by Roni Sarig
DJ Spooky (Paul Miller):
Arto Lindsay and Ikoue Mori, they’re definitely big influences. Mainly with their complete discarding of normal song structure. Arto had a really artsy, poetic side to his thing, it seemed much more idealistic and open to different stuff. Also with his Brazilian stuff, he’s working with people from radically different cultures, which a lot of the New York scene at the time would not do.
Arto Lindsay was born in Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood with his missionary parents in a Brazilian village. Though Lindsay had no musical experience or training, his interest in experimental art led him to New York in the mid-‘70s, where he met a group of like-minded noise-makers who were beginning to apply punk’s irreverence to the atonality of free jazz. Out of these early gatherings came a group of bands – James Chance’s Contortions, Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars, and DNA – and a scene that came to be known as no wave.
Lindsay initially wrote lyrics for the earliest no wave group, Mars, though he soon began to try his hand at guitar. Rather than bothering with the mundanity of learning chords or proper tuning, Arto approached his instrument as if it had never been played before and proceeded to invent an entirely new vocabulary based around rhythms and assorted manipulations. Through his associations in the downtown New York art scene, Lindsay met two other would-be musicians with a similar lack of experience and desire to experiment: Ikue Mori, a Japanese woman who attacked her drums with anarchic expressiveness, and Robin Crutchfield, a (male) sculptor and performance artist who managed to work out enough keyboard expertise (or lack of) to fit right in when the trio – who called themselves DNA – debuted in 1977, one month after forming.
In keeping with the band’s intention to push themselves at an accelerated pace, within its first year DNA released a debut single – Little Ants b/w You and You – produced by Voidoids’ guitarist Robert Quine (who had also “reconditioned” Lindsay’s guitar to better suit his approach). By this time, Brian Eno had become intrigued by the no wave scene and put together a compilation of the leading bands in the movement. No New York, as it was called, featured songs from all four of the major no wave groups, including four stand-out tracks by DNA. With Crutchfield’s simple and cohesive keyboard lines, songs like the bluesy Egomaniac’s Kiss were engaging and accessible; by the end of the year, though, creative differences led Crutchfield to form his own group, Dark Day.
Matthew Sweet:
I had the DNA 45, and I was into their whole anti-music thing. There’s an element in what I do that you’d never know. I probably have done more of that experimental stuff on demos. On records, the songs usually win out, but occasionally I like to do a one note song that’s really anti-melodic. And things tike DNA got me into thinking that way.
To replace Crutchfield, DNA acquired bass player Tim Wright, who’d been a founding member of Cleveland’s Pere Ubu. By choosing not to add another lead instrument, Lindsay and Mori removed any melodic potential from the band. In return, they got a rhythmic bassist who could hold the more formless rumblings together without overshadowing them. It was with this lineup that the band released its only extended recording, though with just six songs in under 10 minutes, A Taste of DNA was hardly an epic. The record’s brevity, however, was right for the music: Inspired by modern composers, far eastern folk styles, and even the Brazilian tropicalia pop Linsday had grown up on, DNA chocked so much rhythmic, tonal, and structural information into their music, it would have been exhausting to go longer than a minute and a half on any one piece.
Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:
It was an incredible influence. I don’t think I ever did anything musically similar, but DNA’s freedom was a big deal to me. It’s more spiritual or philosophical, where just the honesty of approach is an influence. When I watch Ikue or Arto play, it’s not like you’re watching a virtuoso, but through their trust in their ability comes a super-confidence. And all the gestures have meaning. For me, DNA was a big thing as far as, “How do I carry that kind of pride when I play, and what is it that gives them the confidence?”
A Taste of... sounded like rock put through a trash compactor, full of contorted musical ideas, clustered notes, and anemic grunts of nonsensical haikus. Yet, for all its clashing tones and rhythms, the music was joyous and playful. With DNA noise wasn’t an expression of nihilism, but of childlike freedom.
As it turned out, DNA’s lifespan – and that of the entire no wave movement – would be just as short-lived as its music. By 1982, DNA and the rest of the No New York bands had split up. Mori contributed her string playing to Mars’s final record, and has made albums of her own, while Wright played bass on the Brian Eno / David Byrne album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Of the three, though, Arto Lindsay has maintained the highest profile. While DNA still existed, Lindsay had been a part of the Lounge Lizards, a “fake jazz” group led by saxophonist John Lurie. After appearing on that group’s self-titled debut, Lindsay collaborated with another Lounge Lizard (and one-time Feelies drummer) Anton Fier on the first Golden Palominos record. In addition, he has appeared on albums by James Chance, Mars, John Zorn, Don King (a band comprising former members of Mars and DNA, as well as Arto’s brother Duncan), Ryuichi Sakamoto, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, and They Might Be Giants. Lindsay has also distinguished himself as a producer, of David Byrne’s early solo albums as well as top Brazilian artists such as Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze, and Marisa Monte.
Jim O’Rourke, solo / Gastr del Sol:
I’d never heard anyone play guitar like Arto Lindsay. The first time I heard him was on the first Golden Palominos record. At that time the DNA record was completely impossible to find. I think he’s a great guitar player and singer. The DNA record and the stuff on No New York is awesome. They were miles ahead of all those other bands from that period.
In the ‘80s, Lindsay and collaborator Peter Scherer made three albums of their own Brazilian-flavored music, ranging from experimental to dancey, as the Ambitious Lovers. In recent years, Lindsay has once again returned to his Brazilian roots with solo albums that feature guest appearances by Brian Eno, clarinetist Don Byron, DJ Spooky, and members of Blonde Redhead, Cibo Matto, and Deee-Lite.
DISCOGRAPHY
(Various Artists) No New York (Antilles, 1978); DNA contributed four songs to this Brian Eno-produced seminal document of the no wave movement.
A Taste of DNA (American Clave, 1980); the group’s only studio release, this six-song EP, lasting less than 10 minutes, is crammed with enough musical ideas for an entire career.
DNA (Avant [Japan], 1993); a live recording made at the group’s farewell show at CBGB in 1982, and released on John Zorn’s Japanese label.
SWANS
David Yow, Jesus Lizard:
Scratch Acid [Vow’s previous band] was lumped into what they called “pigfuck” music, with Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Butthole Surfers. I liked the name, and I was flattered that us little kids would be lumped in with that stuff... [I] met Michael Gira one night and asked him if he thought his lyrics were very funny. “No,” he very adamantly answered, offended that I would ask. And I said, ‘You mean to tell me, ‘Keep your head on the ground, push your ass up – here is your money,’ isn’t funny? How the fuck is that not funny?” The stuff I know by the Swans I think is a laugh riot. The Michael Gira / Don Rickles Christmas Special, that would be a good one, huh?
At the peak of their strength, the Swans – both sonically and lyrically – explored the extremes of brutality, torture, and power to the point where the music seemed incapable of even the slightest glimpses of light. In his commitment to plumbing the depths of ugliness, Swans leader Michael Gira showed nothing if not a focused vision. But by the time he’d retired the band, 15 years after it began, the music had moved to a place where it revealed moments of grace and beauty. One of two primary successors to the no wave movement (Sonic Youth being the other), the Swans went on to leave their mark on everything from post-rock and electronic outfit
s such as Low and the Young Gods (who took their name from a Swans recording) to goth-industrial groups like Nine Inch Nails.
Though Michael Gira’s first exposure to punk came while attending art school in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, he was always a bit at odds with what he viewed as the fashion-oriented nature of the scene. To counter the deficiencies he saw in L.A.’s punk rag, Slash, Gira started his own magazine entitled No, which he filled with art and writing on favorite topics such as punk bands, pornography, and cadavers. Soon, though, he found himself drawn to New York and the city’s no wave scene. “I responded to it immediately, because the main tool it used was raw sound instead of melodic rock structures,” Gira says of the music being made by people like Glenn Branca and DNA.
By the time he arrived in New York, however, no wave was all but dead, and he found he had little in common with the early ‘80s dance-oriented scene. As he dissolved his first New York band Circus Mort and began to formulate the Swans, the closest things Gira found to kindred spirits were his former art school classmate Kim Gordon and her band, another no wave-inspired outfit called Sonic Youth. “There was no support system at all for the really brutal things we were doing or Sonic Youth was doing,” Gira says. “No one even wanted to know about us, so Sonic Youth and us sort of banded together and supported each other.”
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:
Michael Gira... was a funny guy, he hated everything. He was always having a good time, yet he was completely nihilistic. And neither of us had a cent, so we became really tight, and I played with him a bit when he was developing the Swans. We toured with them, playing in front of ten people at most. We just stuck together and developed side by side. The cool thing was we had different esthetics – we were positive, they were negative – we were the Beatles, they were the Stones. Also, Sonic Youth always kept aware of the flux of the underground music scene and became part of it, where the Swans sort of stuck their ground and refused to be part of anything.
With the Swans, Gira began to construct rhythms around tape loops, using two bassists (of which he was one) and sheets of guitar noise. The intention was to create the most physical and punishing music possible. Through the extreme darkness, Gira hoped to find a sort of freedom. “I wanted to experience making the sound, to crawl inside of it,” Gira explains. “It wasn’t like I was feeling angst and needed to express it, I wanted to create something, in reality, that gave me joy. The music was overwhelmingly transformative.”
The Swans – which maintained a constantly changing lineup due to Gira’s admitted tyrannicalness – investigated this kind of supremely heavy, minimalist metal through their 1982 debut EP and first album, Filth. 1984’s Cop and their Raping a Slave single were even more brutal. With lyrics dealing in domination, humiliation, and mutilation – and harsh, pummeling rhythms to match – Gira’s cathartic nightmare came as close as music gets to making a listener feel physically violated. The Swans’ frighteningly loud and torturous live shows, taking cues from equally punishing industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, featured band members banging on metal and manipulating tapes.
Mark Robinson, Unrest / Air Miami:
They had these huge sheets of metal with one guy in the front whacking them, and I think they had three bass players and a drummer. The thing that really struck me about the Swans live was how everyone in the club left. Unrest did a Swans rip-off song “Kilt Whitey” that’s pretty much taken from the early Swans – the really slow, metal sounding stuff.
In 1985, a former sex worker and dedicated Swans fan named Jarboe made her way to New York from Atlanta with the intention of joining the band. Though it had been very much a boys club until then, she soon proved herself suitably tough and earned a job playing sampler. Though Jarboe’s role was minor at first, on the Greed and Holy Money albums she added a melodic and ethereal element the music had never had before. “People make the clichéd assumptions that a woman gets in the group and they become soft,” Gira says. “But that wasn’t the case at all. She was a very hard person, and she liked the brutal music. But being that she had this tremendous musical experience, I started taking advantage of it to expand. So I started incorporating her elaborate background vocals or some orchestrations she’d help with.”
By 1987, the Swans had moved a long way from their beginnings. Having become romantically involved, Jarboe and Gira embarked on a more acoustic-oriented side project called Skin, elements of which were then incorporated back into the Swans’ Children of God record. The music had become textured and majestic – uplifting even! – with a more varied and accessible sound that fell in the territory of goth.
Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown:
Children of God really changed my view of music a lot. Because that was something that took rock and made it triumphant, like an opera. That record is undeniably one of the greatest records of all time. I like the way he orchestrates acoustic guitar, making it really droney. When I was 14 and 15, we would fancy these bands out in the shed after the Swans.
In 1989, the Swans veered as close to mainstream as they would get when they signed to MCA Records and released their most slickly produced and song-oriented album, The Burning World. The band’s major label flirtations would be short-lived, however. An overall disaster, the record brought the Swans few new fans, alienated many old ones, and left the group deeply in debt. When MCA dropped the Swans after one release, Gira felt deeply shaken by the experience. Determined to maintain complete control over his music, he started his own Young God label and steered his music away from The Burning World’s sound.
Lou Barlow, Sebadoh:
They started out incredibly ugly – with lyrics about being raped in a jail cell and beaten by cops, or autopsies – and slowly developed into the band that did Children of God, where they brought in male/female god themes. And that was kind of the time I met my wife, so they kind of mirrored my life for a while. From that kind of self-hatred, moving to this idea of redemption and beauty. At the time I was just young enough to allow it to speak to me. I really liked the way the band was determined to evolve and flesh out this concept. That was something that influenced me in a philosophical way: Find what you do well, even if it’s the dumbest thing and people don’t understand it at all.
The Swans’ ‘90s music has been largely defined by their synthesis of the earlier rhythm-oriented post-no wave sound with the more melodic and acoustic elements of later albums. Following 1995’s return to form with The Great Annihilator, Gira announced that he would be disbanding the Swans following a final album and tour. He felt the group had become burdened with too many preconceptions and failed to inspire the interest it once did. With the double CD Soundtracks for the Blind, the Swans ended on a high note. Since the Swans’ end, Gira has divided his attention between two projects, an instrumental sound-collage work called Body Lovers and more song-oriented acoustic recordings under the name Angels of Light. Now based in Atlanta with Jarboe, who has continued her solo career, Gira also plans to release new bands on Young God Records, and reissue much of the Swans’ catalogue.
DISCOGRAPHY
Filth (Neutral, 1983, Young God / Atavistic, 1998); reissued on 2-CD set with the 1982 debut EP and live Body to Body album.
Cop (K.422 / Homestead, 1984; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); the beginning of the band’s most brutal period; reissued on a double CD containing all 1984-86 material, including 1984’s Young God EP.
Greed (K.422 / PVC, 1985; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); a more varied sound, with the addition of Jarboe; reissued on a double CD containing all 1984-86 material.
Holy Money (PVC, 1986; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); a companion piece with Greed; reissued on a double CD containing all 1984-86 material.
Children of God (Caroline, 1987; Young God / Atavistic, 1997); a more textured and acoustic release; reissued in a double CD package with the collected works of the Skin side project, entitled World of Skin.
The Burning World (Uni / MCA, 1989; Young God
/ Atavistic, 1998); largely an anomaly, this is by far the group’s most accessible album; reissued on a two-CD set with the ‘91-‘92 studio material.
White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (Young God / Sky, 1991; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); a deliberate retreat from The Burning World, with which it is reissued.
Body to Body, Job to Job (Young God / Sky, 1991; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); a compilation of outtakes and live tracks from the band’s early years; reissued on 2-CD set with the group’s first two releases.
Love of Life (Young God / Sky, 1992; Young God / Atavistic, 1998); reissued on a 2-CD set with all other ‘91-‘92 studio material.
Omniscience (Young God / Sky, 1992); a live album of material from their 1992 tour.
The Great Annihilator (Invisible / Young God, 1995); a return to full strength.
Kill the Child (Atavistic, 1996); a live album featuring performances from 1985 to 1987.
Soundtracks for the Blind (Young God / Atavistic, 1996); the band’s two-CD final studio album.
Swans Are Dead (Young God / Atavistic, 1997); a two-CD live album, one of material from the group’s 1995 tour and the other of their final tour in 1997.
MINIMALIST FUNK
In the early ‘90s, the bands in this chapter all worked on the periphery of a larger musical movement – hip-hop – and attempted to distill the essence of ‘70s funk using limited tools and/or a more focused approach. Thus they share a certain affinity as “minimalist funk.” But while Liquid Liquid and ESG stripped down the instrumentation (and recorded for 99 Records), Trouble Funk streamlined the song structures (with the D.C.-based go-go sound).