Bumming around Pitchfork today I saw excerpts from a forthcoming book by one of their staff writers (Marc Masters) about the origins of No Wave. Hopefully this book is to No Wave what Please Kill Me was to NY Punk.

When I was 16 or so, while a lot of my friends were getting into either punk, hardcore or the rave scenes me and a few friends discovered the No Wave scene by passing around a copy of the book Confusion is Next amongst us. We were all enamored with the descriptions of the albums, shows and anecdotes about Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, James Chance, DNA, Mars, Ut, The Swans, Bush Tetras & a slew of others. But this was like 1995 and we were teenagers so actually hearing these bands posed a problem! Most of this shit was not out on CD and the stuff that was wasn’t easy to track down. We were on like 24k modem connections and music file-sharing hadn’t really caught on, especially not with really obscuro shit. And finally tracking down vinyl, even on the internet was tricky (since we had no credit cards) and would have taken some serious months of saving and only eating school lunch!

We all set out to start our own No Wave bands based on the descriptions of what we expected it to sound like. We were finally able to procure a live DNA album, some used Swans CDs and Mars, Bush Tetras and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks compilations along the way early on. No Wave music and just the overall philosophies behind it were and still remain a huge artistic influence on me. I’m really glad that so much of that music is finally getting re-released and garnering the kind of attention the scene has gotten in the last 5 or so years. Maybe if I can figure out how to rip from audio cassette I’ll make a Doombox from those old band demos, which listening back to now over a decade later really weren’t all that bad!