Along with labelmates ESG, Liquid Liquid exemplified the minimalist funk movement that swept New York's music underground in 1981.
No Wave music reasserted the original anarchy and amateurism of punk rock while rejecting the formulaic rhythms of rock and roll, and the structure that came with regular chord changes and verse/chorus organization. These musicians explored the extremes of atonality and the textures of noise that could be produced with garage band equipment. As raw and fresh as it was, no wave sounded like an amalgam of weird 60's experiments, a blend of free jazzers Albert Ayler and Sun Ra, the Velvet Underground, Yoko Ono, the Godz, and Captain Beefheart, with echoes of older black music forms (slide guitar is often used as a way out of electric guitar tonalities associated with rock). Their expressive array of screams and noises set corny blues or jazz figures wobbling into outer space. The atonality wasn't systemic, as in serial music, but was based on the Thelonius Monk principle of playing the wrong note at the right time. -- Mark Ridlen
And Bill Laswell in the early eighties
Conventional wisdom equates late-'70s/early-'80s disco with velvet ropes and coked-up supermodels, but Joey Negro and Sean P.'s ongoing Disco Not Disco series makes a convincing case for the N.Y.C. discotheque as a place where bold genre-blurring experimentation thrived under the guise of recreation. Where Disco Not Disco 1 spotlighted avant-funk bands, part deux works like an electroclash crash course, with a collection of tracks that suggest Kraftwerk was a more important influence on East Village culture than the Velvet Underground or Ramones. Several nations come together under one groove here: the Clash and Can get cross-wired with Yello's classic "Bostich" and Material's "Rapper's Delight" redux "Ciguri," and if much of DND2 sounds dated... well, isn't that why you're listening in the first place? -- Gern Blandsten