Tuesday 14 August 2018, 7.30pm
Brutal Measures combines the dynamic spoken word histrionics of Lydia Lunch, one of the genres most controversial performers with the improvisational virtuosity of Weasel Walter to create an intimate, terrifying and even hilarious evening of musical verite.
“Of all the great unions of underground music, rock and otherwise; Bowie and Eno, Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, John Cale and Terry Riley, Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brotzzman, and so on; the union between No Wave icon, transgressive artist, and spoken word warrior Lydia Lunch and free jazz, noise, and no wave musician Weasel Walter is perhaps the most harmonious and unquestionably the unholiest. When considering their respective biographies, both full of moments of sticking the middle finger in the faces of conventional standards of taste and decency, it’s difficult to believe that these revolutionaries didn’t find each other sooner.” – Autre
Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature.
Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, writer, musician, poet, spoken word artist and photographer, she has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books have published her anthology Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. She performs in a variety of mediums, is a rabid collaborator and continues to release new music as well as re-issuing classic material such as her spoken word indictment against patriarchal idiocy, The Conspiracy of Women through Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People.
Weasel Walter (first name, last name) is a Brooklyn, New York based multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser best known for leading the seminal punk-jazz/no-wave/brutal-prog band The Flying Luttenbachers between 1991 and 2007 on 16 full-length releases.
Seamlessly uniting the intensity and abstraction of improvised music with the nihilist aesthetics of extreme rock forms, Walter is committed to violent momentum, idiomatic unpredictability and rapid articulation.
Expert in the underground music scene of the late 1970’s, Walter has lectured at various Universities including Bard, San Francisco Art Institute, University of Chicago in Paris, and penned the introduction for Marc Masters book NO WAVE, seen as the definitive history of the New York movement from which Lydia Lunch emerged in 1977 with her first group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
In 2012, Weasel Walter began working with Lydia Lunch as musical coordinator and lead guitarist for RETROVIRUS, a retrospective, which spanned the spectrum of her musical legacy from No Wave Skronk to bludgeoning Hard Rock and sleazy Jazz Noir to propulsive Psychedlia. RETROVIRUS has just released their second full length LP URGE TO KILL in the USA, Europe and South America.
Woolf are a queer punk band from London, bordering on the no wave, dark but frantic proto-hardcore and weird. Initially formed at the Lambeth Women’s Project in 2009, Colette, Irene, Sophie and Georgina have been playing together as Woolf ever since. Woolf have released two LPs; 2012’s ‘The right way to play’ and 2016’s ‘Posing/Improvising’ both on La vida es un mus records and prior to that a split 7” with fellow Londoners Trash Kit on Milk Records. Appearing on numerous compilations also, most recently on Comodillo Tapes a live version of their song ‘Concrete’ aka their version of Morning Song from Pil & Galia Kollectiv’s Concrete Gown For Immaterial Flows performed at the Hayward Gallery in 2014. Woolf have also previously played at Wysing Art Centre’s Space-Time: The Future festival (2014), Bent Fest (2015 and 2018), Static Shock Weekend (2012 and 2017) as well as various gigs and tours across the UK, France, Germany as well as Finland for Oreet Ashery’s Party for Freedom performance. Consisting of members who have past and currently been in bands such as Corey Orbison, Roseanne Barrr, Frau, Score, Dregs and Child’s Pose.
