No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music

Underground music

Underground music comprises a range of different musical genres that operate outside of mainstream culture. Such music can typically share common values, such as the valuing of sincerity and intimacy; an emphasis on freedom of creative expression; an appreciation of artistic creativity...

, film, performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

, video, and contemporary art

Contemporary art

Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...

 scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. The term No Wave is in part satirical word play rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave

New Wave music

New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...

 genre

Genre

Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

. The term originates from a 1981 show, "New York/New Wave", curated by artist Diego Cortez.

Styles and characteristics

No Wave is not a clearly definable musical genre with consistent features. Various groups drew on such disparate styles as funk

Funk

Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground...

, jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

, punk rock

Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...

, avant garde

Avant-garde music

Avant-garde music is a term used to characterize music which is thought to be ahead of its time, i.e. containing innovative elements or fusing different genres....

, and experimental

Experimental music

Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

. There are, however, some elements common to most No Wave music, such as abrasive atonal

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...

 sounds, repetitive driving rhythms, and a tendency to emphasize musical texture over melody

Melody

A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

—typical of La Monte Young

La Monte Young

La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...

's early downtown music

Downtown music

Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music. The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono—one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon—opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street to be used...

.


In 1978 a punk-influenced noise series was held at New York’s Artists Space that led to the 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,...

-produced recording 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...

, documenting James Chance and 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, 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...

, and DNA

DNA (band)

DNA was a No Wave band formed in 1978 by guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield. Rather than playing their instruments in a traditional manner, they instead focused on making unique and unusual sounds...

.

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...

 made their first live appearance at Noise Fest

Noise Fest

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...

, a noise music festival curated by Thurston Moore

Thurston Moore

Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...

 at the art space White Columns

White Columns

White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit space and one of its most prestigious. White Columns is known as a show case for up and coming artists....

 in June 1981. Each night three to five acts performed, including Glenn Branca

Glenn Branca

Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...

, Rhys Chatham

Rhys Chatham

Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions...

, Rudolph Grey

Rudolph Grey

Rudolph Grey is a musician and writer.As an electric guitarist, Grey has recorded and performed under his own name, as well as leading various ad hoc ensembles called The Blue Humans. His music draws on no wave and free jazz....

, 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...

's Dark Day, and others.

No Wave had a notable influence on noise and industrial

Industrial music

Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...

 bands which followed, such as Big Black

Big Black

Big Black was an American punk rock band from Evanston, Illinois, active from 1981 to 1987. Founded by singer and guitarist Steve Albini, the band's initial lineup also included guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati, both of Naked Raygun...

, Helmet

Helmet (band)

Helmet is an alternative metal band from New York City formed in 1989. Founded by vocalist and lead guitarist Page Hamilton, Helmet has had numerous lineup changes, and Hamilton has been the only constant member....

, and Live Skull

Live Skull

-Overview:Live Skull created abrasive no wave music not unlike their 1980s contemporaries Sonic Youth, Swans, Rat at Rat R, The Chameleons, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Band of Susans. Their music featured angular guitar parts interspersed with bleak, quieter passages, for a haunting...

. Theoretical Girls

Theoretical Girls

Theoretical Girls were a New York No wave band formed by Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn that existed from 1977 to 1981.-History:Theoretical Girls played only about 20 shows . It released one single which had some attention in England where it sold a few thousand copies...

 influenced Sonic Youth, who emerged from the scene and eventually reached mass audiences and critical acclaim.

According to Simon Reynolds, writing for Slate

Slate

Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...

:

And although "affection" is possibly an odd word to use in reference to a bunch of nihilists, I do feel fond of the No Wave people. James Chance's music actually stands up really well, I think; there are great moments throughout Lydia Lunch's long discography, and Suicide's records are just beautiful.

No Wave inspired the Speed Trials noise rock

Noise rock

Noise rock describes a style of post-punk rock music that became prominent in the 1980s. Noise rock makes use of the traditional instrumentation and iconography of rock, but incorporates atonality and especially dissonance, and also frequently discards usual songwriting conventions.-Style:Noise...

 series organized by Live Skull members in May 1983 at White Columns with The Fall, Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys are an American hip hop trio from New York City. The group consists of Mike D who plays the drums, MCA who plays the bass, and Ad-Rock who plays the guitar....

, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose career was spawned by the New York No Wave scene...

, Elliott Sharp

Elliott Sharp

Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from blues, jazz, and orchestral music to noise, no wave rock,...

, Swans

Swans (band)

Swans are an influential American post-punk band initially active from 1982 to 1997, led by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira. The band was one of the few groups to emerge from the early 1980s New York No Wave scene and stay intact into the next decade. Formed by Gira in...

, and 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....

. This was followed by the after-hours Speed Club that was fleetingly established at ABC No Rio

ABC No Rio

ABC No Rio is a social center located at 156 Rivington Street on New York City's Lower East Side that was founded in 1980. It features a gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab...

.

No Wave Cinema

No Wave Cinema

No Wave Cinema

No Wave Cinema was a Colab sponsored boom in underground filmmaking on the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City. Its name, much like its cousin No Wave music, was a stripped down style of guerrilla/punk filmmaking that emphasized mood and texture above everything else.This brief movement,...

 was an underground film scene in Tribeca

TriBeCa

Tribeca is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York in the United States. Its name is an acronym based on the words "Triangle below Canal Street", and is properly bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Vesey Street...

 and the East Village

East Village, Manhattan

The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...

. Filmmakers included: Amos Poe

Amos Poe

Amos Poe is a New York City director and screenwriter, described by The New York Times as a "pioneering indie filmmaker."-Career:Amos Poe is one of the first punk filmmakers and his film The Blank Generation —co-directed with Ivan Kral— is one of the earliest punk films...

, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch

James R. "Jim" Jarmusch is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.-Early life:...

, Vivienne Dick

Vivienne Dick

Vivienne Dick is an Irish experimental and documentary filmmaker.She was born in Dublin but moved to the United States in the 1970s. In the U.S., Dick became active in No Wave film culture and produced a series of Super8 short films. Many of her films were staged around well-known New York City...

, Scott B and Beth B, and Seth Tillett, and led to the Cinema of Transgression

Cinema of Transgression

The Cinema of Transgression is a term coined by Nick Zedd in 1985 to describe a New York City, United States based underground film movement, consisting of a loose-knit group of like-minded artists using shock value and humor in their work...

 and work by Nick Zedd

Nick Zedd

Nick Zedd is an American filmmaker and author based in New York City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work...

 and Richard Kern

Richard Kern

Richard Kern is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities of the time...

.

No Wave musicians

• 8-Eyed Spy
  8-Eyed Spy
  8-Eyed Spy was a late 1970s No Wave/Post-punk band featuring Lydia Lunch, Jim Sclavunos, Pat Irwin, Michael Paumgardhen and George Scott III. They covered the Swamp rock classic "Run Through the Jungle" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"...
  
  
• Bush Tetras
  Bush Tetras
  Bush Tetras are an American post-punk band from New York City, popular in the Manhattan club scene in the early 1980s but never achieving much mainstream success. Their music combined funk rhythms and dissonant guitar riffs.-History:...
  
  
• The Del-Byzanteens
  The Del-Byzanteens
  The Del-Byzanteens was a New York-based No Wave band active in the early 1980's. The band comprised Phil Kline ; Jim Jarmusch ; Philippe Hagen ; Josh Braun ; and Dan Braun...
  
  
• Friction
  Friction (band)
  Friction is an influential rock band from Japan, formed in 1978. They originally began in 1971 under the name Circle Triangle Square, and are considered to be one of the pioneers of Japan's alternative rock scene.-History:...
  
  
• Rudolph Grey
  Rudolph Grey
  Rudolph Grey is a musician and writer.As an electric guitarist, Grey has recorded and performed under his own name, as well as leading various ad hoc ensembles called The Blue Humans. His music draws on no wave and free jazz....
  
  
• Jody Harris
  Jody Harris
  Jody Harris is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer who was born in Kansas and became a central figure in the seminal No Wave scene in New York City in the 1970s.-Career history:...
  
  
• Judy Nylon
  Judy Nylon
  Judy Nylon is an American artist who moved to London in 1970. She was half of the punk act called Snatch, which also featured Patti Palladin. Only those who lived in New York and London during the era that spanned glam rock, punk and no wave are likely to appreciate her importance, most of which...
  
  
• Raybeats
  Raybeats
  The Raybeats were an instrumental neo-surf rock combo from New York City that arose from the No Wave musical scene. The original line-up consisted of Don Christensen , Jody Harris , Pat Irwin , and George Scott III .- History :The Raybeats formed in 1979, brought together by George Scott...
  
  
• The Static
• Ut
  Ut (band)
  Ut originated from New York City's downtown No Wave scene in December 1978. The inheritors of the fertile collision between rock, free jazz and the avant garde that first manifested itself in the Velvet Underground, Ut soon became a serious force within the New York music scene.- History :Ut's...
  
  
• Von Lmo
  Von Lmo
  Von Lmo is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist.- History :Von Lmo let very little be known about his the actualities of his life. At times he has claimed to have been born in 1924 to Sicilian parents living in Brooklyn, other times he has said to be an extraterrestrial from the planet...
  
  
• Y Pants
  Y Pants
  Y Pants were an all-female No Wave band from New York City active from 1979 to 1982. The trio, made up of photographer/musician Barbara Ess , visual artist Virginia Piersol, and filmmaker Gail Vachon, developed a unique sound via their acoustic toy instrumentation of toy piano, ukulele and a...
  
  

No Wave artists

• Eric Bogosian
  Eric Bogosian
  Eric Bogosian is an American actor, playwright, monologist, and novelist of Armenian descent.-Personal life:Bogosian, an Armenian-American, was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, the son of Edwina, a hairdresser and instructor, and Henry Bogosian, an accountant. After graduating from Oberlin College,...
  
  
• Stefan Eins
  Stefan Eins
  Stefan Eins Born in Prague, Bohemia, grew up in Vienna and Gresten, Austria. He settled in New York City in 1967. Eins graduated from the University of Vienna with a degree in Theology and he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1964-1967. He does not distinguish between creating art...
  
  
• John Fekner
  John Fekner
  John Fekner is an innovative artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 70s and 80s...
  
  
• Isa Genzken
  Isa Genzken
  Isa Genzken is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin.-Education:Genzken studied fine arts and art history at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts from 1969–1971, the Berlin University of the Arts from 1971–1973, and Arts Academy Düsseldorf from 1973-1977. Genzken married German visual...
  
  
• Kim Gordon
  Kim Gordon
  Kim Althea Gordon is an American musician, vocalist, artist, record producer, video director and actress. She has sung and played bass and guitar in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, and in Free Kitten with Julia Cafritz...
  
  
• Dan Graham
  Dan Graham
  Dan Graham , is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His art career began in 1964 when he moved to New York and opened the John Daniels Gallery....
  
  
• Jenny Holzer
  Jenny Holzer
  Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.-Education:...
  
  
• G. H. Hovagimyan
  G. H. Hovagimyan
  G. H. Hovagimyan is an experimental cross media, new media and performance artist who lives and works in New York City. He was born 1950 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In 1972, He received a B.F.A. from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received an M.A. from New York...
  
  
• Mike Kelley
• Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger
  Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed...
  
  
• Thomas Lawson
  Thomas Lawson (artist)
  Thomas Lawson is an artist, writer, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He has exhibited paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of the Pictures Generation exhibit, Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London and LAXART in Los...
  
  
• Robert Longo
  Robert Longo
  Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
  
  
• Joseph Nechvatal
  Joseph Nechvatal
  Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...
  
  
• Tom Otterness
  Tom Otterness
  Tom Otterness is an American sculptor whose works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums in New York---most notably in Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and in the 14th Street/8th Avenue subway station---and other cities around the world...
  
  
• Tony Oursler
  Tony Oursler
  Tony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...
  
  
• Richard Prince
  Richard Prince
  Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975...
  
  
• Judy Rifka
  Judy Rifka
  Judy Rifka, an American artist, first emerged in the 1970s as a painter and video artist, and is associated with Colab, Tribeca, the Lower East Side arts scene of that period, and such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rene Ricard, John Ahearn, Richard Mock, Ron Gorchov, Becky Howland, Keith...
  
  
• Kiki Smith
  Kiki Smith
  Kiki Smith is an American artist classified as a feminist artist, a movement with beginnings in the twentieth century...
  
  
• Wolfgang Staehle
  Wolfgang Staehle
  Wolfgang Staehle is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.-Education:...
  
  
• David Wojnarowicz
  David Wojnarowicz
  David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.-Biography:...
  
  

No Wave Afterlife

In a foreword to the book No Wave, Weasel Walter

Weasel Walter

Weasel Walter is a composer and instrumentalist who founded the band The Flying Luttenbachers in Chicago in 1991 with late jazz cult figure Hal Russell and is a current member of Cellular Chaos and Behold...The Arctopus...

 wrote of the movement's ongoing influence,

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

Scott Crary

Scott Crary is a film director, producer and writer based in New York City.Crary filmed, produced, edited, and directed the film Kill Your Idols, a documentary examining three decades of New York art punk bands....

 made a documentary, Kill Your Idols, including such No Wave bands as Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Glenn Branca, as well bands influenced by No Wave, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Foetus

Foetus (band)

Foetus is the primary musical outlet of industrial music pioneer J. G. Thirlwell. Until 1995 the band underwent various name changes, all including the word foetus. Monikers adopted at different times include Foetus Under Glass, You've Got Foetus On Your Breath and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel...

 and others.

In 2007–2008, three books on the scene were published: Soul Jazz's New York Noise, Marc Masters' No Wave, and Thurston Moore and Byron Coley's No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.

In 2010, French filmmaker Céline Danhier made a documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 on No Wave Cinema and the Cinema of Transgression entitled Blank City, which interviews directors and actors including Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi

Steve Buscemi

Steven Vincent "Steve" Buscemi is an American actor, writer and film director. An associate member of the renowned experimental theater company The Wooster Group, Buscemi has starred and supported in successful Hollywood and indie films including New York Stories, Mystery Train, Reservoir Dogs,...

, Debbie Harry

Debbie Harry

Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...

, Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore, Richard Kern, Amos Poe

Amos Poe

Amos Poe is a New York City director and screenwriter, described by The New York Times as a "pioneering indie filmmaker."-Career:Amos Poe is one of the first punk filmmakers and his film The Blank Generation —co-directed with Ivan Kral— is one of the earliest punk films...

, James Nares, Eric Mitchell, Susan Seidelman

Susan Seidelman

Susan Seidelman is an American director, producer, writer, and actress.-Career:Susan Seidelman belongs to the first wave of female independent film makers in the American cinema of the 1980s. She graduated Abington Senior High School in 1969 , and went on to study fashion and arts at Drexel...

, Beth B, Scott B, Charlie Ahearn

Charlie Ahearn (director)

Charlie Ahearn was born in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, and is a film director and creative cultural artist currently living in New York City. Although predominantly involved in film and video production, he is also known for his work as an author, freelance writer, and radio host...

, and Nick Zedd. The soundtrack includes music by No Wave bands like James Chance and the Contortions, Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth and others.

Compilations

• All Guitars (1985) Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
  Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
  Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
  
   #10, Harvestworks.org
• Just Another Asshole
  Just Another Asshole
  Just Another Asshole was a short-lived no wave art/music/sound art magazine publication project launched from the Lower East Side Manhattan in the early 1980s. It was edited by Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca.- Just Another Asshole: The Book:...
  
  #5 (1981) compilation LP (CD reissue 1995 on Atavistic # ALP39CD), producers: Barbara Ess & Glenn Branca
  Glenn Branca
  Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
  
  
• N.Y. No Wave (2003) ZE
  ZE Records
  ZE Records was originally a New York-based record label, started in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban. It has been re-established by Esteban since 2003.-History:Michael Zilkha ZE Records (always written with two capital letters) was originally a New York-based record label, started in...
  
   France B00009OKOP
• New York Noise (2003) Soul Jazz
  Soul jazz
  Soul jazz is a development of jazz incorporating strong influences from blues, soul, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often an organ trio featuring a Hammond organ.- Overview :Soul jazz is often associated with hard bop. Mark C...
  
   B00009OYSE
• New York Noise, Vol. 2 (2006) Soul Jazz B000CHYHOG
• New York Noise, Vol. 3 (2006) Soul Jazz B000HEZ5CC
• Noise Fest Tape (1982) TSoWC, White Columns
• 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...
  
  (1978) Antilles
  Antilles Records
  Antilles Records was an American record label that was a subsidiary of Island Records.Its jazz catalog is now managed by Verve Records.-Discography:*1001 Joanne Brackeen - Special Identity 1981*1002 Biréli Lagrène- Routes To Django 1980...
  
  , (2006) Lilith, B000B63ISE
• Speed Trials (1984) Homestead Records HMS-011

Sources

• Berendt, Joachim E. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, revised by Günther Huesmann, translated by H. and B. Bredigkeit with Dan Morgenstern. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992. "The Styles of Jazz: From the Eighties to the Nineties," p. 57–59. ISBN 1-55652-098-0
• Masters, Marc. No Wave. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. ISBN 978-1-906155-02-5
• Moore, Alan W. "Artists' Collectives: Focus on New York, 1975–2000". In Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited by Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette, 203. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Moore, Alan W., and Marc Miller (eds.). ABC No Rio
  ABC No Rio
  ABC No Rio is a social center located at 156 Rivington Street on New York City's Lower East Side that was founded in 1980. It features a gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab...
  
   Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side
  Lower East Side
  The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
  
  Art Gallery. New York: Collaborative Projects, 1985
• Pearlman, Alison, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Reynolds, Simon. "Contort Yourself: No Wave New York." In Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–84. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 2005.
• Taylor, Marvin J. (ed.). The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984, foreword by Lynn Gumpert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-691-12286-5

External links

• New York No Wave Photo Archive
• Official MySpace page for Kill Your Idols, a documentary about the Cinema of Transgression & the No Wave scene
• Video of Thurston Moore talking about his book "No Wave:Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976–1980"