From the Archives: Noise Fest (1981) and Speed Trails (1983)
Founded in 1969, White Columns is New York’s oldest not-for-profit artist-run space, and has seen first exhibitions by such luminaries as Gordon Matta-Clark, Alice Aycock, William Wegman and, more recently, Ashley Bickerton, Sean Landers and John Currin. The new Director of White Columns, Matthew Higgs, describes ‘From the Archives’ as an occasional series that ‘reconsiders seminal (or simply forgotten) moments in White Columns’ 35-year history’.
Just off the main gallery a room has been given over to the archival ephemera of two key moments in the early 1980s’ post-Punk No Wave scene of downtown New York. Staged at the White Columns gallery, ‘Noise Fest’ (1981), organized by Thurston Moore and Josh Baer, evolved over nine consecutive nights and featured more than 40 performers, including Rhys Chatham, UT, Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth. Parallel to ‘Noise Fest’, an untitled exhibition of art by artists who are also musicians, was co-curated by Kim Gordon and Barbara Ess (of the band Y Pants). Evidence of an accompanying ‘Noise Fest’ fanzine organized by Ess was also on display: an early text by John Miller, a work by Richard McGuire (of the band Liquid Liquid) and a drawing by Kim Gordon.
Painted out in charcoal grey, the sombre tones of the gallery walls suggested an improvised Getty Museum meeting the stereotypical teenage bedroom. A series of handbills, yellowed press clippings and hand-corrected posters ring the walls, as black and white footage breathes moody life into ‘Speed Trials’ (1983), ‘five nights of music and performance from NYC and beyond’. On screen Mark E. Smith’s The Fall, all jangly guitars and hardened poetry, makes way for Sonic Youth, proto riot girl Lydia Lunch, Mofungo, seminal Goth Minimalists Swans and the early Punk hardcore of the Beastie Boys.
As band after band appears on stage, the post-Punk world of Manhattan spins out, across and into alternative territories. The short-lived (at least in title) No Wave music scene or sound – although it sought to deny overt definition – lay somewhere between Punk rock noise and New Wave exploration, characterized by the refusal of the traditional rock ‘n’ roll format of chords and chorus and the attempt instead to incorporate external influences such as free jazz, contemporary black music, Funk and Disco.
Some years earlier a similar event at New York’s Artists’ Space led to the Brian Eno-produced No New York LP (1978), seen by many as the first attempt to define the sound, or at least corral its leading protagonists: The Contortions, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars and DNA. Following suit, a cassette version of ‘Noise Fest’ was released on ZG Music, the music label of the legendary ZG magazine organized by Rosetta Brookes. Speed Trials was eventually released as a live album and became one of the best-selling independent records of its time, presumably because of the Beastie Boys’ ascendant fame from Punk rockers to Rap stars. As Eno himself noted, many of the more significant contributions to rock and avant-garde music have been made by ‘enthusiastic amateurs and dabblers’: the artist-run space has been historically key to many such moments.
‘From the Archives’ is also accompanied by a Xeroxed fanzine, The WC – operating as a coda to the project and organized by Higgs. It contains much, if not all, of the material on display, augmented by additional texts by Thurston Moore and interviews with Josh Baer and Tom Solomon,former directors of the gallery. As Baer describes, it was the art school crowd ‘making music in the same way that they approached making art’, and for a short while White Columns became a kind of ‘clubhouse for the art scene’ and associated musicians. As a result of ‘Noise Fest’ Baer started a record label – Neutral Records – with avant-garde guitarist and composer Glenn Branca. Neutral released Sonic Youth’s first album and the music of Swans, cementing the relationship between Philip Glass, Steve Reich and avant-garde composition through Branca to the No Wave, New Wave art rock scene.
It’s difficult to imagine such unregulated activity as ‘Noise Fest’ or ‘Speed Trials’ being tolerated in today’s Manhattan, where simply taking a drink on the street – let alone cranking up the sound system – is an arrestable offence. It is to be hoped that such activity still goes on within the city, perhaps now decamped to Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the far-flung corners of the five boroughs. The scene, that movable feast, has moved on, passed from Lydia Lunch through to Le Tigre, from Sonic Youth through to current bands Gang Gang Dance, Animal Collective and LCD Soundsystem.
Rather than full-scale archival rehabilitation, this slight yet historically charged presentation is expansive in suggestion. More than adumbrating a gesture, ‘From the Archives’ is to be viewed either as a full stop or as a platform, a signpost en route to continued activity. As Greil Marcus suggests in Lipstick Traces (1989), his record of the secret 20th century, if we can stop ‘looking at the past and start listening to it, [we] might hear echoes of a new conversation’.
