Masters — No Wave

Author: Marc Masters
Title: No Wave
Year: 2007
Type: Book (Black Dog Publishing; foreword by Weasel Walter)

Marc Masters wrote his history of no wave as a working critic rather than a former participant — a Pitchfork and Wire byline who co-wrote Pitchfork’s experimental-music column The Out Door and later published High Bias (2023), a history of the cassette tape.¹ The distance shows in the book’s central decision: where the scene’s veterans police the borders of what counted, Masters draws the map wide. His no wave has a prehistory in Suicide and Richard Hell, a core in the four No New York bands, and a periphery the insiders’ canon excludes: near-misses like Red Transistor, the no wave filmmakers, a chapter on public-access television, and descendants running to Sonic Youth.² The jacket compresses his subject into two sentences: “the ultimate anti-movement. Its bands consisted of untrained artists looking to explode rock and disappear before the smoke cleared.”³

The counter-argument arrived within months. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley published their own No Wave (Abrams, 2008), an oral and pictorial history with an introduction by Lydia Lunch, and drew the map at its narrowest — in Moore’s words, “We needed a cutoff point, and we cut it off as soon as anybody plays any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll.”⁴ Moore himself described Masters’s book: it “takes sort of a different tack,” covering the same interviews and history but “following how the recordings document the scene.”⁵ The two books are the scene’s boundary war in print. The insiders end the story in 1980, before their own later bands can claim descent; the critic follows the noise into its afterlives.

Record Collector’s Kris Needs reviewed it as the scene’s missing narrative: “Invaluable photos and flyers, plus chapters on public access TV and local movie-makers, bolster a graphic, gutter-level alternative to the recent Soul Jazz tome, with Masters’ engaging turn of phrase adding much to this little-told story” — while docking it for dealing with ESG “rather swiftly.”⁶ On the shelf it sits as the connected narrative beside Moore and Coley’s scrapbook, the one volume holding the scene’s music, film, and television wings in a single argument.

Key contributions

• The wide map: no wave told as a braid of bands, filmmakers, and public-access television.
• The recordings-first method: the scene reconstructed through what got taped.
• The interview base: new interviews across the four No New York bands and the contemporaries the Eno record excluded.
• The descendants claim: the noise line drawn forward to Sonic Youth.

See also

• No wave — the scene this book informs; the festival and the fight over the record live there
• CBGB scene — the cohort no wave formed against; the Eno signing story lives there
• Mutant disco — the other exit: the scene’s players defecting to the dance floor

Footnotes

1. Masters’s bylines (Pitchfork, The Wire, the Washington Post, NPR, Bandcamp Daily) and The Out Door per his UNC Press author page and NPR contributor page; High Bias (UNC Press, October 2023) per its publisher page (all accessed August 2026). ↩

2. The book’s span — the Suicide/Hell prehistory, the four core bands, Red Transistor among the near-misses, the filmmakers, and the Sonic Youth descendants — per Google Books’ description; the public-access chapter per Kris Needs’s Record Collector review, March 2008 (both accessed August 19, 2026). Black Dog Publishing, 205 pages, ISBN 9781906155025. ↩

3. Publisher’s jacket copy, verbatim per the book’s AbeBooks listing (accessed August 2026). ↩

4. Moore and Coley’s No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976–1980 (Abrams, 2008) and the Lunch foreword per its Goodreads page; Moore verbatim per his June 2008 conversation with Ben Sisario (both accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

5. Moore verbatim per the same Sisario conversation (accessed August 19, 2026). ↩

6. Verbatim per Needs’s review, Record Collector issue 347 (accessed August 19, 2026), which also notes Certain General is ignored entirely. ↩