Soul Jazz Records presents a unique film capturing New York’s No Wave scene in 1979. Ericka Beckman’s seminal rarely seen film captures the driving energy and posturing of early No Wave bands’ performing live in a sparse downtown loft and includes the only known footage of the Theoretical Girls, The Static and other No Wave bands of the period.
Garage band line-ups in varying degrees of post-punk musical destruction. Ericka Beckman’s film matches the rawness, minimalism and radicalism of the music - a fitting document and visual statement of new forms created out of New York’s anti-everything musical nihilism, circa 1979. ‘135 Grand Street, New York, 1979’ is history. This is a film about bands made up of painters, filmmakers, actors - and occasionally musicians - thriving and thrashing in the pulsating, vibrant postpunk world of New York where high art met low culture.
Ericka Beckman documented the cross-fertilizing art and music scene in New York in the mid-1970s. Her film captures the driving energy and posturing of early No Wave bands’ performing in a sparse downtown loft. Featured bands include Theoretical Girls, UT, A Band, Rhys Chatham, Chinese Puzzle, The Static, Morales, Youth in Asia, Morales, Steven Piccolo and Jill Kroesen.
