No wave: New York's refusal

No wave was a New York scene of roughly 1977 to 1982 that rejected punk and new wave in equal measure. Its bands played atonal, scraping guitars, free jazz saxophone, disco rhythms pulled apart and vocals that were shouted rather than sung. They had little interest in songs, technique or careers, and many split up after a handful of shows. The name says it plainly: while the record companies were selling the new wave, these musicians answered with a no.

Most people know no wave through a single record, the compilation No New York of 1978. Behind it stood a small, dense scene of musicians, filmmakers and painters in lower Manhattan.

Where it came from

By 1977 the bands from CBGB were signing record deals, and the New York punk of 1975 was turning into a sound with rules. A younger group of people, many of whom had come to New York to paint, make films or write, saw that as a betrayal of the original idea. They took punk’s permission to play without training literally and went further: if you do not need to know how to play, you also do not need to play chords, keep time or write a chorus.

Several of the most important figures had no musical background. Lydia Lunch arrived from Rochester as a teenager. Arto Lindsay of DNA tuned his twelve string guitar by ear, or not at all. Ikue Mori, DNA’s drummer, had come from Tokyo and had barely played drums before.

The bands

1. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Lydia Lunch’s band played very short, extremely slow and loud pieces, a deliberate negation of the punk tempo.
2. The Contortions. Saxophonist and singer James Chance mixed free jazz and James Brown style funk and became known for confronting his audience physically. As James White and the Blacks he made a disco version of the same idea.
3. DNA. Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori and Robin Crutchfield, later Tim Wright, made short bursts of guitar noise and broken rhythm.
4. Mars. The most abstract of the four, with collapsing structures and guitars used as pure texture.
5. Theoretical Girls. The band of Glenn Branca and Jeffrey Lohn, a link to the minimalist composers of downtown New York.
6. Bush Tetras and ESG. The danceable edge of the scene. ESG were sisters from the South Bronx whose minimal funk was later heavily sampled in hip hop.

Artists Space and No New York

In May 1978 the gallery Artists Space held a series of concerts with about ten no wave bands, among them DNA, the Contortions, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Theoretical Girls and the Gynecologists. Brian Eno, who was in New York working with Talking Heads at the time, was in the audience. He decided to document the scene and persuaded Antilles, a subsidiary of Island Records, to release a compilation.

No New York appeared later in 1978. It contains four tracks each by the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars and DNA. Eno recorded the bands quickly and with little intervention. The album sold modestly, but it fixed the canon: when people talk about no wave today, they usually mean these four groups. It also caused friction, because bands left off the record felt the scene had been reduced to a selection by an outsider.

Labels, clubs and film

ZE Records, founded in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, released the Contortions’ album Buy and James White and the Blacks’ Off White in 1979 and later the Mutant Disco compilations, which tied the scene to dance music. The Mudd Club, opened in 1978 in Tribeca, and smaller spaces became the places to see these bands.

Film was just as important as music. Directors such as Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick and Beth B and Scott B shot on Super 8, often with musicians from the scene as actors. The term No Wave Cinema describes this parallel movement. The film Downtown 81, shot in 1980 and 1981 with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who also played in the noise band Gray, shows the world these groups lived in.

The end and the legacy

By 1980 most of the original bands had split. Mars played their last show in December 1978, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks ended in 1979, and DNA held on until 1982. But the ideas spread. Glenn Branca wrote symphonies for massed electric guitars, and among his players were Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, who founded Sonic Youth in 1981. Michael Gira’s Swans took the slowness and weight of Teenage Jesus to extremes. Later, noise rock, the New York dance punk of the early 2000s and countless experimental guitar bands drew on no wave.

Compared with British post-punk, no wave was more radical, more short lived and more tightly bound to the art world. It is the clearest example of how the punk idea could be turned against the music industry’s new wave at the very moment that industry adopted it.

Where to start

Start with No New York, then Buy by the Contortions. If the noise is too much, try ESG’s early recordings, which show the danceable side of the same downtown scene. For the wider context, read our page on New York punk and our list of post-punk bands.