No Neck Blues Band ???

i still haven't seen noise nomads in a dozen years. loved seeing that dude all the time in RI.

i didn't go to the rangda show at the flywheel and then i heard that chris corsano brought ten boxes of records to sell at the show because he is moving!!! including all the k salvatore records. that's what i get for not getting out of town more often.

my friend andy bought a ton of stuff. apparently. andy has a new shop nearby.

Pat (the decimus dude) from NNCK also has a new collab with Tom Carter out, only 18 copies left. https://decimus.bandcamp.com/album/ashvin

i'm really into it, ordered mine a few weeks back, still waiting on the post.

Great new oral history up at Aquarium Drunkard. Love these freaks

https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2023/01/17/no-neck-blues-band-more-letters-from-the-earth/

That's certainly.... a read. Loved a couple of their albums, but there is some cringe AF stuff in there.

No doubt. It was a different world.

"OMG No-Neck Blues Band are sooooo PRETENTIOUS!"

"well..yeah"

having hung out with them and hosted them back in 05, i have to say that they were lovely and friendly people. it’s reactions like “cringe” and “pretentious “ that make me miss the Noise Board, not a sentiment that comes up a lot for obvious reasons

Going forward, nothing pretentious or cringe will be tolerated. Signed, young people

I mean, I think they were well aware of these pretensions and embraced them with humor and determination. NNCK might've been annoying at times, but hey, so were Sun City Girls. Just seems like part of the fun.

I like the band a lot but, I'm sorry, any band that feels the need to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy to describe their music is going to get a big ol' eyeroll from me.

counterpoint: i like the cormac mccarthy quote. i'm fond of the days when young men could be pretentious dicks together, seems like that's been out of fashion for a minute. as long as they aren't also sex pests, but maybe those two things were always a little too correlated.

i was caught up in "new weird america" for 3 years, must have been a total fad for me since i never go back to any of it. the group i would probably listen to again would be charalambides. i am curious what of this stuff really holds up now for people.

i think the only two i actually saw live were charalambides and excepter, in l.a., both great.

I still have tons of love for Charalambides, tho I see them more as precursors to that N.W.A. stylee CDR boom in the 00s

yeah i'm scene drifting here in my recollections

god i didn't know anything when i was checking out these weird hip bands and s0uls33king them at the time, lol. i lived with my parents and had no money, what can i say. i sort of forgot that excepter came after nnck, i thought they had been around for longer for some reason. charalambides were from .. texas, that's right. iirc they were a cut above, really deep psych.

Charalambides are a great band.

i think charlambides and nnck are totally lump-in-able: same fanbase nowadays

I just feel like social media has really infected peoples' minds to an extent that being ridiculous or over the top in a way that's perhaps a little cringeworthy is seen as some sort of offense.

I also just don't understand how people can say that things like the NNCK quotes are "cringeworthy" and get the soft fuzzies for the banality of statements like, “There’s an element of danger that keeps us alive,” Meek says. “We’ve learned to push into that fear because it gives us life. And it keeps us moving.” (That's Big Thief).

Like, sometimes people actually like and feel like their art is important and has something to say that corresponds to other works of art. It can be bombastic and a little silly, but I'd prefer Keith Connelly saying some nonsense about Cormac McCarthy and the freedom of sound to some banal, ratioed bullshit that gets passed off as actual music journalism these days.

(Not trying to pick on you, jvc, I get where you're coming from— I just think that so much of what we read about music is FUCKING BORING and a lot of artists are AFRAID TO SAY ANYTHING and that the NNCK folks are not in that camp is *inspirational*, not cringeworthy)

map, my tracking of this stuff: NNCK, Excepter, Charalambides, Gang Gang Dance, Growing, Comets on Fire, Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, Nautical Almanac, Volcano the Bear, Avarus, Lau Nau, Espers, etc.

There are similarities in approach tho the music is all very different— Avarus and NNCK and Nautical Almanac and WWVV are the most similar, the rest a little more "gentle," so to speak, in that they tend to use actual song structures to arrange the freakout moments.

(There are others, of course, that's just the stuff I still like and occasionally listen to, tho I forgot Double Leopards, Tan as Fuck, Gang Wizard, etc. The closest thing to NNCK that is still kicking is Crazy Doberman, from my ken)

Tan As Fuck that’s some old school weird shit.
Sunburned are still going.
Pelt….

oh boy do we remember poster r0ger 4adultery? he was the ww + vv guy, yes?

i remember liking uhh espers and tower recordings a fair amount.

there were all of the wolf eyes and related noise things and of course wolf eyes is still at it. would much rather watch a doc about some of these people than the dumb lcd / strokes thing that just came out.

xp didn't know about sunburned, that's cool. and god pelt were great. i never heard of tan as fuck i'll have to check that out.

When I think about this period, I always think about CD-Rs, and about how the CD-R was the dominant form of distribution for many of these bands as well as some of the noisier bands of the time, and then I think about how most of those discs probably no longer play. I wonder if anyone was actively archiving any of this music at the time. There were a few limited Sunburned Hand Of The Man things I remember really liking, and I noticed recently that they're one of the few bands from this era who seem to be Bandcamp-savvy. I keep meaning to check out some of it but there is just so much, which I think you could argue is one of the reasons people got burned out on this stuff so quickly. Most of the bands mentioned in this thread just saturated the market.

you can get like 50 Sunburned albums on bandcamp for $26 or something ... I haven't taken the plunge yet, but I might!

I as going to add Sunburned to the list, their new album from last year was really good.

Anyway, didn't think I'd get this much pushback for that comment, it wasn't a knock against the band at all. Like I said, I dig them quite a bit though I never got to see them live. Fwiw that Meek quote you pulled out is equally as cringeworthy as that Cormac Mccarthy quote, but I think that's an element of trying to get musicians to answer awkward questions or dig into thoughts that come out quickly in response. Doesn't typically make me lose respect for a musician unless the pretentiousness is backed up by shitty music (which isn't the case wrt to NNCK).

Also, fwiw, it wasn't me that brought "pretentious" into the discussion.

isn't the closest to nnck the band "jackie-o motherfucker!"

the only reason JOMF is different is because they are essentially a location-based group— the line-up always changes. from what i know of Crazy Doberman, they’re more static, like NNCK were.

fwiw a lot of NNCK stuff is up on Bandcamp, and Pat Murano (of the group) has a lot of his own stuff up too, along with collabs with Tom Carter, etc. I really like his work

I HATED Wolf Eyes live, but have come to love Aaron’s solo recordings since he left the group, as well as his collaborations… the records with Turman are especially nice, “Blizzard” is all time for me, just really menacing and beautiful at once.

On my phone and cant be bothered to change it to an embed, but that can be found on Bandcamp and also here

oh boy do we remember poster r0ger 4adultery? he was the ww + vv guy, yes?

i remember liking uhh espers and tower recordings a fair amount.

there were all of the wolf eyes and related noise things and of course wolf eyes is still at it. would much rather watch a doc about some of these people than the dumb lcd / strokes thing that just came out.

xp didn't know about sunburned, that's cool. and god pelt were great. i never heard of tan as fuck i'll have to check that out.

Maybe I should start a thread as a nostalgia repository for all this stuff— it really did change my life, in many ways for the better. I became a much better listener

oh definitely, all of that stuff really sharpened my listening too and offered a whole new world of possibilities. there was a period of about 4 years where i was on that board i hate music, before i got to ilm. a lot of that stuff plus the eai erstwhile related stuff were responsible for helping me hear a lot more and more sensitively.

liking the revive, there is a hilarious noize board post somewhere that's an "interview" with some guy trying to guess the music playing and running through all of these names plus more

"Mouthus?"

-no

"Double Leopards?"

-no

etc

I’d add Growing to this list. I saw they’re playing still

Which NNCK album would you recommend for someone unfamiliar with their work? Saw them live a couple of times in the 2000s and was very impressed.

Anagram: most accessible would be “Sticks and Stones….”, I’m a fan of “Rye Antenna” and “Letters from the Serth”

I’d add Growing to this list. I saw they’re playing still

Here’s the live set from when I booked them as an undergrad.

https://archive.org/details/NNCK-live-11-5-05-fairchild-chapel_202101

I can't say I've heard enough of the discography to be certain, but I'll say that 2005's Qvaris was my way in.

i like Qvaris but feel it a little leas dynamic than I want. Sticks and Stones has high energy freakouts and low-level, nearly inaudible moments of weird mesmerizing string work. It was also, admittedly, my way into their sound, so I probably have listened to it more than most other records, excepting a few live sets that are just wild

Still have the original sleeve with Christopher Wool print for “Quantarenius, Cook & Co”, another favorite and perhaps their most explicitly “political” recording

Maybe I should start a thread as a nostalgia repository for all this stuff— it really did change my life, in many ways for the better. I became a much better listener

This old thread Whiney made has at least some overlap: Best Underground American Noise Act of the Noise-Punk Era (ca. 1998-2005)

Was doing college radio during the peak of this era. And though I rarely revist these groups now, I can honestly say--at the risk of sounding as grandiose or "pretentious" as the NNCK guys--this whole scene really did kind of change what I saw as "possible" in lots of different facets of life, not just music or art.

I caught the tail end of a lot of this stuff and never really got into the No-Necks. I'm going to have to revisit for sure.

In the UK, it feels like a lot of this stuff was centred around the Wire and David K33nan in particular - his record shop and mailing list. Also tend to think of this as 'ATP-core', which is ugly but true in terms of how we encountered lots of the bands.

This thread made me dig out *Drowner Yellow Swans*. Bury me inside this shit.

Yeah D Yellow Swans among the best of these groups, the most consistently good

This thread made me dig out *Drowner Yellow Swans*. Bury me inside this shit.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski)

thank you so much for this, never checked 'em out before cuz I never knew where to start, this is like Zoviet France through a distortion pedal, so good and exactly what I needed right this minute

I made a recording of a nasty good live set they did in 05, will upload soon.

05-06 was the year I was kind of the head of my college concert board— we brought Yellow Swans, No-Neck, Old Time Relijun, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Excepter, Wooden Wand, and Gang Gang Dance. Circle and Lichens also performed. It was a real golden age for me and this type of music.

Oh, and also BATTLES, who were excellent live

Not really listened to many of these bands recently but it really was fun being 16 or so and spending all day on the internet when this stuff was in it's peak.