No Wave

Musical genre that experienced its zenith from the mid-1980's to the dawning moments of the 1990's. No Wave music was characterized by a collective spirit of experimentation and anti-commercialism despite heavily referencing disco, jazz fusion, rhythm & blues, early hip-hop, and other popular music forms. Largely native to New York City, the No Wave scene centered largely on a group of smaller clubs and illegal performance spaces dotting New York City's Lower East Side (LES), Alphabet City, and Tribeca neighborhoods including The Pyramid, White Columns, and the Knitting Factory. The popularity of No Wave music was highly localized and failed to achieve any real modicum of commercial success due to a variety of factors: the afore-mentioned spirit anti-commercialism, rampant use of narcotics, and the incestuous and tumultuous relationships between the core creative practitioners of the scene. To wit, groups like Digital Riptide, Tetra Denim, Spaceships of Ezekiel, and Black Screen o' Death all shared members and experienced early demises due to various forms of self-generated drama and dysfunction.

The No Wave community was unique in its direct overlap with other musical genres and creative mediums including the nascent fields of performance art (including relational aesthetics) and hacking/phreaking. In fact, in absence of commercial recording contracts, the hacker-developed Phantom Archives (accessible through the controversial and, like-mindedly anti-commercial MindVox ISP) stands as the primary documentation system of No Wave and its extended community.