5 posts tagged “skronk”

I must stop beginning blog entries with "I must"--there's nothing like seeing identical openings stacked up in an RSS reader to point out a rut.  My last UK skronk entry covered Clock DVA and Biting Tongues, both from 1981.  Now we'll move on to Blurt, a three-piece band centered around Ted Milton's sax and vocal exhortations (he uses several vocal styles, not one of which could really be called "singing").  Milton started Blurt in 1980, with his brother Jake on drums and Peter Creese on guitar, in Stroud, Gloucestershire.  For audio illustration I have selected "Bullets For You"  from the 1984 album of the same name (and also from the Best of Blurt CD, as you can see):

Amazingly, Ted Milton is still at; though "The Last Blurt Tour" wrapped up in March, he did a tour of the Netherlands in April, and played a show in Paris just this past Sunday.  No sense in stopping if they'll still come to see you.

To wrap up this mini-survey of UK skronk we'll go north to Scotland and the no wave noise of Edinburgh's Fire Engines.  The Fire Engines stand out here by not having a saxophone, but their guitars approximate one throughout their body of work.  Singer/guitarist David Henderson went on to perform actual pop music in Win, then quirkier music in The Nectarine No. 9, and his new band is called The Sexual Objects,  From 1980, here is the Fire Engines' first single, "Get Up and Use Me" (as taken from the Lubricate Your Living Room LP):

Skronk is in the air: just last night Boing Boing did a post on No Wave, "a new photo and oral history book documenting the highly-influential art-punk scene in New York City from 1976-1980."  That's probably worth a read.  That period was just before my own divergence from the musical mainstream, which is why I caught on to the early-80s UK version rather than the earlier New York version.  Both locations were equally out of reach for me at the time anyway; being part of either scene was out of the question, but at least I got some vicarious enjoyment out of the records.

I must come to terms with the fact that a blog entry is not a book, so instead of a definitive history of skronk in the UK, here is a brief survey of it.  "Skronk" is a term attributed to Robert Christgau (by Lester Bangs) to refer to a certain kind of music being made in New York in the late 70s: bands bringing punk's do-it-yourself attitude (which does not necessarily mean "sloppy" but that was often the result) to new interpretations of jazz and funk, and of course rock.  The quintessential skronk album is the 1978 No New York collection compiled by Brian Eno for Antilles Records, featuring James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch), Mars, and D.N.A. (with Arto Lindsay).  "No Wave" is another term applied to roughly the same music (nice photo archive here). 

In England, Bristol band The Pop Group was an early proponent of the no wave melting pot, previously seen here.  Another early UK skronk band was Sheffield's Clock DVA, formed by Adi Newton after he quit The Human League (in their first incarnation as The Future) because of their emphasis on electronics.  (Ironic, then, that Newton would later transform Clock DVA into one of the purest electronic bands of the 80s and 90s.)  Clock DVA's first great album, 1981's Thirst, contains lots of saxophone wailing by Charlie Collins and scratchy guitar playing by Paul Widger, plus energetic if not quite nimble bass playing from the late, much-maligned Stephen "Judd" Turner.  It's more conventional than most US skronk, but there is a greater dynamic range (especially on the stately, measured "Impressions of an African Winter").  On occasion, though, they do work up quite a racket, as on "Piano Pain"--

(Great early album cover by design superstar Neville Brody.)  Newton decided to pursue a more accessible sound and fired the Thirst band, an unpopular move which nevertheless paid off, as the next Clock DVA album, Advantage, is one of the best of the decade.  Collins, Widger, and drummer Roger Quail stayed together as The Box (previously seen here) with new vocalist Peter Hope and bassist Terry Todd, producing an unsurpassed catalog of British skronk.

Meanwhile in Manchester, Biting Tongues were dishing out the skronk.  The band's origin is described on the Biting Tongues website:

Then came Tony Wilson's Factory Club (at the Russell Club in Hulme) offering an open invitation to experiment that was taken up when Ken Hollings, Howard Walmsley, Eddie Sherwood and a few others decided to make some noise to accompany their 16mm silent epic Biting Tongues. A further performance followed a few weeks later, when Colin Seddon and Graham Massey disbanded their Post Natals project and joined up. The film itself, a flashing series of negative images, became a memory; the name remained.

(Massey would later be a founding member of 808 State.)  Biting Tongues' first album, Don't Heal (also 1981), was the first record on the Beggars Banquet offshoot label Situation Two.  The vocals are mostly spoken recitations of found texts, often cut up in the grandest surrealist tradition.  Here is "You Can Choke Like That"--

More UK skronk on the way!

The posts I want to do keep getting bigger, and thus they are taking longer to prepare.  Coming soon will be a post on UK Skronk, but in the meantime, Mojack brings us some brand new skronk from the US.  Mojack is the current band of Greg Ginn (the guitarist from Black Flag and Gone and the founder of SST records) with Tony Atherton on sax and Mike Lopez on drums.  Skronk is a "term attributed to Robert Christgau by Lester Bangs in 1981′s ‘A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise’ referring to music of the late ’70s art-punk movement." (from skronker.com)  Meaning James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, D.N.A., etc.  I've been listening to lots of British skronk band The Box lately; they broke up over twenty years ago, but Mojack sounds like The Box all over again.  Minus the vocals, though; Peter Hope's singing was completely over-the-top and damn near nonsensical, but it humanized the music.  I like Mojack, but I think they could use a vocal focal point.  That's just my opinion, though, you can judge for yourself via this handy-dandy Mojack player:

Since I've put up two songs from Peter Hope's post-Box career, I should really put up something from the band that put him on the map.  (You know, my map.)  The Box was formed by the original ClockDVA instrumental lineup after being fired by bandleader Adi Newton; Peter Hope won the spot as their singer, and Terry Todd was recruited on bass.  They made quite the postpunk no-wave racket, summed up best by the first song on their first record, 1983's self-titled 5-song EP:

And I am continuing to work my way through the Nine Inch Nails back catalog; today it's been The Fragile.  Trent's never done much in the way of breakbeats, but The Fragile contains a killer breakbeat instrumental, the all-too-brief "Complication"-

One of the great lost records of my 80s music experience is an album by the Headhunters.  It was one of those records that we had at the campus radio station, and I played several cuts from it, but I never found a copy for myself.  I have a 12" single by them, "Wipe Out the Funk," but not the album.  It was a hard album to search for, too, because any search for Headhunters is flooded with Herbie Hancock results (either the album of that name, or records by the band from that album, who recorded sans Herbie as Headhunters).  To compound the problem, I didn't remember the title of the album I wanted.  But continued Googling paid off last month: there it was (entitled Industrial Warfare, released in 1983) in an archived entry on one of my favorite sharity blogs, Phoenix Hairpins.  So now I have a virtual copy, and it's so great to hear it again.  The Headhunters were clearly influenced by Killing Joke, and they even do them one better on a couple of tracks, such as the album opener, "Bright and Bloody"--

The Headhunters only released one LP and three singles, which Phoenix Hairpins has collected here.  My search for another Killing Joke-inspired band from the 80s, 1919, continues.  Killing Joke are, amazingly, still active, though their last album was kind of a mess.  With all the 80s revival bands imitating Gang of Four, The Cure, Duran Duran, and Joy Division, surely the field is ripe for a Killing Joke pretender or three.  I'm waiting...