No wave

Punk → No wave

Periodc. 1977–1982

Locationdowntown Manhattan, New York

Genres

Post-punkNoise rockPunk jazzMutant disco

LinksRYM

On August 8, 1977, in the dressing room at Max’s Kansas City, an eighteen-year-old guitarist named Lydia Lunch explained her band to a fanzine called FFanzeen. “We don’t play chords. I never played guitar before but I wrote all the music and all the words, except for the two that (Siegfried) wrote.” What was Teenage Jesus and the Jerks for? “The ultimate goal of the group is to annoy. We just want to show the other bands how bad they are.” Her influences? “I don’t even have a stereo or a record player. I don’t have a TV, and I hate bands and I hate music.”¹

Those answers are the scene in miniature. For roughly five years, a cluster of bands drawn from the SoHo art world and the East Village heard the Punk being professionalized a few blocks away as one more revival — “New Wave is dead wave,” Lunch told the same interviewer, “There’s no such thing because all the New Wave bands are re-hashed Who” — and built a music out of what they refused: chords, technique, melody, the audience’s comfort, and eventually their own bands.¹ “New York City was the devil’s dirty litter box,” Lunch said later, and its cheap ruined blocks let people who were not musicians afford to become bands.² Even the name was secondhand: the term is usually traced to drummer Jim Sclavunos’s No Magazine or to Lunch’s own pun on new wave, and the players themselves rarely used it. Thurston Moore, watching from the audience, gave the working definition: “They were called No Wave bands because they had nothing to do with anything. They weren’t New Wave, they were No Wave.”³ CBGB scene tells how punk’s cohort assembled, argued, and signed; this note follows the people who refused all of it.

Four refusals

Mars came first and moved slowest. Connie “China” Burg and Nancy Arlen met in 1975 at a dance workshop led by the minimalist choreographer Lucinda Childs, and the two women brought Mark Cunningham and Sumner Crane “together to talk about music” — a band convened before anyone in it could play.⁴ Mars refused the song’s remaining shape, and Burg later compressed the program into a question: “The evolution evolved into devolution: How far could we break from the vestiges of music but remain in the form?”⁵ That took daily labor: Cunningham remembered the quartet practicing “constantly, almost every day, jamming on new ideas and going deeper into our nature and sound,” and the question stayed open until the band ended.⁴

Teenage Jesus refused melody, and then duration. The band’s whole live set ran about ten minutes of very short songs, and Lunch described the sound herself: “It’s smell for the ear. It’s stench for the ears.”⁶ Two decades on she still measured the band against punk and found punk wanting — no wave, she decided, was “dealing more with personal insanity while English punk rock was dealing with social insanity,” and Teenage Jesus itself “was very anti-punk.”⁷

James Chance was the scene’s exception, a trained musician among the amateurs, and his target was the audience. “I first came to New York on December 27th 1975,” he recalled — from Milwaukee, where he had played saxophone in a band called Death, a childhood piano prodigy with three years at the Wisconsin Conservatory behind him and a taste for Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor abstractions that irked his teachers.⁸ He passed through Teenage Jesus on saxophone (he is the “(Siegfried)” of Lunch’s writing credit), then recruited on the club circuit: “Uh, I was in Teenage Jesus, but I’m starting my own band. I really like your hair,” he told Pat Place, who had studied painting and sculpture.⁹ The Contortions put free-jazz saxophone over slashing funk, a mix that came to be called punk jazz. Chance turned performances physical: at a 1978 benefit for X Magazine, by his own account, “I wanted to take them down a few pegs. I got mad and waded in.”¹⁰

DNA turned inexperience itself into the program. “I just had this notion that I wanted to do the most extreme thing I could and I also very consciously wanted to do something that was very different from Mars because we were all very close,” Arto Lindsay said of founding it in 1977 with keyboardist Robin Crutchfield.¹¹ Ikue Mori had arrived from Tokyo that year, a punk fan with no instrument; asked at a club what she did, she answered honestly and was drafted on the spot. “I just said I don’t do anything. ‘Okay,’ they said, ‘you can be our drummer!‘”¹² She built a style from memory — “It’s a very primitive way of drumming like the way you play with big sticks: this is called ‘taiko.’ That was a big influence on me” — and placed the band’s speed outside rock altogether: “DNA wasn’t as beat orientated as other bands. It’s more like thrash metal music than rock music—it was very fast and the songs were very short.”¹³ Her telling reaches past DNA: “Everybody started picking up instruments who weren’t musicians. Arto was a writer. Robin Crutchfield was an art/designer.” And: “You’d never hear them talking about technique or how to play – it was all about the idea.”¹³

BANDS at Artists’ Space

The founding event ran five nights in early May 1978 at Artists Space, a SoHo gallery, organized by the artists Michael Zwack and Robert Longo. Zwack’s poster dodged every genre word on offer; it said, simply, “BANDS.” Glenn Branca, who played it with Theoretical Girls, called the festival “the singular event of whatever no wave was,” and insisted the convergence had no plan behind it: “It all was completely coincidental. A lot of people all had the same idea at exactly the same time.”¹⁴ The last two nights stacked the future canon — DNA and the Contortions on Friday, Mars and Teenage Jesus on Saturday — and Friday produced a well-documented crowd story. Chance harassed a woman in the audience mid-set, the Village Voice critic Robert Christgau physically intervened, and the two scuffled at the stage. Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again retells the fight on page 146, and the Voice’s review of the book scored it in three words: “Xgau wins.”¹⁵

Brian Eno was in the audience that week, and what he did next drew the scene’s borders for good — CBGB scene carries the signing story; this is the fight over the cut. A stage that had held bands from both of downtown’s art worlds became a record with room for four, and the four were all from the East Village side. Lindsay admitted the lobbying decades later: “We very deliberately kept the No New York record to just those bands,” he said, calling it “a little bit of a turf thing” and adding, “we convinced Eno that Glenn Branca’s band shouldn’t be on the record.”¹⁶ Branca’s account matches from the losing end. “The problem was it seems that Eno had personally met the people on the East Village side, and they convinced him that the idea of four bands was better.” His faction, “coming more from the SoHo side of things, playing galleries and the openings of art shows in art spaces,” stayed off the canon’s founding document, and his verdict on the producer stands for the whole grievance: “He just sort of came sweeping in… treated us all like we were some kind of sociological project.”¹⁷

No New York itself was cut at Big Apple Studio — the Contortions’ four songs that June, by their guitarist’s chronology — and released on Antilles, Island’s jazz subsidiary, in 1978, sixteen tracks in all.¹⁸ Nobody in it liked it. Branca, excluded, heard flattening: “Eno took all four bands and made them sound like the same fucking thing.” Chance, included, denied the record was produced at all: “It was not produced at all! It was like a field document!” A period reviewer for Sounds found the consensus already formed: “I spoke to three of the bands and they all thought the album sucked and that producer Eno should have stayed home.”¹⁹ The complaint and the record’s value are the same fact. A scene built on shedding craft got a document instead of a production, and in a scene that left few recordings behind, the sixteen tracks did most of the surviving.¹⁹

Half the instruments

Burg and Arlen convened Mars, and Lunch owned Teenage Jesus outright. Mori drummed DNA through its whole life. Place played slide guitar in the Contortions, where Adele Bertei held down the organ. New bands kept the ratio. In 1979 Place started Bush Tetras with singer Cynthia Sley and bassist Laura Kennedy — three women and the drummer Dee Pop, with Bertei passing through the early lineup.²⁰ Their 1980 debut “Too Many Creeps”, on 99 Records, carried the scene’s sniping attitude to No. 57 on Billboard’s club chart.²⁰ Y Pants formed the same year from three artists working in other media — the photographer Barbara Ess, the painter Virginia Piersol, the filmmaker Gail Vachon — playing toy piano, ukulele, and a paper-headed Mickey Mouse drum kit over Casios; Branca recorded their debut EP for 99 in 1980.²¹ Ut, founded in December 1978 by Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham, and Sally Young, ran the idea to its limit: the three passed vocals, guitars, bass, and drums among themselves song by song, then took the practice to London in 1981.²²

The scholar Maura Edmond later put an argument under the pattern: in a scene this open — no credentials asked, no technique required — the usual gatekeeping had nothing to stand on. “Women visibly doing and being in creative roles begets more women in those roles,” she wrote. The filmmaker Vivienne Dick said it from inside: “Punk was a great liberating thing for women.”²³

Super 8

Dick’s presence points at the scene’s other half. No wave was a film movement as much as a band movement, shot on Super 8 and screened at the New Cinema, a short-lived storefront on St. Mark’s Place, with casts drawn from the bands. James Nares’s Rome ‘78 put Lunch and Chance in a costume-drama Rome; Dick’s She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) cast Lunch as a belligerent tormentor and Place as her brow-beaten friend, the power reversing until Place strangles her at the Coney Island Cyclone.²⁴ Dick filmed the scene from inside it: she played keyboards in Beirut Slump, Lunch’s simultaneous second band, alongside Sclavunos on drums.²⁵ Beth B, who made Black Box with Scott B, kept the wing’s aesthetic in one line: “It was all about abrasiveness and speaking the unspeakable.” Her venues were the same rooms the bands used: Black Box ran at Max’s Kansas City as, in her words, “the first film shown in a club,” and the clubs were the point. “No galleries could support that. It was the perfect venue for the films we were making.”²⁶

The clubhouse

By 1979 the scene had a room of its own. Tier 3 opened that spring at 225 West Broadway on the corner of White Street, and Hilary Jaeger, who started there as a waitress and ended up running the booking, filled its bills with the scene’s second act: DNA, 8 Eyed Spy with Lunch, Bush Tetras.²⁷ The building worked like the scene did, art stacked on music. “We had art shows and photography shows on the second floor,” Jaeger remembered. “Kiki Smith painted a mural there, and Basquiat painted not only the DJ booth but this incredible mural on the wall.”²⁷ The room lasted less than two years. An eviction notice arrived around December 1980, and Danceteria was pulling the crowd uptown; cutting the bands’ share of the door to 75 percent had already “created some rifts,” in Jaeger’s words. By then the regulars were scattering into the wider circuit of the Downtown scene — the Mudd Club, the lofts, the crossing with the Bronx.²⁷

On schedule

The bands ended the way they were designed to. Lunch stated the design outright: “You have a concept, you develop it, you execute it, you do the next thing. I never wanted to do anything longer than one album.”²⁸ Mars played its last show in December 1978 at Max’s Kansas City, the room where Lunch had explained the scene to FFanzeen. Beirut Slump stopped in June 1979, and Teenage Jesus ended with the decade. Chance took ZE Records’ money to the dance floor, into mutant disco. DNA held out until 1982.²⁹

Their players scattered in two directions, and the loud one ran through composition. Branca and Rhys Chatham built massed-guitar orchestras out of the volume the bands abandoned, and Moore played in both composers’ ensembles. He had watched the four bands as a newcomer to the city: “It wasn’t until I started seeing these bands who were my age playing that I knew the world was mine.” He admired “this built-in obstinance and this hilarious nihilism.”³⁰ In June 1981, at Kim Gordon and gallery director Josh Baer’s urging, Moore organized Noise Fest, nine nights at the sixty-capacity art space White Columns: Chatham and Branca played, Ut and Y Pants played, and an early Sonic Youth made its first live appearances — the Artists Space festival restaged for the next cohort, three years on. Sonic Youth’s and Swans’ debuts then arrived through Branca’s Neutral label.³¹ By 2004, when a reissue wave brought the catalog back, Slate’s reviewer could hear both exits at once: no wave “cleared the way for some of the most exuberant, exhilarating rock music of the century,” while the Contortions “prefigured the current crop of ‘dance rock’ acts.”³² The refusal was the work, and the work finished on time.

See also

• CBGB scene — the room next door, and the success these bands defined themselves against
• Downtown scene — the rooms after: where this scene’s survivors joined the crossing
• Mutant disco — the dance exit: ZE’s checkbook and the players who took it
• No Wave — the wide-map history, and the boundary war over who counted

Footnotes

1. All quotes verbatim per FFanzeen No. 2’s Teenage Jesus interview by Robert Barry Francos, conducted August 8, 1977, in the Max’s Kansas City dressing room, published October 31, 1977, reposted on Francos’s blog (accessed August 19, 2026). Lunch’s age and the lineup — Lunch 18, James Siegfried on saxophone, Reck 19 on bass, Bradley Field on drums — per the same interview. ↩ ↩²

2. Lunch verbatim per Amy Haben’s PleaseKillMe feature on the scene, December 15, 2015 (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

3. The coinage’s two candidate sources and the artists’ non-use per RYM’s scene description (accessed August 20, 2026); Moore verbatim per his Red Bull Music Academy “Musical Education” feature, January 2015 (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

4. Cunningham verbatim (“Later, in ‘75 sometime, Connie and Nancy met at a dance workshop led by [minimalist choreographer] Lucinda Childs and they brought me and Sumner together to talk about music”) and the near-daily practice per Vice’s Mars oral history by Jordan N. Mamone, September 28, 2015 (accessed August 19, 2026); the 1975 formation and the Crane/Burg/Cunningham/Arlen lineup per the band’s RYM page (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩ ↩²

5. Burg verbatim per the same Vice oral history (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

6. The ten-minute set per Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Wikipedia (“The band put together a ten-minute set of very short songs”; accessed August 20, 2026); “smell for the ear” verbatim per the FFanzeen interview (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

7. Lunch verbatim per her October 1997 Perfect Sound Forever interview by Jason Gross (accessed August 19, 2026) — “I think they were dealing more with personal insanity while English punk rock was dealing with social insanity.” ↩

8. Chance’s arrival quote, the Milwaukee band Death, and the conservatory years (the Monk/Taylor characterization is the article’s) per Mojo’s James Chance remembrance (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

9. The recruitment quote per the same Mojo piece (accessed August 19, 2026), in which Place recalls frequenting CBGB and Max’s nightly without saying where the approach happened; Place’s BFA in painting and sculpture per her Wikipedia article (accessed August 2026). ↩

10. Punk jazz as the Contortions-seeded offshoot per RYM’s scene description (accessed August 20, 2026); the X Magazine benefit quote per Mojo (accessed August 19, 2026), which pins Chance’s words to that 1978 event — a separate brawl from the Artists Space fight below. ↩

11. Lindsay verbatim per his November 1997 Perfect Sound Forever interview by Jason Gross (accessed August 19, 2026); DNA’s 1977 formation and Crutchfield’s 1977–78 keyboard tenure per the band’s RYM page (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

12. Mori’s 1977 arrival from Tokyo as a punk fan and the drafting quote per Huck’s Ikue Mori interview (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

13. The taiko, thrash-metal, and “picking up instruments” quotes per Mori’s Perfect Sound Forever interview (accessed August 19, 2026); the technique line per Huck (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩ ↩²

14. The five nights, early May 1978, and the Zwack/Longo organizing credit per No New York, Wikipedia (accessed August 19, 2026); the “BANDS At Artists’ Space” title, its deliberate genre-dodging, and both Branca quotes per his interview with Marc Masters, The Wire (accessed August 2026). ↩

15. The final-nights schedule per No New York, Wikipedia; the May 5, 1978 date, the harassment, and the scuffle per Weasel Walter’s Contortions history, part 3; Reynolds’s page-146 retelling and “Xgau wins” per the Village Voice’s review of Rip It Up and Start Again, February 2006 (all accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

16. Lindsay verbatim per Perfect Sound Forever (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

17. All three Branca quotes per The Wire’s Branca/Masters interview (accessed August 2026); the ellipsis in the “sweeping in” quote bridges the interview’s own text. ↩

18. Big Apple Studio, the Antilles release, and the four-by-four structure per No New York, Wikipedia (accessed August 19, 2026); the June 1978 dating of the Contortions session per Weasel Walter’s history (accessed August 19, 2026), which rests on that single source. ↩

19. Branca per The Wire (accessed August 2026); Chance per his September 2015 Vice interview by Zachary Lipez (accessed August 19, 2026); the Sounds reviewer as relayed verbatim by No New York, Wikipedia (accessed August 19, 2026); the scene’s thin recorded legacy per RYM’s scene description (“however, few left recordings behind”; accessed August 20, 2026). ↩ ↩²

20. Bush Tetras’ 1979 formation, the Sley/Place/Kennedy/Pop lineup, Bertei’s brief early membership, and “Too Many Creeps” (99 Records, 1980; No. 57 on Billboard’s club play chart) per Bush Tetras, Wikipedia (accessed August 2026). ↩ ↩²

21. Y Pants, Wikipedia (accessed August 2026) — the members’ professions, the toy instrumentation (“toy piano, ukulele and a paper-headed Mickey Mouse drum kit, augmented by electric bass guitar, Casio keyboards”), the 1979–1982 run, and Branca’s 1980 EP session for 99. ↩

22. Ut’s December 1978 founding and 1981 London move per Ut (band), Wikipedia (accessed August 2026); the instrument-trading per the band’s RYM page (accessed August 20, 2026), whose member roll lists each of the three on vocals, guitar, bass, and drums. ↩

23. Edmond verbatim per her “Deracination, Disembowelling and Scorched Earth Aesthetics: Feminist Cinemas, No Wave and the Punk Avant Garde,” Senses of Cinema, September 2016 (accessed August 19, 2026); the Dick line appears in the same essay, quoted there from a 2015 interview, so Edmond’s page is the carrier. ↩

24. The New Cinema storefront, the Super 8 medium, and Rome ‘78’s cast per No wave cinema, Wikipedia (accessed August 2026); She Had Her Gun All Ready’s casting and Cyclone ending per Edmond’s essay (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

25. Beirut Slump’s 1978–June 1979 run, Dick’s keyboards, and Sclavunos’s drums per the band’s RYM page (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

26. All Beth B quotes per Hyperallergic’s interview (accessed August 19, 2026), which places the Black Box screening at Max’s Kansas City — Lunch had introduced the Bs to the room. ↩

27. Tier 3’s address, spring 1979 opening, Jaeger’s waitress-to-booker arc, the DNA/8 Eyed Spy/Bush Tetras bookings, both quotes, the door-split cut, the eviction notice around December 1980, and the Danceteria competition per Perfect Sound Forever’s Tier 3 oral history (accessed August 19, 2026) — Jaeger ran the room’s booking, not its ownership. The venue anchors this note’s map pin; the scene itself had no single address. ↩ ↩² ↩³

28. Lunch verbatim per Perfect Sound Forever, 1997 (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

29. Mars’s December 1978 finale at Max’s per Vice’s oral history (accessed August 19, 2026); Teenage Jesus’s end-of-1979 dissolution per its Wikipedia article (accessed August 20, 2026); Beirut Slump’s June 1979 end and DNA’s 1982 end per the bands’ RYM pages (Beirut Slump, DNA, both accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

30. Moore’s quotes and his time in Branca’s and Chatham’s ensembles per Red Bull Music Academy, January 2015 (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

31. Noise Fest’s June 16–24, 1981 run, the roughly sixty-capacity White Columns space, Gordon and Baer’s urging and Moore’s organizing role, the Chatham, Branca, Ut, and Y Pants appearances, and Sonic Youth’s first live appearances per Noise Fest, Wikipedia (accessed August 19, 2026); the Neutral debuts per RYM’s scene description (accessed August 20, 2026). ↩

32. Philip Sherburne verbatim per “No Wave, Reissued,” Slate, June 2004 (accessed August 19, 2026), reviewing the DNA on DNA, Buy, and Lesson No. 1 reissues. ↩