Cancel all plans for the rest of the month if you’re a fan/worshipper of avant-garde composer and saxophonist John Zorn: you may have missed his 60th birthday jam at his East Village venue, The Stone (see above video for 30 seconds of him performing with Fred Frith), but worry not: a cavalcade of events will celebrate the pillar of the downtown music scene, starting with a week and a half of movies he curated for Anthology Film Archives.
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ikue mori
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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