May 28: Arto Lindsay 1953; John Bergamo 1940
Arto Lindsay via DNA, Ambitious Lovers and Goebbels-Muller but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Bergamo via the Repercussion Unit at NMA85 in Los Angeles and his own work at NMA87.
Arto Lindsay 1953 Richmond, Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arto_Lindsay
First up - what he’s been up to recently:
Arto Lindsay appeared in three different iterations during the New Music America festivals, each distinctively different from the other, though always with his entrancing (at least to me) way with the electric guitar.
♪ 1979 New Music New York
The first time was as one of the club gigs at the first NMA, 1979’s New Music New York. It was the evening of the legendary Ear Inn VarEarIty performance, so only one correspondent, Charles Ward of the Houston Chronicle - if he indeed went after writing this - took in Arto Lindsay in his 1979 band DNA play in an evening in a packed lineup at the Mudd Club.
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DNA (Arto Lindsay, Robin Crutchfield, Gordon Stevenson, Mirielle Cervenka, Ikue Mori and Tim Wright), Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day, Alan (Vega) Suicide with Ann DeLeon at the Mudd Club June 13, 1979
Constant in this throbbing environment has been the refusal to observe any boundaries of art. MCA institute fellows heard, for example, a disco mix of Glass’ North Star and saw a video tape by a composer who works as much in video as he does in sound sources. Chatham has programmed evenings of “art” music at the Mudd Club, the hippest spot of the downtown popular music scene.
Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle July 24, 1979
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Until I arrange a history interview or two or three to get more about the club gigs that year - sadly, a tradition not often followed afterwards, and certainly not to the NYC extent… except of course during the return to NYC in 1979.
But I found this valuable document this morning, written in 2013 by Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers for the website which I gather is in coordination with New York magazine, so I’ll just excerpt some of it and let you check out the full article: https://bedfordandbowery.com/2013/09/nightclubbing-dna-at-mudd-club-1979/
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong are sifting through their voluminous archive of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library. This week: a look back at DNA.
“How dare you play your guitar like that! Don’t you know that’s the same instrument that Eric Clapton plays?” Audience members were often quick to share their dissatisfaction with the screeching dissonance that Arto Lindsay wrung from his instrument during a feverish set. So whenever his no wave band DNA finished up, Lindsay was sure to pack up quickly.
“It was the music I liked to play,” Lindsay says. “I thought the more far out you were, the more likely you were to be hailed as the next Jimi Hendrix. I just wanted to see what music would do to people. “
The son of missionaries who moved to Brazil to spread The Word, Lindsay seemed an unlikely candidate to blaze through the Downtown scene as one of its most adventurous and experimental musicians. Fronting bands like DNA and Ambitious Lovers and collaborating with the original Lounge Lizards and the Golden Palominos, he had a quirky guitar style that was unlike anyone else. He punched a hole in the idea of what his instrument could do.Lindsay moved to New York in 1974 with his college roommate, Mark Cunningham. “We tried to teach ourselves music by listening to everything. We would buy or steal records from soul to classical, just the gamut,” Lindsay recalls. When Cunningham began playing in the band Mars in 1977, Terry Ork booked them at Max’s Kansas City. Ork noticed Arto tagging alongand asked him if he, too, had a band. “I lied and said yes and persuaded him that it would be better if he booked us in a month rather than the following week.”
Lindsay rushed out and called his friend Ikue Mori. Neither of them could play, but he encouraged her to try percussion. Next to join was Robin Crutchfield, a performance artist whose work had impressed Lindsay. After only a few rehearsals, DNA debuted playing a confrontational set: lots of stops and starts, very loud, then very soft. “They were songs based on ideas,” Lindsay said. A scene began to coalesce around them as other musicians like Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, James Chance and Lydia Lunch all began pushing on the edges of what a song could be.
In 1978, a Soho gallery, Artist Space, hosted the legendary No Wave series: as the poster said, ten bands, five nights. DNA played along with other noise groups like Teenage Jesus, The Contortions and Mars. Brian Eno was so taken with their boundary-breaking verve that he convinced Island Records to let him record and produce the bands and the seminal no wave album No New York was the result. “Eno is a wonderful guy,” Lindsay said, but they had a rocky start: “He set us up in the studio and we started to play and he was sitting there reading a magazine. I was furious and started screaming at him, ‘This is our life, this is our music!’ I think he appreciated it. We were the only band who went to all the mixes and we’re still friends to this day.”
Robin Crutchfield left to form his own band Dark Day, and Tim Wright stepped in. The former bass player of Pere Ubu, he was a real musician. “We rehearsed relentlessly when Tim joined,” Lindsay said. “It really upped the ante. Ikue and I didn’t want to get overwhelmed. But there was a real competitive thing. Having a woman in the band, with Ikue, it kept us real, but that macho thing between Tim and I, I think was healthy. And it was thrilling.”
With Wright in the band, they began playing out regularly, especially at CBGBs. Lindsay remembered, “It was great because then you were able to survive. If you played a weekend, you made real money. And of course, we wrote all our music together. Sort of a Lennon and McCartney — and McCartney — thing. The three of us were equal collaborators. We thought we would be rock stars; we had absolutely no concept of the business or how songs should be.”
So it really stung when John Rockwell of the New York Times wrote that they were determined to be non-commercial. “I thought that was despicable,” Lindsay said. Years later at a Yoko Ono show, they met and Lindsay recalls “going CBGB on him. I said, ‘You ruined me with that line.’ I mean, he’s a nice guy and all but he was creating a hierarchy…. I was trying to affect an audience, make people sweat, get girls excited.”
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Watch this week’s clip, a DNA performance at the Mudd Club in 1979. Doorman Richard Boch remembers, “It might’ve been 3 a.m. I walked out of the Mudd Club second-floor bathroom and heard the scream. Not sure if the floor was shaking or if it was me, I walked downstairs. Arto was singing, Tim was doing a bass rumbling crazy side-step and Ikue was pounding away. DNA was onstage.”
They weren’t covering “Layla.”
This video is undated but does indicate it’s the Mudd Club:
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Lindsay’s next appearance would be with his ensemble the Ambitious Lovers - interestingly, my program doesn’t note the partner of the duo, Peter Scherer, listed in the lineup that included David Moss, Jorge Silva, Toni Nogeira, Claudio Silva, all who appear on the first Ambitious Lovers album, Envy.
It was an afternoon concert at the Old State house during the Hartford 1984 festival, the band paired with Rick Rosie and Mixashawn and it garnered these comments:
At lunchtime, insurance men and women ventured from their offices to explore Arto Lindsay's Ambitious Lover's blend of Brazilian music and white funk embellished by quavering, quirky gibberish.
- Brooke Wentz report for High Fidelity November 1984
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"I don't know how Hartford will respond to all of this," said Doug McLeod, who works at Computerland in West Hartford and was dressed in a blue blazer and wing-tip shoes. "I think Arto Lindsay (and the Ambitious Lovers) are the most accessible and will be popular with the crowd. But I'm not sure about the rest. personally, I love it."
So did the crowd of several hundred at the noontime New Music America series at the Old State House Monday, which featured Lindsay and his eight-member band.
The band's incessant, driving Brazilian rhythms acted as a strong pull for even the most novice new-music listener. At the center of the high-energy band was the gawky-but-spirited Lindsay who took an upbeat approach to his group's offbeat sounds. It was hard not to be seduced by the persuasive percussion with its whiplash tempos and its gear-grinding shifts of rhythms. And if the beat didn't get you, the vocals certainly did.
Vocalist David Moss seemed to make strange and wondrous sounds from every ounce of his ample being: His tonsils, throat, both lungs and parts of his large intestine seemed to contribute to the sounds that were coming from his mouth. It was scat-singing on acid, combined with bits of Donald Duck, bees in heat, a busy signal, a spoon going down the garbage disposal and angels screaming. It was amazing.
- Combined writers of the Hartford Courant, July 3, 1984
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There was other good music too, of course. The Ambitious Lovers, Arto Lindsay's band, played outdoors for a lunchtime crowd; they were tight and fresh, a genuine fusion not just of styles but of people, new music types and Latin percussionists.
- Geoffrey Stokes, Village Voice July 24 - "New Music Back to Normal"
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The full album Envy is currently posted at y2b at
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n_zIpyDuy7vcEZndnTpKdHf-2G_W4DZks
and the two first tracks feature one of our all time NMA favorites, David Moss:
And then there is this amazing video which sure sounds like it included David, though he wasn’t listed (or Anton Fier maybe) in my Discog details.
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And in 1989, Lindsay returned to perform at NMA New York in the production of Man in the Mirror, a work with Heiner Goebbels and Heiner Muller - I was lucky enough to see them on the week that the Berlin wall came down which made for extra enthusiasm in an already pretty intense work. That one was enough for a separate substack, paywall lifted and linked here; there’s a lot in the link from the very profuse liner notes in the program to David Garland offering an excerpt on his radio show at WNYC, to my own from the audience recording and an alternate version on video.
But here, I’ll highlight the video of an actual NMA89 performance (it may have been the one I attended as there were three of them), thanks to The Wendy Hour and posted on the y2b.
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John Bergamo May 28, 1940
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bergamo
We got to see John Bergamo twice at the NMA 1985 festival in Los Angeles. First unforgettable time was when he performed with the Repercussion Unit. Unforgettable for many reasons, including the fact they used a metal airplane engine cover as a really cool percussion instrument by rolling marbles in it.
Repercussion Unit
John Bergamo, Jim Hildebrandt, Gregg Johnson, Ed Mann, Lucky Mosko and Larry Stein: On the Edge (Bergamo); Having Fun Yet (Stein); The Tower (Mann); Legend of the F’ish (Johnson)
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Pleasures of more uncomplicated character dominated the Friday event, a jolly 55-minute appearance by the Repercussion Unit, a six-member, six-composer ensemble of the bang-clang-and-swoosh school.
As you may have heard, this is a performing group of unfailing musicality and strong entertainment values. The six players/composers--John Bergamo, Jim Hildebrandt, Gregg Johnson, Ed Mann, Lucky Mosko and Larry Stein--have fun, make music and hold their observers’ interests.
Friday, those interests were visual as well as aural and focused on some of the equipment--the large, red inflatable, for instance, which made one outstanding appearance--and many instruments.
- Daniel Cariaga "Feldman Quintet, Other Works Premiere at Fest", Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1985
The band also teamed up with the Kronos Quartet with what must have been a delightful morning gig:
And a little bit of extra duty on the CalArts weekend as he was part of an ensemble performing Ronnie Engel’s Performance Percussion:
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At NMA 1987, Bergamo teamed up with Ron George to present his piece Gupta Sloka Chanda.
The percussion portion of the concert ended with "Gupta Sloka Chanda," written and conducted by John Bergamo, and featuring George on tablas and ballad console with five marimbas accompanying him.
Based on North Indian music, the piece was in three movements. Most interesting was the second movement, during which the musicians created strange effects by bowing the marimbas.
The result was a background of musical sighing against which George built sound textures from his collection of gongs.
- Susan L. Pena, Redding Eagle-Times, “New Music Sounds Off in Old Philadelphia”, October 9, 1987
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Bergamo's piece, with [Ron] George playing tabla while five percussionists from Temple University developed shimmering sounds from marimbas and vibraphones, had the same inner serenity wrapped in motionless sonic atmospheres.
- Lesley Valdes (with contributions by Daniel Webster), "New-music fete floats a concert", Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 1987
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A recorded version from 2008 which seems to have dropped an “a” in the spelling…
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A really nice homage on his passing from CalArts, including a couple of videos