28 Years Later
IN THE PAST decade of rock music development, theres been no more ubiquitously and haphazardly invoked lineage than that of No Wave. A scarcely categorizable subgenre to begin with, the tag and its most revered cornerstones (DNA, Mars, Glenn Branca, James Chance) have been bandied around as primary influences by art-credibility-seeking young bands of all stripes in recent years, lending the very notion of No Wave somewhat more of an imaginary and faddish character than it perhaps deserves.
Now into this environment comes the brand-new, first time release of Interferences self-titled only album, originally recorded in 1982 and, in its circumstances and pedigree, as much a No Wave Lost City of Gold as the kids could hope for. Brooklyn-based label The Social Registry (itself home to art-noise torchbearers like Gang Gang Dance and Psychic Ills) has been the catalyst for the release of this long-buried jewel, describing its intentions thusly: We would hope it at least challenges the convention [of No Wave revisionist history], suggesting that revisionists might have left a few stones unturned.
Unturned feels an apt term for the original music on Interference; a steaming, self-fertilizing bed of art action, produced by a group of young people in the flower of their creative voraciousness. Band member David
Linton, who has in the past three decades remained a tirelessly progressive audio-visual artist and organizer, states, The years immediately leading up to the juncture at which this recording was made were incredibly full of musical excitement coming from all directions, globally and from within the then very special cultural micro-climate of Downtown New York.We were still just sifting through the weeds along the ragged trail No Wave had blazed into the wilderness... looking for survivable scraps. And, while many of these scraps share some sonic signifiers with other work from the same era and community (fetishists will latch onto the choppy guitar figures, persistently rubbery bass lines, scrap metal percussion and group-mind vocals), Interference feels, perhaps simply by virtue of the fact that it has not been present to be imitated, exhilaratingly fresh.
Expanding on the groups methodological intentions, Linton says, We were all involved in various other musical projects but very much wanted Interference to function as a fully collaborative band, not just another project on the Downtown rostrum, which was very much a hierarchical scene built around individual careers and a kind of demimonde star system. Some of the bands process can be discerned in observing the two versions of Excerpt #1 present on the new release (one of which comes as a bonus track). Both utilize a similar gesture of a bass line, along with certain set rhythmic figures and designated (but highly divergent in the two versions) blocks of white noise. It is music built on skeletal conceptions of songs and healthy dollops of igniting chance. It is, in short, explicitly experimental in a way that a great deal of music that labels itself as such is not.
The original record is a relatively brief affair, consisting of only four full pieces and two sax-laden interludes. For this reason and perhaps for the purpose of casting it in a context of modern lineagethis release includes a second record of new remixes by a bevy of electronic and multi-media experimentalists. I personally made the shift into electronic performance in the early 90s so all these remixers are people with whom I´ve worked side by side in that context for many years at this point, says Linton. Some of the remixes are more successful than others. While certain tracks carry an over-sterilized effect, others, like the Dolly and Toshio Kajiwara remixes, manage to accelerate Interference´s timbral din while keeping much of the winning weirdness intact.
Why Interference proves such an interesting listen is that it provides an isolated slice of the past, one which was excluded from the natural cultural flow it was once part of and deposited here, 28 years later, an untouched sliver of secret history. And, while it may not prove the game-changing lost No Wave jewel that some might hope, it is a record that feels wholly vivid and not only undimmed but emboldened by its decades of public non-existence.
Interference in 1982.