Mudd Club (NY)
Punk-era nightclub kingpin Steve Mass reminisced about the days when Keith Haring worked the Mudd Club door and Jean-Michel Basquiat was a regular visitor in the celebrity lounge. The legendary anecdotes about Haring painting whole room installations for "25 bucks and can of black paint" were completely false, Mass confessed. "Keith never did wall paintings at the Mudd Club, he got together curations, he got Basquiat to paint a wall once, but he organized the shows rather than tagging the space directly." The Mudd Club is now the downstairs two floors of Ross Bleckner's White Street digs. --Baird Jones
CDs
Anti Ny (2004) - Various Artists [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
1. Launderette - Goldman, Vivien 2. If I gave you a party - Sexual Harassment 3. Drum mode - Gray 4. Love attack - Konk 5. Girl's imagination - Del & Byzanteens 6. NCR - Ike Yard 7. Exterior Street - Death Comet Crew & Rammellzee 8. Drum mode (Paul Mogg version) - Gray 9. Launderette (Munk version) - Goldman, Vivien 10. If I gave you a party (Syrup version) - Sexual Harassment 11. Exterior Street (Protein version) - Death Comet Crew & Rammellzee 12. NCR (Funkstorung version) - Ike Yard
A definitive compilation of NY post-punk centred round the infamous Mudd Club, incorporating the dance ethic of disco and reggae, the newly-emerging voice of hiphop, and the experimentalism of rudimentary synths: the first real melting pot world music. The seven original tracks from 1978-82 sound like they could easily have been made yesterday, and the five remixes don't mess around too much with the originals. Can't recommend this too highly if you love raw, vital dance music. grantc via amazon.com
It’s easy to forget that despite today’s re-imagining of that era, disco and punk were sworn enemies, with the Mudd Club and it’s progeny structuring themselves as a response to the 9-5 Weekender attitude of the disco crowd. We’re soon to be treated to the first bonafide history of the era at the hands of New York-based Academic Simon Reynolds' eagerly anticipated Post-Punk book. “None of the disco people went to The Mudd Club. You got the Bianca Jaggers thrown in once in a while, but if we saw those people we'd trip 'em up, kick 'em, and if they came dressed all disco James Chance might just mug them on the dancefloor. The strata of people was pretty pronounced. When you say Disco people I think Studio 54 people, that was a whole tribe of people. More power to them, but it jusn't wasn't our scene.” With Dominatrix he was trying to engineer transgression, not homogeneity: “Its good to have boundaries because then you can say “this” and “this” get together, and it's not just a pool of musicians.” This boundary breaking was echoed in the tracks' subject matter. “I'd been hanging out with Dominatrixes, they were my good friends. I wanted to do a thing which showed what they were about…these women in power who were beating and peeing on the top music business lawyers in New York.” Stuart [Argabright] clearly in awe of these girls and the down-up inversion of power they practised. --Woebot, March 22, 2004 http://www.woebot.com/movabletype/archives/000452.html [May 2004]
Stuart Argabright is a Producer and Director who has been working in music and multimedia in NYC since 1978. Stuart has created The Futants, Ike Yard, Dominatrix, DCC aka Death Comet Crew, The Voodooists, black rain and now Dystopians usually doing a record /CD release or 2 with each group before moving on. In 2003 into 2004, he is able to experience a bit of the past, present and future simultaneously with his 1980's groups getting their Rerelease and new life while he continues working on new music with Dystopians and Dominatrix (now a major Rerelease on Gigolo Records) and Producing Artists like The Rammellzee's "Bi Conicals Of The Rammellzee" Album for the Munich indie Gomma and remixing up and comers like Tussle (SF) for Tmu.In addition, Stuart has been working in Music Video, and with Artists such as Gretchen Bender, Robert Longo, Bill T Jones, and author William Gibson, including the 1994 "Neuromancer" Audio Book and "Hip Tech High Lit" in 1987 with Judy Nylon and Sean Young. Stuart and Co.'s music appear as soundtracks on movies by directors Nicolas Roeg, Johnathan Demme and others. The music video for Dominatrix (directed by Beth B) resides in MOMA's permanent Collection, the "Digital Shiatsu" CDROM Stuart Directed and CoProduced won Silver Award @ New Media Awards in '95 and Stuart's team recieved Emmy nomination in 2001 for their Sdtk work for NY Times TV's popular Cable TV series "Trauma: Life In The ER" on TLC. --Tigersushi.com [May 2004]
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