Photo: Jasmine Hirst
It is well known that Lydia Lunch’s core competency is to shit on competencies and keep things simple: noise, music, stress. In her performances, photographs, and lyrics, on her records and concerts, The No Wave pioneer goes where not even the sleaziest tabloid would dare to go and regularly comes back with great art. For this reason, it’s only natural that her methods must be adapted to the purpose at hand. Her joint project with Weasel Walter is fittingly called Brutal Measures, and together they developed the commissioned work »No Wave and Beyond« for Pop-Kultur. Walter, a multi-instrumentalist, belongs to a generation of musicians who were born too late and who concern themselves with transforming the legacy of Lunch’s New York movement and adapting it to the pulse of the time. The No Wave historian met Lunch for the first time in 2012 for the project Retrovirus and, on this evening of the festival, will accompany her distinctive spoken word performance with all given (and decidedly brutal) measures.
»No Wave and Beyond«
When in doubt, Lydia Lunch has always been in favor of being against things. Fittingly, the movement she and her contemporaries built in late-1970s New York was called No Wave. Because punk didn’t go far enough in its break with rock'n'roll, Lunch and her kindred spirits pushed the abandoned genre to the extreme, i.e. until it was on its very head. From dressed-up jazz (James White and the Contortions) to exuberant guitar ensembles (Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca) to jarring anti-rock (DNA) to situationist performance art (Lunch's Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), No Wave overturned the conventions of the rock tradition more radically than ever and it sounded outrageously good in the process, exactly because it was never about euphony. But No Wave also became a genre of its own, in turn producing superstars like Sonic Youth or Swans. So where was it headed, and where is it heading now? Pop-Kultur seeks to answer these questions via a special commissioned work by Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter as well as a discussion and workshop (for the Nachwuchs programme) with them.