Photo: Jasmine Hirst
When Lydia Lunch walked onto the stages of the world, she did so shouting all the while. As co-founder of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, she helped to launch the No Wave movement and, in doing so, showed punk what was missing from its supposed revolution against the tradition of rock. Since then, she hasn’t gotten any quieter—only more versatile. With her menacing whispers, violent grumbling, and dust-dry understatement, Lunch can boast a vocal repertoire that adapts at the very most to the subject matter of her performances but not to much more. Accordingly, this repertoire can’t be taught in the classic sense; rather, it must be experienced. In the workshop »From the Page to the Stage«, Lunch will offer 15 participants of Pop-Kultur’s Nachwuchs programme exactly that experience, over two intensive days. The results will be presented in public on August 17th at the Panda Theater in the Kulturbrauerei.
»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.