No New York

It's 1978, you're Brian Eno and you're in New York to master the new Talking Heads album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which you've also produced. While in town you visit an underground festival at a venue named Artists Space and are taken by the "No Wave" bands performing. You decide this music should be documented, so what do you do? You record four of the bands and put out a record on a small subsidiary of Island Records, that label you have a friendly relationship with, called Antilles. You name the record No New York and history is changed or something like that.

Seriously, that's basically what happened. Eno got Lydia Lunch's Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, James Chance and The Contortions (credited simply as Contortions), Mars and Lindsay/Crutchfield's D.N.A. to hunker down at the Big Apple Studio in New York for some quick sessions with minimal production and the album was all but complete. At that time it was probably assumed that none of these bands would go on to anything big, and while their then current incarnations never had any substantial success or hits, you can't underestimate the influence Lunch, Chance, Lindsay and their associates had on modern music. The spastic punk/funk/noise of their works remains important and has been documented in books like Please Kill Me. At times catchy and fascinating, at others ear damaging and scream inducing, everyone here was truly unique for their time and there really aren't many records like it. A number of unrelated compilations have even been issued to pay tribute with names like Yes New York, Yes L.A. and Maybe Chicago?, but they all kind of miss the point. While those compilations feature bands of their eras and scenes, there was NOTHING like No New York at it's time, nor is there much of anything similar today. Truly great stuff that proves you don't have to be number one to change the world.


No New York

Contortions
01 Dish It Out
02 Flip Your Face
03 Jaded
04 I Can't Stand Myself

Teenage Jesus and The Jerks
05 Burning Rubber
06 The Closet
07 Red Alert
08 I Woke Up Dreaming

Mars
09 Helen Fordsdale
10 Hairwaves
11 Tunnel
12 Puerto Rican Ghost

D.N.A.
13 Egomaniac's Kiss
14 Lionel
15 Not Moving
16 Size



R.I.P. Anya Philips: 1955-1981