Nihilist Spasm Band, Van’s Peppy Syncopators, Thurston Moore, Jojo Hiroshige, Knurl, Alan Licht & others
Every Monday Night
Consider Snow’s friends the Nihilist Spasm Band. In the early 60s seven friends founded a Merry Pranksterish society called the Nihilist Party as a front for creative art terrorism in the small city of London, Ontario, in part as a protest against the Conservatives then holding sway over Canada. Visual artist and kazooist Greg Curnoe introduced his pals to the writings of the Russian nihilists, a movement devoted to the negation of existing cultural institutions. At the same time Hugh McIntyre, a librarian and blues fan, was researching the turn-of-the-century “spasm” bands: African-American southern players who got together for regular street and porch jam sessions on invented and adapted instruments, odd machine bits, and kitchen utensils. Partly out of the need for a band to accompany Curnoe’s film No Movie and perform at their Nihilist Picnics (which they still hold today), the Nihilist Spasm Band began their own jam sessions every Monday night.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yet the band managed never to play in the United States until their January 1997 appearance at the Empty Bottle, which is where I got hooked. Their playful but intense improvisations were marked by keen sensitivity and razor wit, and their apparent guilelessness–their authenticity, if you’ll pardon the expression–was in fact the self-possession of six very intelligent men in their 50s and 60s who knew just how venal things could get, but for 30-odd years had been content to resist by example. In New York later that year, they were greeted and feted by Thurston Moore, who had tried to get them a gig with Sonic Youth; instead they made their local debut at the Knitting Factory with sax-and-guitar typhoon Borbetomagus and the experimental rock band Run On.
The Nihilist Spasm Band had just returned from another Japanese tour, where they shared stages with Hijokaidan, Masonna, Merzbow main man Masami Akita, and other noise luminaries. They seemed a little stunned to be back in London and surrounded once again by improvisers, many of whom were young enough to be their children, and some of whom were their children, and one of whom was a child. So much for that social-astrology notion that generational affinity is everything.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Brian Davis.
