Sebastian is beginning to sound more and more like Camera Obscura. Camera Obscura's early album covers expressed their fascination with Sixties era geek chic. I own 12" vinyl editions of Camera Obscura's earliest eps and albums simply because of anesthetic quality of their cover art. Their album cover photos reveals their stylistic fetish for an early Sixties sensibility. Nearly all their songs underscore their love of Brill Building pop, Phil Spector girl groups and the Burt Bacharach. The band members all dress in a similarly fashionably unfashionable thrift store clothing making them all look like lovable geeks. Early on John Peel noticed them and proclaimed Camera Obscura as one of the biggest up and coming bands on the British Isles. They were recorded for a Peel session but that album has yet to be released in the United States. Now 12 years and 5 albums later, Camera Obscura is finally beginning to live up to Peel's early praise. Camera Obscura vocalist and songwriter Traceyann Campbell at the 2010 Coachella Music Festival Desire Lines comes after a two year period in limbo in which the band put all touring and recording activities on hold because illnesses and personal problems of band members. The album isn't a big change in course for the band but yet another benchmark in the bands evolution toward producing increasingly cool and self assured pop music. My favorite album track is Troublemaker which has an element of synth pop with it's interlocking synthesizer lines and drum machine-like beats that meld with Campbell's sad-hearted harmonies and the more familiar Bacharachian percussion of previous albums. Embedded below is Camera Obscura's live performance Troublemaker before a noisy crowd at the SOhO club in Santa Barbara on June 16, 2013. It's good to see Camera Obscura back out of the gate with a recording that is their most confident and consistent musical outing to date. __________________ There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff. Townes Van Zandt Last edited by Gavin B.; 07-08-2013 at 10:48 PM.

07-16-2013, 07:55 AM	#53 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	I'm going to be putting Warehouse of Songs on hiatus for the time being in order to pursue some other musical interests. Last week I started a thread on Outernational music in the Country, Folk and World Music forum which has gotten a pretty good response. I plan on posting 3 or 4 times a week there. http://www.musicbanter.com/country-f...nal-hi-fi.html I'd also like to revive my reggae music journal which has fallen into disrepair since YouTube disconnected all my linked songs when they booted me for copyright violations. I've recently resolved the issue with YouTube and they've agreed to allow me to post certain copyrighted materials under the fair use doctrine. __________________ There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff. Townes Van Zandt