No Wave, a Brief, Noisy New York Moment That Still Echoes – NYTimes.com

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.

Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.

But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.

Check it out here.