No wave

I'm Mark Masters.

Written two books about music, No Wave, published in 2008, and High Bias, The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, published in 2023.

On this podcast, I talk to music book authors about how they get from their first idea to a finished book and all the decisions they make along the way.

So this time around, I was psyched to talk with Kip Lornell and Tom Minty.

Hello and welcome to Different Head.

Broadcasting live from my apartment, this is an annotated mixtape of New Wave, No Wave, and Neither Wave.

Once again, my name is Tyler Sorensen.

On today's show, every song on this playlist is inspired by my recent road trip to Cream City, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And he just drops right into that scene, leading to this complete deconstruction of traditional rock music.

You get the emergence of this movement called No Wave in New York's downtown scene.

Right, because punk had already happened.

And to these downtown artists, punk had already become too commercialized.

Basically a uniform at that point.

Yeah, a uniform.

So No Wave was a total violent rejection of traditional musical structures.

Lindsay forms a band called DNA and they famously get included on this legendary 1978 compilation album called No New York.

It's more New Wave... than probably punk uh speaking of which the punk band we see at the start which i assume is that the roosters as well because they have their faces painted white and they've got red lipstick on which is not very punk either i don't think

well i think this was probably the emergence of new wave wasn't it or no wave kind of around this time with like um suburban lawns and those kind of bands so i think there was kind of a fight back and like um television and uh the kind of cbgb's but their sound is very punk though Well, it kind of is, but there was a lot when we've watched film like New Year's Evil, even that was 1981 or 1980, it was a lot of that punk sort of LA and New York punk still had that punk, sorry, new wave had that punky sound.

So I think there was kind of this is good.

That was before obviously synthesizers and stuff came in.

So I think there was kind of that crossover period, but there was definitely that kind of seems to be that move into kind of the new wave or the no wave kind of movement around this time.

What I did like about the Roosters was that they actually do sound like a garage band.

So often in films, you find that they've dubbed a studio, a polished studio kind of soundtrack over them as they're rehearsing.

But whether or not um i mean i guess you had other new york filmmakers the guy who made splatter university was kind of a relative that was kind of but that that's somebody who i mean there's a lot of films from around the time like maniac and nightmares and undamaged brain the howlings another one that captures which is a bigger budget movie it captures that 42nd street kind of griminess doesn't it um Whereas actually, funnily enough, in this film, they don't actually feature any kind of 42nd Street style stuff, do they? Which is kind of almost a bit of a cliche, isn't it? And a lot of those films like The Howling, Nightmares and Damaged Brain, they've all got those kind of scenes showing the 42nd Street kind of being quite self-reflexive in some ways, reflecting themselves back on each other, you know, that kind of the grindhouse aesthetic.

I thought it was just a little like open secret amongst people in the East Village and Gowanus and Soho that, oh yeah, I also do jazz, jazz sessions.

They're recording a couple of jazz records and also, oh yeah, some hardcore comes in, but that doesn't really resemble No Wave, you know, but I don't really talk about it.

But it's also like an open secret thing, but not something that I felt was worth trumpeting.

It took someone else trumpeting that like, hey, take a look at this.

I'm Mark Masters.

I've written two books about music, No Wave, published in 2008, and High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, published in 2023.

On this podcast, I talk to music book authors about how they get from their first idea to a finished book, and all the decisions they make along the way.

So for this episode, I was psyched to talk with Ashley Kahn.