DNA (band)
Encyclopedia
DNA was a No Wave
band formed in 1978 by guitar
ist Arto Lindsay
and keyboard
ist Robin Crutchfield
. Rather than playing their instruments in a traditional manner, they instead focused on making unique and unusual sounds. Their music was described as spare, noisy, and angular and was compared to some of Captain Beefheart
's output and even to Anton Webern
.
and Mirielle Cervenka, and took their name from a song by another no wave band, Mars
. Stevenson went on to play bass for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; Cervenka was the younger sister of Exene Cervenka
of X. This incarnation of the band was very brief, not playing even one concert. After the rapid departure of Stevenson and Cervenka, Lindsay and Crutchfield hastily recruited Ikue Mori
—who at the time had little command of English and no drum set—to be DNA's drummer.
This lineup of DNA played occasionally at CBGB
and Max's Kansas City
and recorded one 7" single. Within their first year, they had cemented their reputation as a paradigmatic no wave band when Brian Eno
selected them as one of the four groups documented on the No New York
LP, the first recording to expose no wave groups to an audience outside of lower Manhattan
. The other three bands appearing on this album were The Contortions
, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Mars
.
Shortly after the recording of No New York
, Crutchfield left DNA to form a new band, Dark Day. He was replaced by Tim Wright
, previously of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu
. As Wright played bass guitar and not keyboards, and was the only member of the band to have any conventional instrumental technique, the change in DNA's sound was dramatic. The music became even more spare and angular, with Wright's bass lines creating a sometimes menacing sound to support Lindsay's scraping, atonal guitar and Mori's irregular rhythms. Their song structures became tighter, briefer, more abstract, and have been compared to haiku
.
The Lindsay-Mori-Wright lineup of DNA developed something of a cult following
between 1979 and 1982, but perhaps more of their fans came from the art world than from rock audiences. Live shows were frequent in this period, but rarely outside of the CBGB
/Mudd Club
/Tier 3
circuit in lower Manhattan.
The group's 10-minute debut album, A Taste of DNA was recorded for Kip Hanrahan
's American Clavé label, and was later released on Rough Trade
in 1980. Some live DNA tracks appeared on compilation albums while the band was still in existence.
Lindsay, Mori, and Wright decided to dissolve the band in 1982. It's a measure of the cult following the band had developed that its final concerts were three consecutive sold-out nights at CBGB. DNA's final encore was a cover of Led Zeppelin
's "Whole Lotta Love." This is not included on the CD Last Live at CBGB, released more than a decade later on John Zorn
's Avant label.
The band is featured in the film Downtown 81
starring the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
.
DNA on DNA, a comprehensive CD chronicle of the band, was released by No More Records in 2004.
Lindsay and Mori, and to a lesser extent Crutchfield, have remained active in music.
The rock group Blonde Redhead
takes its name from a DNA song.
No Wave
No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music, film, performance art, video, and contemporary art scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City. The term No Wave is in part satirical word play rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre...
band formed in 1978 by guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
ist Arto Lindsay
Arto Lindsay
Arthur Morgan Lindsay is an American guitarist, singer, record producer and experimental composer. He is a 1974 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida....
and keyboard
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...
ist Robin Crutchfield
Robin Crutchfield
Robin Crutchfield is an American artist. He is best known as one of the founding musicians of the former New York No Wave scene. He has performed at such hallowed musical grounds as CBGB's, Max's Kansas City and Artist's Space; as well as had his work on display at prestigious venues like MoMA and...
. Rather than playing their instruments in a traditional manner, they instead focused on making unique and unusual sounds. Their music was described as spare, noisy, and angular and was compared to some of Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
's output and even to Anton Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
.
History
DNA originally consisted of Lindsay, Crutchfield, Gordon StevensonGordon Stevenson
Gordon Stevenson was an artist, musician and filmmaker.Born in Dublin, Georgia, he attended Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he met Arto Lindsay in the 1970s...
and Mirielle Cervenka, and took their name from a song by another no wave band, Mars
Mars (band)
Mars was a New York City No Wave band formed by vocalist Sumner Crane in 1975. He was joined by China Burg , Mark Cunningham , and artist Nancy Arlen , and briefly by guitarist Rudolph Grey. The band played one live gig under the name China before changing it to Mars...
. Stevenson went on to play bass for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; Cervenka was the younger sister of Exene Cervenka
Exene Cervenka
Exene Cervenka is an American writer, musician and artist, most famous as the co-lead vocalist of the Los Angeles punk rock band X.-Career:...
of X. This incarnation of the band was very brief, not playing even one concert. After the rapid departure of Stevenson and Cervenka, Lindsay and Crutchfield hastily recruited Ikue Mori
Ikue Mori
, also known as Ikue Ile, is a drummer, composer, and graphic designer.-Biography:Ikue Mori was born and raised in Japan. She says she had little interest in music before hearing punk rock...
—who at the time had little command of English and no drum set—to be DNA's drummer.
This lineup of DNA played occasionally at CBGB
CBGB
CBGB was a music club at 315 Bowery at Bleecker Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City.Founded by Hilly Kristal in 1973, it was originally intended to feature its namesake musical styles, but became a forum for American punk and New Wave bands like Ramones, Misfits, Television, the...
and Max's Kansas City
Max's Kansas City
Max's Kansas City was a nightclub and restaurant at 213 Park Avenue South, in New York City, which was a gathering spot for musicians, poets, artists and politicians in the 1960s and 1970s.-Origin of name:...
and recorded one 7" single. Within their first year, they had cemented their reputation as a paradigmatic no wave band when Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
selected them as one of the four groups documented on the No New York
No New York
No New York is a compilation album released in 1978 by Antilles Records under the curation of producer Brian Eno. Although it only contained songs by four different artists, it is considered by many to be the definitive single album documenting New York City's late-1970s No Wave...
LP, the first recording to expose no wave groups to an audience outside of lower Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. The other three bands appearing on this album were The Contortions
James Chance and the Contortions
James Chance and the Contortions, led by saxophonist and vocalist James Chance, were one of the original punk jazz groups of the New York No Wave music scene. Their first recording, credited solely as Contortions, was on the 1978 compilation, No New York, produced by Brain Eno...
, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Mars
Mars (band)
Mars was a New York City No Wave band formed by vocalist Sumner Crane in 1975. He was joined by China Burg , Mark Cunningham , and artist Nancy Arlen , and briefly by guitarist Rudolph Grey. The band played one live gig under the name China before changing it to Mars...
.
Shortly after the recording of No New York
No New York
No New York is a compilation album released in 1978 by Antilles Records under the curation of producer Brian Eno. Although it only contained songs by four different artists, it is considered by many to be the definitive single album documenting New York City's late-1970s No Wave...
, Crutchfield left DNA to form a new band, Dark Day. He was replaced by Tim Wright
Tim Wright (bassist)
Tim Wright is an American bassist. He was the original bassist with Pere Ubu, but left in 1978 to join Arto Lindsay in the no wave band DNA. He stayed with them until they split in 1982.- References :...
, previously of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu
Pere Ubu (band)
Pere Ubu is an experimental rock music group formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. Despite many long-term band members, singer David Thomas is the only constant...
. As Wright played bass guitar and not keyboards, and was the only member of the band to have any conventional instrumental technique, the change in DNA's sound was dramatic. The music became even more spare and angular, with Wright's bass lines creating a sometimes menacing sound to support Lindsay's scraping, atonal guitar and Mori's irregular rhythms. Their song structures became tighter, briefer, more abstract, and have been compared to haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
.
The Lindsay-Mori-Wright lineup of DNA developed something of a cult following
Cult following
A cult following is a group of fans who are highly dedicated to a specific area of pop culture. A film, book, band, or video game, among other things, will be said to have a cult following when it has a small but very passionate fan base...
between 1979 and 1982, but perhaps more of their fans came from the art world than from rock audiences. Live shows were frequent in this period, but rarely outside of the CBGB
CBGB
CBGB was a music club at 315 Bowery at Bleecker Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City.Founded by Hilly Kristal in 1973, it was originally intended to feature its namesake musical styles, but became a forum for American punk and New Wave bands like Ramones, Misfits, Television, the...
/Mudd Club
Mudd Club
The Mudd Club was a TriBeCa nightclub that was opened in October 1978 by Steve Mass, art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips, a figure in the downtown punk scene...
/Tier 3
Tier 3
Tier 3 was a no wave art nightclub that was located in downtown TriBeCa Manhattan at the juncture of West Broadway and White Street. In the late 1970s it became a major fixture in the city's underground music and counterculture scene; along with the Mudd Club...
circuit in lower Manhattan.
The group's 10-minute debut album, A Taste of DNA was recorded for Kip Hanrahan
Kip Hanrahan
Kip Hanrahan is an American jazz music impresario, record producer and percussionist.-Biography:Hanrahan was born in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Bronx to an Irish-Jewish family. He has an unusual role in the albums released under his name, one which he has analogized to that of a film...
's American Clavé label, and was later released on Rough Trade
Rough Trade Records
Rough Trade Records is an independent record label based in London. It was formed in 1978 by Geoff Travis who had opened a record store off Ladbroke Grove...
in 1980. Some live DNA tracks appeared on compilation albums while the band was still in existence.
Lindsay, Mori, and Wright decided to dissolve the band in 1982. It's a measure of the cult following the band had developed that its final concerts were three consecutive sold-out nights at CBGB. DNA's final encore was a cover of Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...
's "Whole Lotta Love." This is not included on the CD Last Live at CBGB, released more than a decade later on John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
's Avant label.
The band is featured in the film Downtown 81
Downtown 81
Downtown 81 is a film that was shot in 1980-1981.This film, directed by Edo Bertoglio, written and produced by Glenn O'Brien with post-production in 1999-2000 by Maripol, is a rare real-life snapshot of ultra-hip subculture of post-punk era Manhattan...
starring the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...
.
DNA on DNA, a comprehensive CD chronicle of the band, was released by No More Records in 2004.
Lindsay and Mori, and to a lesser extent Crutchfield, have remained active in music.
The rock group Blonde Redhead
Blonde Redhead
Blonde Redhead is an American alternative rock band composed of vocalist/rhythm guitarist Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace , which formed in New York City in 1993....
takes its name from a DNA song.
Albums
- No New YorkNo New YorkNo New York is a compilation album released in 1978 by Antilles Records under the curation of producer Brian Eno. Although it only contained songs by four different artists, it is considered by many to be the definitive single album documenting New York City's late-1970s No Wave...
: various artists (Four DNA tracks) 1978 - Antilles, AN 7067 (LP) - A Taste of DNA 1981 - American Clavé, AMCL 1003EP (12")
- The Fruit of Original Sin: various artists (Three DNA tracks) 1981 - Les Disques Du Crepuscule, twi 035 (2xLP)
- Last Live at CBGB 1993 - AvantAvant RecordsAvant Records was a record label based in Japan specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. The label was started by composer and saxophonist John Zorn in 1992, as an offshoot of the DIW label...
(Japan), Avant 006 (CD) - American Clavé Sampler: various artists (one DNA track) 1993 - American Clave (USA), AMCL 1020/1026 (2xCD)
- DNA on DNA 2004 - No More Records, NoCD12
External links
- Official Myspace page for "Llik Your Idols", a documentary about the Cinema of Transgression featuring DNA live.
- DNA Live at the Mudd Club, 1981 (you tube clip 10:47)