Photo: Jasmine Hirst
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.