“Stripped down to the core duo of Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado and with Conny Plank again behind the boards with crisp, focused production, with Alles Ist Gut (Everything Is Fine) DAF turned into an honest-to-goodness German hit machine, as detailed in the 1998 Mute reissue’s liner notes by Biba Kopf. Even more important and impressive was how they did it — keeping the electronic brutality that characterized them, but stripped down to nothing but Görl‘s massive drumming, electronic bass and synth tones, and Delgado‘s deep, commanding singing. The result was and remains massively influential — Nitzer Ebb, to mention one later industrial disciple, would be nothing without this album as a template, while the genre of electronic body music, or EBM, got its undisputed start with the doom-laden death disco here. …”
allmusic (Audio)
W – Alles ist gut
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Alles Ist Gut (full album) 34:49
Marcus Garvey/Garvey’s Ghost – Burning Spear (1990)
“This disc brings together Marcus Garvey, Burning Spear’s debut album, with its dub counterpart, entitled Garvey’s Ghost. The resulting package is one of the pillars of roots reggae, an album packed with thick, heavy grooves and uncompromising religious and political messages. Although this Mango reissue has been criticized as sonically weaker than the Jamaican original, it will sound plenty dread to all but the most critical ears. Songs like the title track, ‘Slavery Days’ and ‘Give Me’ (with its remarkably well-integrated flute part) all tremble with the intensity of Winston Rodney’s dark voice, and some of the dub versions (in particular ‘Black Wa-Da-Da,’ based on ‘The Invasion’) number among the most frightening ever created. There are no sing-along melodies here; Burning Spear has always been more about setting up a relentless groove and using it to get the words across. But that groove is glorious, and it’s more than sufficient to support the significant weight of the lyrics.”
allmusic (Audio)
W – Marcus Garvey, W – Garvey’s Ghost
amazon
What Makes a Man Start Fires? – Minutemen (1983)
“… At almost twice the length of their previous album, The Punch Line, the Minutemen’s songs began surpassing the two-minute mark. Breaking another Minutemen record, the band took the longest time they took to date to record What Makes A Man Start Fires?. The basic tracks were recorded in one late-night session, but then the band held two separate late-night sessions for guitar and vocal overdubs. Watt has said that he considers this to be Minutemen’s ‘first real album.’ …”
Wikipedia
Minutemen – Reflecting on the 40th Anniversary of “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (Audio)
The Genius Of… What Makes a Man Start Fires? by Minutemen (Audio/Video)
Discogs (Video)
Popol Vuh – Agape-Agape Love-Love (1982)
“Two years after the issue of Sei Still, Wisse ICH BIN, Agape-Agape (Love-Love) offers a deeper view of the same animal. Still utilizing a choir for Gregorian chant-like ethereal intensity — though they sing in Byzantine scales — pianist Florian Fricke, guitarist/percussionist Daniel Fichelscher, guitarist Conny Veit (who came back to the fold after a prolonged absence), and vocalist Renate Knaup delve deeply into the drone world of Fricke‘s sacred music muse. … Fricke only comes to the fore on the title track with his shimmering, insistent mantra-piano, but the twin guitars of Fichelscher and Veit more than compensate elsewhere as they entwine and slip through and around one another. Once again, though the music might seem formulaic, it is in the subtleties and dynamics that Fricke‘s compositional growth is revealed, and Agape-Agape is a worthy, devastatingly beautiful outing.”
allmusic (Audio)
Wikipedia
YouTube: Agape Agape, Love Love (full) 37:17
Tellus #16 – Tango
“… ‘Tango’, #16 in the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine series, offers the unexpected pairing of contemporary downtown NY composers with vintage tango songs. It works though, contributors avoiding mimicry and impersonation, and the essence of tango being retaken by participants as slow, melodramatic songs, with added gusto and drama. Tango is merely a dotted line here, serving as rough guidelines to participants eager to emancipate themselves from any popular format, while seeking the intense, gripping mood of tango. I assume the complex choreography of this dance also appealed to the Tellus team as a kind of stage play, as they had always been interested in music theater, radio plays, radio art, etc. …”
UbuWeb (Audio)
Discogs
Robert Wilson: It’s About Time
“When Robert Wilson’s work first appeared internationally it was generally seen from a single and limited viewpoint—as a return to the image. Wilson was understood as a proponent of two-dimensional theater, of theater to be looked at only. This was because he came into the public eye at the beginning of the ’70s, when the figurative gesture ruled supreme on the stage, and the body, in its expressive entirety, was at the center of a tendency to involve the spectator. But Wilson’s push was to stretch the visual; it was a recuperation of the grand deliriums of the Surrealist painters, basing dramatic narrative on a simple sequence of backdrops and the unfolding of a tableau vivant, immobile yet in continuous and unstoppable evolution. …”
ARTFORUM
YouTube: How Robert Wilson Bends Time
Are You Receiving? Killing Joke As Post Punk Pioneers
Jaz Coleman portrait courtesy of Killing Joke
It’s undeniable that Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984 (Faber, 2005) is an essential text for anyone interested in the revolutionary potential of DIY music recorded in the pre-digital age. This weighty but gripping tome starts with the implosion of the Sex Pistols during their ill-fated American tour of 1978 and concludes with the explosion of such ‘new pop’ acts as Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Art Of Noise seven years later. These two stylistically diverse bookends only hint at the cornucopia of ragged and revolutionary sonic thrills to be had on the pages in between. The oppressive gloom of Joy Division; the herky jerky deconstructed jazz fusion of The Contortions; the militant Marxist funk of Gang Of Four; the avant feminist punk of The Slits; the revolutionary machine noise of Throbbing Gristle; the rumbling, scabrous dub of PiL; the heady, post-modern pop of Talking Heads, and so on. …”
The Quietus
No Wave Post-Punk Underground New York 1976-1980
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley: “New York City during the 1970s was a beautiful, ravaged slag — impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore. [Expletive] was already percolating by the time I hit Manhattan as a teen terror in 1976. Inspired by the manic rantings of Lester Bangs in Creem magazine, the Velvet Underground’s sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Dolls’ first album, and the poetic scat of Horses, by Patti Smith, I snuck out my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound, and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped from. …”
NY Times – ‘No Wave: Post-Punk’
amazon
Bush Tetras – Boom In The Night (Original Studio Recordings 1980-1983)
“… Myself and half of the other straight guys were in love with the butch dykes that ruled downtown with everything one could hope to have= real style, Intelligence, wry humor, poetry, good music and defiant politics.They did not become big because of their in-your-face lesbian sensuality. I remember when ‘Too many creeps’ came out, everyone was like ‘hey who are these women, and what are they saying?’. Sadly, heroin took its toll and members went downhill and destroyed a great band… Do yourself a favor. Buy this record. This is the real deal. …”
Holland Tunnel Dive
Bandcamp (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
Theoretical Girls – Theoretical Record (2002)
“… Theoretical Girls was a New York band formed by Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn that existed from 1977 to early 1979. They were among the most enigmatic of the late ’70s New York no wave bands, famous not so much for their music, since they released only one single during their brief existence, but because the group launched the careers of two of New York’s best known experimental music figures, composer Glenn Branca and producer Wharton Tiers. The latter played drums, the former guitar (as you might expect) in the quartet, which also featured keyboardist Margaret DeWys and vocalist/guitarist Jeffrey Lohn, a classically trained composer who, like Branca and so many others in the no wave scene, wasn’t interested in working with popular musical forms until inspired to do so by the explosion of punk rock. …”
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs (Video)
Punk Scrawled Artist 