The 'No New York' album, originally released back in the 
post-punk, disco-funk era of 1978, charted a course that 
changed the direction and validity of rock music to this day. 
For better or worse, the deconstructionist tendencies put forth 
by these American experimenters to their three-chord 
counterparts in the British punk scene, opened the previously 
restrictive door for several generations, and thousands of 
emerging rock wannabes, to do their own thing. I should 
know, because I was there, as keyboardist/founding member 
of DNA, the band that closes out this collection. 

At the time there were only two New York City clubs to play 
at: CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. And only two or three 
fledgling indie labels. Now, alternative shops and online 
services have propagated and proliferated to the extent that 
they clog the arteries of the worldwide web with thousands of 
indie labels and artists, making it virtually impossible in the 
new world of virtual reality for any one of the do-it-yourself 
visionaries to realise success by standing apart from the 
crowd and find their audience. The price of open 
opportunities and affordable technology as a means of 
expression has its downside. With so many voices crying 
over each other to be heard, who is left to listen? Let this 
then, be an introduction.

Brian Eno had a vision and an ear for the efforts of the 
untrained to express themselves, and enough pull to get this 
material waxed and released, albeit hushed and buried by 
Island Records on a lesser label after hearing the mastertapes, 
until proudly reclaiming it now, twenty-five years later, after 
many have lauded the album with critical acclaim..

The Contortions wrench open this collection with an over the 
shoulder kick in the direction of James Brown and a high-
octane, speed-induced brand of squeak-and-squawk sax-led 
punk-funk.

Teenage Jesus And The Jerks follow with angry, minimal, 
abbreviated and punctuated, blessedly-brief, but ingeniously 
constructed, bursts of aurally antagonizing little ditties, 
owing inspiration to "Diddy Wah Diddy" forebearer Captain 
Beefheart. Their drummer used a single snare drum and club-
sized drumsticks with a Bamm-Bamm Rubble of the 
Flintstones approach, pounding out a beat that echoed Lydia 
Lunch's tortured vocal line, offset by mimicking whiny and 
strangulated bottleneck guitar lines and abusively battering-
ram bass lines.

The third act on this collection (three is a magic number) is 
very dear to my heart. Mars was a four-piece unit evenly 
divided between the sexes with low alto hallucinogenically 
somnolent female vocals alternating songs fronted by a 
manic male voice frenetically approaching falsetto in its fear-
inducing intensity. The instruments meshed in varying 
timeframes and textures reinventing a 'fill spectre caterwaul 
of sound' with cascading rhythms and pitches shifting over 
one another like the Velvet Underground through a distorting 
glass riding Niagara Falls.

Closing the album, and making way for things to come, was 
DNA with a perfect fusion of elements present in the 
previous three bands, recombinant into a strange new beast. 
With the psychotic vocals of the Contortions, the minimalist 
noise and pattern structures of Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, 
and the falling wall texture of Mars, DNA took up where the 
Plastic Ono Band left off eight years previous, balancing a 
juggling act of equal parts of chaos and order into a blend 
that expressed the repressed feelings of the frustration of 
youth at the time (the eternal ongoing theme present in the 
most enduring perpetrators of rock and roll).

The lyrics of all four bands expressed extremes in mental, 
emotional, physical, psychic and sexual abuse, and the title of 
the album negated existence of a life of contentment, 
fulfillment, or substance in late '70s New York City.

And so, they say, the rest is history. This album once again 
rears its ugly head in the new millennium with Island now 
proudly reclaiming the bastard birth by stamping its logo on 
it in place of the original Antilles subsidiary logo, as well as a 
hefty, super-inflated price tag, acknowledging its importance 
as a trendsetting footnote leading into the 21st century.

Despite the landmark nature of the album and the importance 
its role played, its rerelease on CD in no way benefits the 
sixteen participating individuals on it, as none receive a 
penny in royalties from its greedy, overbloated reissue price 
here.

If you want to find out about the source of today's indie 
proliferation, by all means purchase this disc. However, if 
you want to pay tribute by supporting these artists, I suggest 
you seek out their individual efforts elsewhere, for instance 
online search engines.

You might start by purchasing the release of my new CD, 
Dark Day-Strange Clockwork.