No Wave: The Discordant Sound of Downtown New York in the 1970s

In December 1978 the Nova Convention gathered a group of extraordinary artists, writers, musicians, and provocateurs in New York City to celebrate William S. Burroughs.

The event unfolded against the backdrop of a downtown cultural scene immersed in exploring radical reinvention. Punk had challenged the conventions of rock and roll, but a new no wave movement questioned the very premise of what music could be. Rejecting virtuosity, convention, and even the comforts of recognizable music, a generation of artists embraced noise, dissonance, and confrontation as tools of creative liberation. The boundaries between music, conceptual art, performance, video, and experimental cinema dissolved; raw energy and possibility exploded.

Ahead of Getty’s October 23 screening of Nova ’78, and in dialogue with our recent celebration of the women who shaped no wave, this playlist traces the movement’s many intersections, provocations, and unlikely transformations. From Patti Smith’s reinvention of the female performer to rock music’s disintegration and eventual reassembly in the hands of Sonic Youth, listen along to understand how no wave helped set the stage for an alternative culture that would continue to reverberate throughout the 1980s and beyond.

The Playlist

1. Patti Smith—“Radio Ethiopia” (1976)

It’s difficult to overstate Patti Smith’s influence on the NYC artists who came of age in the late 1970s. With her striking androgyny, poetic ambition, and fearless stage presence, Smith shattered expectations about what a woman onstage could look and sound like. Reviewing her 1976 album Radio Ethiopia, critic Robert Christgau celebrated the band’s raw vitality, describing its guitar-driven sound as having “the human élan of a band that is still learning to play”—a sentiment that became central to the no wave ethos. The album’s extended, feedback-drenched title track was inspired by the MC5’s “Black to Comm,” as Smith later recalled in a 1996 interview with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Smith also performed at the Nova Convention, making this song a particularly fitting place to begin.

2. Theoretical Girls—“You Got Me” (1978)

Even this band’s name speaks to the extraordinary overlap between New York’s downtown art and music scenes in the late 1970s. It referenced the young women artists pursuing conceptually driven practices later associated with the Pictures Generation, including Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. Bringing together Glenn Branca, Jeffrey Lohn, Wharton Tiers, and Margaret De Wys, Theoretical Girls created music that was stripped down, repetitive, and defiantly unconventional. Conceptual artist Dan Graham was an early champion of the band, presenting it at Franklin Furnace in 1977. In 1979 he appeared on a program with Branca’s next group, the Static, at London’s Riverside Studios, performing his seminal Performer/Audience/Mirror. “You Got Me” captures the restless, experimental spirit of no wave.

3. Y Pants—“Magnetic Attraction” (1980)

As the story goes, Gail Vachon found a discarded children’s Mickey Mouse drum kit on the street and started making music with Barbara Ess on ukulele. They recruited Virginia (Verge) Piersol to play drums, mixed their real and toy instruments, and Y Pants was born. The band popped up on club stages and alternative spaces like Tier 3 and Fashion Moda, where music, performance art, and experimental cinema freely intersected. Their message was wonderfully simple: you didn’t need permission, or even know how to play an instrument, to start a band. As artist Kiki Smith recalled, “In the late ’70s and early ’80s everyone had very fluid art identities. One day you were a filmmaker, the next day a musician, and Y Pants was very much a part of it.” She remembered the music as “repetitive and trance-like… [with] a sense of urgency.”

4. James Chance and the Contortions—“Contort Yourself” (1979)

After attending a festival listed simply as BANDS at Artists Space in 1978, Brian Eno was inspired to produce No New York, a now-legendary compilation featuring four bands of the then emerging no wave movement: the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Mars. James Chance and the Contortions were perhaps the most danceable of the four, combining free jazz, funk, punk, and aggressively confrontational performances that sometimes erupted into fistfights. The group’s early membership included visual artist Jamie Nares alongside guitarist Pat Place and keyboardist Adele Bertei. Their jagged rhythms and convulsive stage presence also evoke Robert Longo’s celebrated Men in the Cities drawings, depicting elegantly dressed figures caught in extraordinary contortions. Longo has acknowledged the Contortions as an influence on the series, another example of the porous boundaries between art and music downtown.

5. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks—“Burning Rubber” (1978)

If the Contortions were danceable, Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks seemed determined to dismantle rock music altogether. Their songs were short, brutal, and almost perversely uncompromising, dispensing with conventional melody and musical structure in favor of abrasive guitar and Lunch’s unmistakable vocal delivery. Case in point: “Burning Rubber” is a furious burst of sound. Lunch was still a teenager when she emerged as a central no wave figure, and her refusal to accommodate expectations about femininity, musicianship, or even the relationship between performers and audiences remains one of the movement’s most radical gestures.

6. DNA—“Blonde Redhead” (1981)

DNA’s music sounds as though its instruments are being simultaneously invented and dismantled. Guitarist Arto Lindsay’s fractured playing, Tim Wright’s spare bass lines, and Ikue Mori’s unconventional drumming created a completely new sound. Mori had arrived in New York from Japan with little experience playing drums but developed a singular rhythmic language that launched an extraordinary career in experimental music and electronic improvisation. The group performs “Blonde Redhead” in Downtown 81, a film starring a young Jean-Michel Basquiat that captures the downtown scene’s creative ferment. Basquiat played in the experimental band Gray, another testament to the fluid boundaries between art and music.

7. Mars—“Helen Fordsdale” (1978)

Of the four bands featured on Brian Eno’s No New York, Mars may be the most radically disorienting. Featuring a collection of mostly visual artists—Sumner Crane, China Burg, Mark Cunningham, and Nancy Arlen—the group created a musical language of fractured rhythms, discordant guitars, and strange, almost otherworldly vocals. The origins of “Helen Fordsdale” offer a glimpse into their creative process. Burg recalled that Crane returned from a week in the Catskills fascinated by insect sounds and was determined to re-create them musically. The band began playing their guitars beyond the fretboard, experimenting with slides and unconventional techniques, until Cunningham introduced the bass line that transformed their bug-like chirps into a song.

8. The Red Crayola—“Born in Flames” (1980)

No wave’s creativity extended into independent and experimental filmmaking. Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames, a radical feminist science-fiction movie where women organize against inequality in a supposedly liberated society, is one of its great achievements. Starring musician Adele Bertei of the Contortions, the film features a constellation of British post-punk musicians, including Lora Logic of Essential Logic, Gina Birch of the Raincoats, and Epic Soundtracks of Swell Maps. The Red Crayola recorded the title song. This band—led by Mayo Thompson, whose career took him from the psychedelic avant-garde 1960s to working as Robert Rauschenberg’s studio assistant in the early to mid-1970s and later producing UK post-punk bands the Raincoats and the Fall—embodied the transatlantic circulation of experimental ideas.

9. Bush Tetras—“Too Many Creeps” (1980)

As no wave evolved, some of its most inventive musicians rediscovered rhythm and dance. Founded by former Contortions guitarist Pat Place, Bush Tetras combined jagged, minimalist guitar with infectious bass lines, propulsive drums, and Cynthia Sley’s unmistakable vocals. “Too Many Creeps” is practically a downtown New York anthem, capturing the discomfort of navigating the city’s streets while also creating something irresistibly danceable.

10. Julia Heyward and T-Venus—“Draggin’ the Bottom” (1983)

Julia Heyward is one of the most singular figures to emerge from New York’s downtown scene, moving fluidly between music, experimental theater, video, and performance art. Using the stage name Duka Delight, she combined her extraordinary vocal range with an artistic language of humor, theatricality, and surrealism. At the Nova Convention, Heyward appeared alongside Laurie Anderson, both dressed in tuxedos, in a performance featuring electronically manipulated vocals. A few years later, concurrent with MTV and music video as a new cultural force, Heyward created “Draggin’ the Bottom” with her band T-Venus. That same year, she coedited Talking Heads’ iconic music video for “Burning Down the House” with David Byrne, bringing downtown’s experimental sensibility into the emerging mainstream of music TV.

11. Sonic Youth—“Shaking Hell” (1983)

Perhaps more than any other band, Sonic Youth propelled no wave’s experimental legacy into the alternative music culture of the 1980s and beyond. Drawing together the dissonance, unconventional guitar techniques, and confrontational spirit of the scene, they forged a unique musical language. Both Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo had performed in Glenn Branca’s guitar ensembles, while Kim Gordon brought her own visual art background to the group. “Shaking Hell,” from their first full-length album Confusion Is Sex, captures the band in its raw early incarnation, with Gordon’s haunting vocals and guitar sounds that seemingly strain against the instrument’s limits. Sonic Youth challenged conventions, electrified young listeners, and influenced generations of musicians.