Inspired by some of the images in Julie's photos from the other day, I broke out my copy of the first edition of the excellent New York Noise series for a little vintage Manhattan skronk to score my walks to the office this week. For those unfamiliar, New York Noise is a series of compilations put out by those archivist hepcats at London's Soul Jazz records that concentrate on the thus-dubbed "mutant disco"/No Wave/post-punk & primitive funk scenes that fleetingly thrived at the beginning of the 1980s. At last count, there were three editions, but my favorite remains the first, culling together tracks both legendary and obscure by bands like Liquid Liquid, James Chance, the Bush Tetras, ESG and many more. It's a truly awesome collection that's really worth seeking out.
It's becoming harder and harder to reconcile that Manhattan is the same place that spawned these acts (and, obviously, countless similarly-adventurous others). I'm arguably being guilty of that same "borrowed nostalgia of the unremembered 80s" that James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem laments in "Losing My Edge," but I assure you it isn't total projection. While I was living uptown as a teenage geek at the time, I was gradually becoming aware that downtown was where most the cool stuff was happening. I even came into owning a couple of the LPs represented on New York Noise before they started being considered ancient artifacts worthy of reverence. I know, not quite "I was there," but let me explain.
Between having a savvy older sister, some legitimately clued-in hipster friends and my frequent expeditions to the dingy downtown records shops of Soho, Greenwich Village and the East Village (most of them gone today), I grew to realize in fairly short order than there was more to music than simply classic rock radio and the still-nascent MTV. A seismic development in that capacity came courtesy of a couple of large crates of vinyl LPs that a then-boyfriend of my mother's decided to unload on me one summer during the mid-80s (I wrote about this experience in some detail back in the summer of 2008). Said crates shook me out of my steady-diet of heavy metal, goth rock and hardcore and exposed me to a whole new realm of interesting sound, from the odd electronic squall of Nash The Slash to the frantic avant-jazz noodling of Rip Rig + Panic to the chirpy pop of Altered Images and all points in between. Not all the slabs of black wax in those crates were great, but rarely were any of them particularly boring.
There was one LP, however, that I initially (and foolishly) wrote off. Dubbed Lesson No. 1, the mysterious album by a po-faced gent named Glenn Branca seemed more precious and pretentious to me than anything else. Dutifully dropping the needle to give a fair shake, though, I listened for a few fleeting moments to the eight-minute title track, "Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar." After under a minute of soaking in Branca's dense layering of notes, I obliviously deduced that it was simply "a ripoff of King Crimson's 'Discipline,'" and turned my attention to something else. Technically, Branca's work pre-dates Crimson's, although the similarity is unmistakable. In any case, the track's absence of anything resembling the conventional structure of a rock song (verses, choruses, hooks, etc.) prompted me to myopically file it away in the "probably-never-going-to-listen-to-again" section of my record collection. That turned out to be an oversight.
A couple of years later, thanks to a long-neglected copy of No New York that I found gathering dust in the racks of my college radio station, I developed a taste for the discordant strains of the short-lived No Wave scene of the early 80s, which led me to checking out Glenn Branca's Theoretical Girls, who were basically Soho's answer to the East Village's DNA. Recorded prior to Lesson No. 1, Branca's music with the Theoretical Girls was more along the lines of what I was getting into – punky, noisy and furiously pounding, but still within the very loose parameters of "rock." Check out "You Got Me" (also featured on New York Noise) for a taste of same.
In any case, time moved on and I got into a whole different bunch of stuff, largely forgetting about my first Branca experience (although I was snobbily proud of myself for recognizing Bowie's allusion to him in the lyrics to Tin Machine's otherwise arguably lamentable theme song). It probably wasn't until getting ahold of the New York Noise disc in 2003 that I actually listened to "Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar" in earnest again. This many years later, I think it's completely captivating. If I'd stayed with it beyond the two-minute mark all those years back, I'd have experienced the moment in the piece where the song breaks out into a new phase (around 2:44), moving from simple tonal repetition into something altogether different and, dare I say it, beautiful. Sure it may seem impenetrably arty (music heads might thrill to know that Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth bend their strings on the track), but I think it's an extraordinary piece of music. And for anyone who suggests that Branca is an austere, unapproachable artiste, I recommend checking out his bits in the otherwise flawed documentary "Kill Yr Idols," wherein he comes across as fairly hilarious.
In any case, sit back and soak in "Lesson No. 1." Better yet, go get yourself a copy of New York Noise, rip it to your iPod and go walk these city streets with it.
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