No Wave is kind of hard to describe using actual words. One generally has to rely on onomatopoeia like skree and krang to effectively capture the chaos and dissonance that defined the music. But in his book No Wave Arlington music writer Marc Masters does a good job of characterizing the movement without resorting to a Thurston Moore-invented vocabulary. If you want to check it out in person, he’ll be doing a reading and signing tonight at Crooked Beat Records around 7 p.m. If that leaves you curious as to what No Wave music actually sounds like, Masters will also be DJing tonight at Marx Cafe (located at 3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW) from 10 p.m. to 3 am..

DC music writer Marc Masters‘ No Wave book has been out for a couple months now. The Village Voice reviewed it last November. And Washington City Paper’s Mark Athitakis reviewed it and interviewed Masters back in January.

I didn’t write about it when it came out for a lot of boring reasons, but I wanted to blog about the book a bit on a personal level. Masters is a friend and when he contacted me about using some of the No Wave-related interviews that I conducted in the late ‘90s I was more than happy to dig through my archives. This is less glamorous than it sounds. It involves moving my cat’s litter box, as well as numerous suitcases and various paint buckets and such.

The reason I had this material in the first place is because, when I first acquired and became enamored with the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation album—the central document in the noisy No Wave movement—I decided to write an article about it. I did this not because I was looking for something to write, but because I was curious and it didn’t seem like anyone had ever tackled the subject of this 1978 album—or at least not retrospectively.

Basically, what I was looking for was Masters’ book. It is every bit as exhaustive as I wanted my article about the No New York album to be but wasn’t. The New York-based post-punk movement called No Wave didn’t last long and didn’t leave many recordings behind (the big bands are MARS, DNA, and the Contortions). So, every 7-inch takes on the importance of an album—or even a sub-genre. This might smack of nerdy obsessiveness, but you just can’t cover the subject at length without getting into that level of detail.

Masters contributes to the forward-pushing British magazine The Wire, a publication that panned his book, saying that it’s too academic. It’s an odd charge coming from a review that’s much drier than the book itself. The main bone of contention seems to be the footnotes at the end of each chapter. I guess Masters could’ve included the attributions in the text, but he did so much research for this thing that it might’ve just bogged down the prose. Besides, Lester Bangs already dealt with this stuff, critically, in his usual blurtin’ fashion. A more thorough journalistic approach was overdue–and that’s just what Masters provides.

Arlington music writer Marc Masters, 39, is a regular contributor to the Wire, Pitchfork, Paper Thin Walls, Baltimore City Paper, and Signal to Noise. He’s also worked as an editor on recent Jeff Krulik films like The Psychedelic Secretary and Al Breon, Throat Vocalist. Black Dog Publishing has recently released his book on New York’s No Wave scene, reviewed in this week’s CP, and he’ll be celebrating with a couple of release parties. The first is this Sunday at 8 p.m. at George Washington University as part of the new-music series the Electric Possible. And next Friday, Feb. 8 Saturday, Feb. 9, he’ll take part in an event at the Velvet Lounge featuring Kohoutek and DJ sets by Mark C. of Live Skull.

Masters answered questions about his book via e-mail.

How did you first take an interest in No Wave music as a fan, and what prompted you to write a book about it?

I’ve been interested in No Wave since I first heard Lydia Lunch in the late ’80s. Going back into her early stuff with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks led me to No New York and all the bands from that period, though it was and still is hard to find a lot of the records. It really clicked for me when I got Mars’ 78+ CD on Atavistic (the Chicago label responsible for many crucial No Wave reissues). My tastes generally run towards the noisy side of rock, from the Dead C to Merzbow to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but I love punk and new wave too. Mars bridged that gap, in a totally uncompromising way. Their stuff still sounds challenging today, which is kind of amazing when you consider that most “movements” from the ’70s and ’80s sound less unique now because so many bands since have re-used the ideas. No Wave has somehow maintained its originality through three decades of ancestry.

As far as what prompted me to write the book, Black Dog approached me about writing a book about another subject, but for various reasons that fell through. They mentioned they had been considering doing a No Wave book for a while, and I jumped at the chance.

No Wave often seems to be conflated with the larger New York punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. What were the key distinctions?

There were a lot of overlaps and similarities–the line is blurry at best. The simplest difference is that Punk, as radical and rebellious as it was, was still steeped in rock and blues. Whereas the No Wavers didn’t want to modify musical rules, they wanted to discard them. Punk bands certainly had members who weren’t technically adept, but that was much more common with No Wavers, many of whom wanted to be artists but found music a more exciting medium for their ideas. So in that way No Wave was rebelling against Punk, especially in the way the Punk bands were getting bigger and signing to major labels and so on. But No Wavers were also friends with Punk groups and supported by them–Patti Smith offered to release the first Mars single, Suicide were mentors to Lydia Lunch and James Chance, etc. In a way you could say No Wave tossed out the last few rock rules that Punk had hung onto. So in that way, No Wave was both a rebellion against Punk and the logical extension of Punk (the art of Suicide, the nihilism of Richard Hell and the Voidoids, etc.)

You obviously tracked down a lot of key people for interviews in this book, though a few people are missing from the conversation–Brian Eno most notably. Were there other people you had hoped to track down for the book? Were there people you were surprised were willing to speak about it?

Just for the record, Brian Eno’s management told us he wasn’t doing any interviews in 2007. I of course would’ve loved to talk to him. In terms of other people: if I had had more time and space, I would’ve spoken to John Lurie and Glenn O’Brien, and some other filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo. I wasn’t particularly surprised that any specific person was willing to talk, though it was nice to track down Charles Ball of the Lust/Unlust label, as many people I spoke to hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years. But I was generally surprised that no one declined or was even resistant. Given the attitudes in No Wave and the way many of the figures like Lunch and James Chance treated the press at the time, I figured some of them would be wary of how they were portrayed, or bitter about it, or tired of being lumped into a movement, etc. But each and every interviewee was incredibly talkative and forthcoming, and they all seemed really pleased to speak about the time period. I think that even though the attitudes at the time were somewhat nihilistic, they were also very passionate, and I think the participants on the whole look back fondly on that time, when they were all excited to be doing music and films together.

What interested you in getting Weasel Walter to write the introduction?

When Black Dog first mentioned the idea of the book, I immediately contacted Weasel, who has long been a really tireless researcher and collector of all things No Wave. At one point he toured the country with his collection of rare No Wave videos, and he has done this all strictly out of fandom and passion for the music. I really couldn’t imagine doing the book without his input and approval. Many people had suggested to him that he should write a No Wave book, but he didn’t want to, even though he’s a great writer himself. But he was more than happy to help me, and his assistance and expertise were invaluable. I visited him in Oakland and pored over his collection of music and especially magazines ­ his collection of New York Rocker issues was total gold, as those are very hard to find, and there were No Wave-related articles in nearly every issue. Over the course of writing the book, he answered a million of my questions, and went through innumerable rounds of proofreading on tight deadlines. In a way I consider him the co-author of the book, and I felt his name had to be on the cover. So a foreword was a perfect way to include his voice in the book alongside his research and assistance. I also think his foreword is really funny and captures the essence of both No Wave and his work in keeping its memory alive.

How crucial were the New York critics at the time to the scene? They have a lot of colorful observations in the book, but did their writing bring people to the shows and bolster the scene?

That’s hard to say–no one directly stated that the critics bolstered the scene. But it seems impossible that they didn’t ­ I can’t imagine that many people outside of the bands themselves would’ve heard about No Wave if it wasn’t for New York Rocker, The Soho Weekly News, East Village Eye, and, surprisingly, The Village Voice and The New York Times, both of whom covered No Wave a lot more often than I would’ve expected. I also got the sense that a few of the writers, especially Roy Trakin, wrote so often about this music and interviewed the bands so frequently that they were like de facto scene advisors. Roy’s ideas and support had to boost confidence in what they were doing, and maybe even make them think differently it and its value.

How much legwork was involved in digging up some of the archives you feature in the book?

In terms of the text sources, the majority of it came from two places: Weasel’s New York Rocker collection (and a few issues housed at the rare book room of the NYU library), and the archives of the publications mentioned above, all of which are housed on microfiche at the New York Public Library. In terms of the pictures and illustrations, those were primarily acquired by my editor Ziggy Hanaor and the research staff of Black Dog. I helped point them to people and places to find images, but they did most of the work. We were lucky to have some great photographers like Catherine Ceresole and David Godlis give us their images. Flyers, ads, and other ephemera often came from the musicians and filmmakers themselves, who were incredibly generous in supplying material.

The documentary Kill Your Idols makes an argument for bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gogol Bordello, and Black Dice being inheritors of the No Wave scene, but you choose to end the book around the time of Sonic Youth’s early works, and don’t really speculate about No Wave’s influence beyond the early ’80s. What do you think No Wave has influenced today?

I considered including a section on No Wave descendents, but ultimately felt it would date the book. Also, No Wave had a pretty definite end, even if its influence didn’t. It was a clear product of the times in terms of it fermenting in New York in the late ’70s, and without that element, you can’t really call a band No Wave. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t living in abandoned buildings, siphoning electricity off of lampposts.

As to who No Wave has influenced, that’s hard because the bands really didn’t sound alike. It’s hard to imagine a band sounding like all four bands on No New York. I think some recent bands got called “No Wave” because they were somewhat similar to the second-wave bands like ESG and Bush Tetras, who themselves were really No Wave descendents, not actual No Wave bands in terms of time period.

Personally, I do feel some of the same rush I get from Mars and DNA in some of the noisy New York bands now. I specifically hear it in Sightings and Mouthus, both of whom use dissonance and abstraction to create abstract, challenging rock music. Both use extreme guitar noise and harsh rhythms in a way similar to DNA; I can imagine Arto Lindsay’s guitar would sound like that of Mark Morgan of Sightings, had Arto stayed on the No Wave path up to now.

Speaking of staying on the No Wave path, I would also include Dial, a band that includes Jacqui Ham from No Wave group Ut. They are really noisy and uncompromising, and even though many of the No Wavers are doing great music now, I think Jacqui is the only person from the original scene who is still making something as challenging today as she was back then.

Byron Coley and Thurston Moore have a No Wave book of their own coming out in June. Excited? Worried? Feeling competitive?

I’m excited! Of course, when I first heard about their book, I was intimidated a bit. Byron Coley is my favorite rock writer; I used to read him in Forced Exposure and Spin religiously. His stuff was like poetry, and certain lines of his rang in my head for years. One of my biggest thrills came when he wrote the liner notes for a record I released back in 1994. So I didn’t think I could match him, but I also knew that he and Thurston were there during No Wave, and would most likely be providing an insider’s perspective. Whereas my book might be more like a primer. So it seems to me that there is definitely room for two No Wave books, and while it’s an odd coincidence that they are happening so close together, I think it’s good for both books. It seems like No Wave’s time has come again in that sense. I definitely can’t wait to see their book.

The year is almost over and I do love lists, so I thought I’d throw some favorites up on BPB. Here’re my top five live shows of 2007, in no particular order:

Torche at the Black Cat
This poppy alt-metal band was every bit as substantial as its records imply, and heavier than most of its peers—which is saying a lot.

Boris at the Black Cat
The only act I saw this year that brought more heft was the Japanese psych-metal trio Boris (guitarist Wata pictured), which augmented itself with Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara. Never before have I felt so completely bathed in awesomeness, not to mention bass. This was some kind of personal pinnacle.

Leos Janacek’s Jenůfa at the Kennedy Center

Tim Page pretty much nailed it in the Post. Here’s the conclusion to his review:

The production [of the Czech composer’s great 1904 opera], which was first performed at the English National Opera last fall and then brought to Houston before coming here, is already famous. And rightly so: I cannot imagine a more affecting and appropriate “Jenufa.” The updating to the present day seems utterly natural, without any directorial affectation, and such time-tested theatrical gestures as the throwing of a chair or the smashing of a window here take on the painful immediacy of body blows. This is great music drama. Whether you end up “liking” it or not, you will never forget it.

John Abercrombie Quartet at Blues Alley
I only caught the first set, which had a more ragged, aggressive vibe than the guitarist’s excellent latest, The Third Quartet. That record, like the two ECM discs that came before it, documents what is without a doubt one of the best stealth bands in jazz.

Alex Ross at Politics and Prose
Not a live set, per se, but Ross was more entertaining than most live bands I see. He read from The Rest Is Noise, his new book about 20th century classical music, and, via laptop, played selections from Stravinsky and Reich, among others (Bjork, too, got the invisible jukebox treatment). He’s a generous guy in print, and even more so in person.

Even as a college student who loved jazz biographies but hadn’t quite grasped the mechanics of prose, I could tell that many of the books about John Coltrane left something to be desired. One sentence that sticks in my mind was intended, if I remember correctly, to explain his dental problems: “Coltrane loved hoagies!”

What the selection of Coltrane books lacks in quality it more than makes up in quantity. A search of the Library of Congress catalog yielded no less than 13 books with the legendary saxophonist’s full name in the title. And that can’t be everything, because the same search in Amazon’s books database gives me 3,177 hits.

So, while it’s hard to get excited about yet another Coltrane bio, it is nice to see New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff tackling the subject, because, well, it’s nice to see him tackling just about any subject. The guy’s writing—the way he describes the actual sound of his subject matter—is a model of clarity. His previous book, The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, is as essential as the records he writes about. And, though I have yet to crack open my copy, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound seems as if it is a worthy follow-up.

The one review I’ve read thus far, which calls it a “not-quite” bio, includes Ratliff’s tantalizing critique of a certain portion of Coltrane’s present-day fan base:

“Believe this: there is a type of free-jazz record collector–in fact, after punk, part of an increasingly flourishing breed–who does not necessarily think of Africa when he hears a Coltrane album like Expression [1967]. Having come through punk, Japanese noise, and electro-acoustic improvisation, he may just like it because it sounds extreme and nonnegotiable.”

It’s one thing to like or dislike Coltrane’s noisy late-period stuff, but it’s quite another to appreciate it (just see his piece on Interstellar Space from Jazz: A Critic’s Guide…) and still be able to explain its pitfalls and the pitfalls of the culture that surrounds it. Coltrane tends to attract the true believers, which is one reason I’ve had trouble listening to his music the past few years, but not always those who can deal with the towering figure in an intellectually honest fashion.

Let’s hope this is the final word on Coltrane. Ratliff deserves the honor. Plus, it would be nice to go to the jazz shelf in a bookstore and see some less-explored topics.

Dear Sting,

I am in receipt today of a copy of your book, Lyrics by Sting, which was sent to me via your public-relations proxies at the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. I’m was quite struck by your efforts to not only create an index of first lines to all of your songs (”Free, free, set them free”; “Oh! Demolition, demolition”), but to write explanatory notes for many of them. I’m relieved to know that “So Lonely” is indeed about feeling lonely, that “Brand New Day” is about optimism, that the lyrics to “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” “weren’t trying to be coherent,” and that “Fields of Gold” is about the “inherently sexy” barley fields that surround the giant castle in which you live.

You tell so much of yourself! “Seeing a wild creature as beautiful as a fox always takes my breath away,” you write of one song. You explain that you were laying in a garden with your beloved and watching the skies when you thought of the key lines to “King of Pain”:

I turned to Trudie. “There’s a little black spot on the sun today.”

She waited expectantly, not really indulging the mood but tolerant.

“That’s my soul up there,” I added gratuitously.

Is there lead in the paint over at Castle Sumner, Sting? Just asking.

I guess I’m not entirely surprised that your book reveals you as a pretentious ass, but I confess I’m disappointed at how much your commentaries ruin your few good songs. “Message in a Bottle,” I learn, was helped to fruition by your dog. “He [the dog] would stare at me with that look of hopeless resignation dogs can have when they’re waiting for their walk in the park. Was it that hopeless look that provoked the idea of the island castaway and his bottle? I don’t know, but the song sounded like a hit the first time we played it.”

If you must continue writing songs, could please at least stop writing about how you wrote them? Thanks.

What book do Americans want to read about more than David Halberstam’s history of the Korean War but less than Karrine Steffans‘ memoir of her sexual exploits?

Why, it’s Motley Crue guitarist Nikki Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star; probably because it will contain the best of both worlds– true stories of cold, hard suffering, and stories about STDs.

The recovering addict’s tell all book recently appeared sandwiched in between Halberstam and Steffans on a New York Times list of nonfiction releases that received the most advance orders in August.

As a bonus, the book also comes packaged with The Heroin Diaries soundtrack, a CD of new music by Sixx and his compatriots under the name Sixx: A.M.–which is why you might favor Sixx’s heart-wrenching story of drugs, music, and personal agony over fellow guitarist Eric Clapton’s, whose Clapton: The Autobiography appears two notches lower on the list.

Ironically, Halberstam might be dead, but his book is possibly the only one mentioned here that isn’t ghostwritten.

In October Da Capo Press, publishers of this book among many other fine music-related tomes, will release Best Music Writing 2007, edited by Robert Christgau. The book, we’re happy to report, features one of our own: among the pieces that made the cut is “Multiple Personality Disorder,” a piece on irrepressible local MC Multiple Man written by contributor and former staff writer Sarah Godfrey.

Two City Paper contributors made the longlist for pieces in other outlets: Nick Green’s “Invisible Oranges,” which ran in Decibel, and Ben Westhoff’s “Private Enemy,” which ran in the Village Voice.

On Sept. 4 Akashic Books will publish Silent Pictures, a collection of photos by Pat Graham that documents the D.C. rock scene in the ’90s, and also features acts like Modest Mouse, Bikini Kill, and the Shins. (Akashic makes sense as the publisher of choice: it was founded by Girls Against Boys‘ Johnny Temple.) It’s a fun nostalgia trip for anybody who was paying attention to indie rock in the ’90s, or who just wants to learn what the fuss was all about. Graham spent much of the decade in D.C. (he now lives in London), and the book has a few casual, relaxed shots of iconic indie-rock musicians at the time–Unrest in a Bethesda yard in 1993, the Make-Up strolling through foggy London in 1997. But Silent Pictures is mostly made up of band photos like the one above, of Fugazi at St. Stephen’s Church in 1992–serious and intense action shots that expose Graham’s knack for capturing musicians at their fiercest, vein-popping-est moments. (On the same page as that MacKaye shot is one of Ian Svenonius flailing on the Black Cat stage in 1993 and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in San Francisco in 1994, when she was in Excuse 17. Elsewhere is a shot of Lou Barlow hoisting his guitar in such a way that makes the mope look suprisingly, impossibly badass.)

In her afterword to the book, Cynthia Connolly notes that Graham often had trouble getting his due:

Pat was always the nice guy. He was constantly helping people out, taking photos, giving photography advice to people like me. When he started getting all these jobs shooting photos for bigger magazines, he had problems, as do most photographers, with getting paid and receiving credit for his work. One year, for a gift, I letterpressed him some business cards with big words that said, PHOTO CREDIT: PAT GRAHAM.

Graham will be in D.C. to discuss the book on Sunday, September 23, at 6 p.m. at the Dupont Circle Olsson’s.

Photo used with permission of Akashic Books.

Fiction writers seldom get rock right. Perhaps it’s because they aim for the bleachers—you know, like Cameron Crowe’s Stillwater, the Almost Famous band that was Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, and Skynyrd rolled into one. Somehow, in trying to achieve too much, most writers don’t achieve anything at all. William Gibson, though, he’s different. In his new novel, Spook Country, the post-science fiction novelist gets at something substantial.

Here, Hollis Henry, the former lead singer from the Curfew (terrible name, I know), is asked by Alberto, a geo-hacking, culture-jamming, Wired-type artist, where the band broke up:

“She looked him in the eye and saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew’s fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today, aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With the increasingly temporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably serious. She didn’t know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying.”

What I like about this quote is that Gibson, who was born in 1948, nails the granularity and fractionalization of today’s music culture. The Internet has allowed us to bury ourselves inside our own Curfews to the point where few of us seem to realize how inchoate things have become. To borrow a term from Robert Christgau, there is no monoculture anymore. For those of us who want to at least understand the place and appeal of all the Curfews of the world—even if it’s the most surface understanding—the landscape is more treacherous than ever. Any good music critic has been Alberto, with the “deep otaku focus.” (Anyone heard the new Baroness? It totally rules, dude!) But there’s a difference between being that guy and being that guy and knowing which Ravel or U2 record to recommend.