Finalised playlist

Today I completed my final playlist for my chosen genre No Wave. Previously the tracklist had featured an A side of exclusively late 70s/early 80s New York 'era' No Wave and the reverse had featured more contemporary, 'no wave-inspired' music. However, after the recent mid-project crit in which the concept of taping elements together in a makeshift manner was selected, there is no longer this contrast between old and new within the design. For this reason, I have decided to create a new playlist as well as designing a new set of rules for the A and B side. For this tracklist, I am using youtube instead of Spotify as a lot of prominent No Wave artists such as Mars and DNA do not feature on Spotify.


The system for grouping each side is fairly simple; the A side is punchy and dissonant No Wave that features the classic disarray of notes and pitches. The reverse or A side is a far more harmonious affair that features classic No Wave songs that I do not believe conform to the same, experimental musical patterns. This discrepancy that exists within the genre is due to the definitions varying between being based on the style of music itself or just the artists that were about on the N.Y. postpunk scene at the time. I wanted to highlight this by having two fairly different sounding sides of music that both come under the 'No Wave' banner. Another key rule that I set myself was to not have two songs by the same artist on one side of music, however, artists could feature on both sides as does Lydia Lunch. The musical decisions were well informed by research in general but specifically, other key compilations such as the Brian Eno curated 'No New York' and the more recent ZE Records 'N.Y No Wave'. Certain, educated inclusions are, I believe, a little leftfield such as Eno's 'Kings Lead Hat' which I have never seen on a no wave compilation but definitely conforms to certain features of the genre and is included due to Eno involvement in the latter years of the scene.

Both playlists are around half an hour long but the dissonant collection features one less song with 8 compared to harmonious on 9, highlighting further the differenced between the two extremes of the short-lived avant-garde genre.