arto lindsay

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Four Sick Shows: No Wave Now and ‘Quickly Graying’ Noise Rock

(Image via Trans-Pecos/ Arto Lindsay)

(Image via Trans-Pecos/ Arto Lindsay)

Arto Lindsay Noise Quartet, Celestial Shore, Zula
Tuesday February 16, 8 pm at Trans-Pecos: $10

Arto Lindsay, the tireless no-wave guitar legend who’s been called “the perfect New Yorker” (by the New Yorker, no less), is well on his way into his 60s. And it’s true that DNA spent only a brief time on this earth, shredding weirdness at Max’s Kansas City and closing out the B side of Brian Eno’s nothing less than perfect glimpse of that particular scene, No New York (1978). But the dude is still doing all sorts of wonderful and new things in the New York music scene that keep him relevant and has been, pretty much without stopping, since the ’70s. Last fall, Lindsay showed the kids what was up when he played with seminal Brooklyn weirdos PC Worship, and in 2014 he dropped a compilation spanning his career (Encyclopedia of Arto) which, by many accounts, was all too modest and left us drooling for more.

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Week in Shows: a No Wave Takeover at Trans-Pecos, Plus a Night of Brutal Industrial Noise to Test Your Limits

(Flyer via Trans-Pecos / Other People)

(Flyer via Trans-Pecos / Other People)

Other People Residency
Tuesday Dec. 8th through Friday Dec. 11th at Trans-Pecos

Our favorite no wave loudmouth Lydia Lunch will play at Trans-Pecos on Friday with her band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, part of a full week of music curated by Other People. The “serial label,” founded by Nicholas Jarr drops a new rotation of new and nostalgic music each week, and they’ve just put out a stellar collection of the band’s live recordings, Live 1977 – 1979 (which you can stream for free right now over yonder). It’s pretty much the best thing happening this week, and it’s happening all week. Truly, it’s one of those events that helps us justify paying astronomical rents to live in this city.

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PC Worship’s Basement Hysteria is Out, Justin Frye Guides Us (Partway) Through the Haze

"Basement Hysteria," PC Worship's new EP is out on Northern Spy Records (Via PC Worship/ Bandcamp)

“Basement Hysteria,” PC Worship’s new EP is out on Northern Spy Records (Via PC Worship/ Bandcamp)

Let’s face it, this coming weekend is pretty much guaranteed to be a wash of regret and sorrow. But there’s a light at the end of this vortex of darkness (just the first in a long series of them throughout the holiday season): PC Worship‘s Basement Hysteria release party is happening at Palisades next week. We first spoke (extensively, too) with Justin Frye back in September when the band’s new release was still a fairly far-off thing. Now that the four-track EP is finally out we had some new questions for Mr. Frye. (Oh, and don’t go straight to the disappointed sighs– Basement Hysteria may be an EP, but it clocks in at over 40 minutes.)

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Nightclubbing: DNA at Mudd Club, 1979

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong are sifting through their voluminous archive of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library. This week: a look back at DNA.

“How dare you play your guitar like that! Don’t you know that’s the same instrument that Eric Clapton plays?” Audience members were often quick to share their dissatisfaction with the screeching dissonance that Arto Lindsay wrung from his instrument during a feverish set. So whenever his no wave band DNA finished up, Lindsay was sure to pack up quickly.

“It was the music I liked to play,” Lindsay says. “I thought the more far out you were, the more likely you were to be hailed as the next Jimi Hendrix. I just wanted to see what music would do to people. “
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Nightclubbing | Lounge Lizards, 1979

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Lounge Lizards (Photo: Pat Ivers)

We finally shot the Lounge Lizards at CBGBs in the spring of 1979, just a few months before we bought our first color camera. Good thing, too. They just looked better in black and white.

Some called what they played fake jazz but we loved their sinuous stew of no wave, be-bop and cinematic soundscape that Robert Palmer of The New York Times famously described as “somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Hermann.”
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