The Brooklyn Rail

In the mid-1970s and into the ’80s, New York was awash with fresh sounds, newly-minted bands, and musical experimentation. Downtown artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, architects, and dancers were keen on blurring the lines between their native disciplines. One symptom of this was that, as Marvin J. Taylor notes in his introduction to The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984, “everyone was in a band.” Some of those bands would cement themselves into mainstream music history, and their promiscuous intermedia roots are buried in the footnotes of the grander narratives of punk, new wave, no wave, and post-punk. But many other artists, especially women, who were working in these messy, energetic, experimental modes remained underground. Those looking for traces of their music might have more luck in the archives than in record stores, but the music—compelling, catchy, and at times uncannily current—is often worth the trouble.

Drawing inspiration, in varying proportions, from the asceticism of 1960s-era performance art and minimalist music, the DIY ethos and confrontational politics of punk culture, and the cool, anything-is-possible cresting of the electronic new wave, a small but vibrant group of women artists carved out a niche along the edges of art and pop. Though a key part of the downtown scene, they and their music have been overlooked for decades. But the ongoing curiosity about and nostalgia for late-seventies/early-eighties New York culture has these artists reconsidered by scholars and music aficionados alike, and—thankfully—some of this remarkable music is finding a new audience. Rooted in experimental music, performance, and visual art, these artists took up rock as one tool among many available to express the urgency, humor, and ideology of their moment. A vast topic, there is a short list of artists whose legacies are an illuminating window into the era: Julia Heyward, Jill Kroesen, and the group DISBAND.

Julia Heyward started as a dyed-in-the-wool performance artist. She began performing her monologue-based pieces in the 1970s at venues like The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, and Franklin Furnace. These one-woman events were mixtures of spoken word, chanting, and vocal manipulations that combined her fascination with Mongolian throat singing and sub-Saharan African yodeling with a melodic sense of language inherited from her father, a South Carolina preacher. Heyward’s performance pieces were direct, unflinching, and, at times, confrontational engagements with feminism, nature, religion, and the body.

The innate musicality of her performance style led to collaborations with other musicians in the late 1970s. Adapting her prose and themes from her monologues into lyrics, Heyward formed a band with both shifting rosters and names. Performing under the names T-Venus, The Abstractions, Kulture, and the Glo National, Heyward was joined by Don Christensen and Jody Harris (both of James Chance & the Contortions and the Raybeats—a band with one session produced by Philip Glass), Martha Swetzoff and Trude Koby from Bound and Gagged, 8 Eyed Spy’s Pat Irwin and Jim Sclavunos, and David Hofstra of The Waitresses, in creating rhythmic, jangly, upbeat tunes.

In their various iterations, Heyward’s bands would perform at clubs like Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and DC’s 9:30 Club, and also in new and familiar art venues around the country. In 1981, she returned to The Kitchen, this time with T-Venus, to premiere 360, a concept album combining the band’s music with video. Planned for eventual release on videodisc, 360 pioneered the visual album even before the advent of MTV. Heyward imagined a synthesis of video and music that could disrupt commercial television’s calcifying supremacy, but these dreams fizzled out with the demise of the short-lived videodisc format.

Heyward still left her mark on pop music, however, becoming one of the few female music video directors of the early MTV years and developing videos for the Talking Heads, Romeo Void, The Fixx, and the Boogie Boys, among others. Her own video for “Draggin’ the Bottom” also aired on MTV, though no commercial releases of her music materialized. Finally, in 2024, a cache of Heyward’s music was finally issued on record for the first time. The album, Julia Heyward & T-Venus - Duka I 1979-1988, is available on vinyl, CD, and streaming from the smart, crate-digging imprint Modern Harmonic, a division of Sundazed Records.

Jill Kroesen came to New York in 1974 carrying the credentials of a musician’s musician; the California native had earned both a BA and MFA from the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College before moving east. In Oakland, Kroesen had studied under minimalist shaman Terry Riley and avant-garde opera composer Robert Ashley. Even within the venerated Mills College composition program, however, Kroesen gravitated toward more popular forms. Her interest in joining art music and pop vernaculars was encouraged by Ashley, who served as the CCM’s director. As Kroesen told Tim Lawrence, author of Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene 1972-1992, “[At Mills] we didn’t think of ourselves as composers doing music, but as artists doing art, with music one of our components.”

In New York, Kroesen met members of the like-minded downtown scene and quickly linked up with a community of musicians/artists orbiting around The Kitchen. She presented her first work in the city, Dear Ashley in the Kitchen (1975), in that space with backing from guitarist Rhys Chatham and cellist Arthur Russell—both of whom would also integrate avant-garde music with pop in groundbreaking ways. Kroesen also reconnected and collaborated with fellow Mills graduate Peter Gordon as part of his eclectic ensemble the Love of Life Orchestra. Her solo performance works evolved into complex and sometimes chaotic events she labeled “systems portraits.” These works—including Stanley Oil and His Mother (1977) and The Original Lou and Walter Story (1978)—were multi-actor theatrical pieces that integrated music, dance, and melodrama in order to examine global-scaled issues like gender politics and Cold War relations.

Alongside her frequent collaboration with Ashley and Gordon, Kroesen played in bands, including a seemingly untraceable one called Gertrude Stein, before shifting her focus to her own creative projects. Her songs, written for and performed in tandem with her longer theatrical pieces, seem to ooze allegory. Perhaps her most well-known track remains “I Really Want to Bomb You,” which Kroesen has called “Russia’s love song to the USA”; it recasts the rival nations as paramours caught in a tense and flirtatious negotiation. In 1980, Kroesen recorded an EP for Lust/Unlust Music, and in 1982 she released a full album of no-wave songs, Stop Vicious Cycles with Lovely Music, Ltd., home to the central catalogue of Ashley’s music. The retrospective collection I Really Want To Bomb You: 1972 - 1984 was released on Modern Harmonic in 2022.

The founder of the alternative space and archive Franklin Furnace, Martha Wilson is also a noted artist whose biting portrayals of political figures, including Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and, in recent years, Donald Trump, put her on the map. A native of Pennsylvania, Wilson studied in Nova Scotia before relocating to New York in 1974. While Marvin J. Taylor quipped retrospectively that in the late seventies, “everyone was in a band,” Wilson amplified the sentiment, recalling in a 2012 interview for Art21 magazine that “At that time … everyone was in three.” Inspired to jump on the band bandwagon in spite of the fact that she played no musical instruments, Wilson founded DISBAND, an “all-girl conceptual art punk band” which would both borrow from and satirize music of the moment from a decidedly feminist angle.

During its lifespan, DISBAND included an ever-changing group of artists. At the outset, Wilson recruited two fellow peers who also happened to double as musicians, Daile Kaplan (of The Gynecologists) and Barbara Ess, who played in Y Pants, The Static, and Ultra Vulva. Later members would include artists Barbara Kruger, Ilona Granet, and Donna Henes, as well as the artist and drag performer Diane Torr, and Artforum’s editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy. Though DISBAND started out playing traditional musical instruments (or, in the case of some members, attempting to), they soon abandoned that convention in favor of making noise with their bodies. Dominated by clapping, stomping, shouting, and chanting, with occasional singing and no instrumentation, DISBAND’s songs might not be the kind of music you’d put on in the background (one music critic writing for the Los Angeles Herald in 1981 compared it to “those embarrassing noises one’s stomach makes after too much pizza and beer”), but their witty appropriation of the rock band archetype remains a compelling performance gesture.

DISBAND’s performances were visual as much musical, with movement, costume, and interaction between members key elements of the work. Like many performance-based experiments that cropped up downtown, DISBAND’s output was never widely accessible, but it was, thankfully, well-documented and archived. In 2008, DISBAND would re-group to perform at MoMA PS1 for the exhibition, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. The following year, the book publisher Primary Information released recordings of DISBAND performances from 1979 to 1982, and the Canadian video art distributor Vtape released a DVD of performance footage. The album CD is now out of print, though still available digitally. That might be okay, as DISBAND is best experienced through video documents of their performances, many of which can be located online.