Sonic Youth originated in No Wave, a movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s that reduced rock to minimal gestures and explored extremes of noise. In the mid-1980s, Sonic Youth’s style changed ...as they began to incorporate guitar parts that were reminiscent of 1970s hard rock. But their experimental tendencies persisted through this change, because they overlaid the parts in ways that created incongruity and tweaked hard-rock stylistic features in order to create dissonance or tonal conflict. Sonic Youth’s strategies for twisting hard-rock norms into clashing harmonies often follow one of two recurring types. The first,
tonic divergence
, occurs when separate lines have phase-mismatched tonic harmonies. The second,
intervallic dissonance
, occurs when instrumental lines are arranged in order to highlight harshly dissonant intervals or chromatic clusters. In many songs, their dissonant counterpoint works in tandem with their characteristic noisy guitar timbres by occurring in alternation, forcing listeners to continually re-evaluate how they perceive a song as a standard rock track. The analyses show how the band continued to experiment within popular style and created types of dissonance that influenced 1980s–1990s guitar-based indie rock.
This article outlines the utility of the term ‘post-punk polymath’ to describe the sustained multi-medium and intertextual artistic practice engaged in by artists of the post-punk scene on New York’s ...Lower East Side in the late 1970s. Through the example of Kembra Pfahler and a detailed analysis of Lydia Lunch, it discusses the unique environment of artistic collaboration in the city that was sustained by the subcultures that occupied the dilapidated neighbourhood of the Lower East Side. In this countercultural interzone, which flourished because of, rather than despite New York’s municipal degradation, Lunch remembers that ‘everyone was doing everything’. As both Lunch and Pfahler are artists whose practices encompass music, visual art, installation, literature and film, it is only by understanding their work across a multitude of artistic mediums that a sense of their wider artistic strategy can be arrived at. As I argue throughout, they are not musicians who also happen to produce film or installation, but post-punk polymaths engaged in a unified practice sustained and encouraged by the subcultural environment that they matured within.
Between 1983 and 1989, as the two German pop music industries continued to license one another’s properties, and Amiga continued releasing American and British records, five long-playing records were ...released by independent labels based in Western Europe that contained music recorded in the German Democratic Republic. They were then smuggled out of the country rather than formally licensed for release abroad. Existing outside the legal framework underlying the East German record industry, and appearing in small pressings with independent labels in West Germany and England, these five tamizdat LPs represent intriguing reports from the margins on the mutual entanglement of the two Germanies’ pop music industries. Closely examining these LPs’ genesis and formal aspects, this article explores how independent East German musicians framed their own artistic itineraries with respect to (or in opposition to) the commercial pop circuit, as they worked across borders to self-release their music.
In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, the Raincoats reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working ...with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists. In this short book – the first on the Raincoats – author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group’s audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called “wonderfully classic scripture.” Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of the Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself to explore this album’s magic, vulnerability, and strength.
Abstract
1976-1994 marks a distinctive period in Mancunian popular music history. During this period, biblical language was used extensively. However, such use is markedly different at the beginning ...and end of our period. At the beginning, biblical language was used in the name of dark introspection, cynical observation, nihilism and pessimism; by the end, such language was largely being used in the name of self-congratulation, self-importance, hedonism, and (largely misguided) optimism. Social, cultural, economic and biographical reasons are given for this shift.
Sputnik Baby Ian Haig
Fibreculture journal,
12/2009
15
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this article, Haig argues that UK New wave, post punk pop band Sigue Sigue Sputnik made an important and undervalued contribution to the history or remix and sample culture in the mid 1980’s. ...Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s overloaded cyberpunk image and album 'Flaunt it' are discussed, along with discussions of the role of Sigue Sigue Sputnik as a sampler of pre existing music, styles and iconography.
Adrian Martin Adrian Martin
Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique,
12/2011
22
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Melbourne, 1980. Amidst the post-punk arts scene that animated the city at that time, the artist-writer Philip Brophy reviewed, in the first issue of the small-run, photocopied magazine New Music ...published by the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, a video performance/screening by a local duo, Robert Randall and Frank Bendinelli (known collectively as Randelli). I have never forgotten this line from the review: to the remark by Bendinelli that the collaborative process is "a continual fight ... we're both either com-promising or attacking each other's throats," Brophy responds: "But that's good because it means that the object hasn't got an artistic intention but it's just got artistic tension." For what Brophy said there - deftly summing up an entire artistic and subcultural sensibility - was not an especially Romantic or Utopian view of the collaboration between two artists.
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