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50,000 Reasons: UT

These pen portraits build up into a gallery of special people. These people have made unique contributions to popular culture. Some of the stories will be fairly familiar, and some may seem slightly strange. There are some glaring omissions, and some odd inclusions. A thread of narrative runs through, and it’s all as subjective as hell.

Just occasionally you read something on pop matters that has you punching the air with sheer joy. One of those moments for celebration came chancing upon a delightfully detailed Ut interview at Warped Reality, where Andrea Feldman had long been flying the flag for one of the great pop groups. The reissue by Blast First of the In Gut’s House and Griller titles by Ut gave the perfect opportunity for Andrea to delve, and it gives a great excuse to air my Ut story.

Way back in the mid-‘80s when I started a new job I was distracted by an envelope on one of my new colleagues’ desks, addressed to one Jacqui Ham. I was intrigued. Jacqui Ham was a member of Ut, the cantankerous pop explorers. Could it be her? Eventually I plucked up the courage to ask. My new colleague didn’t have a clue what I was on about, but promised to check with her partner who mastered records for a living. And, yes, it turned out it was our Jacqui Ham, and he had been, erm, utterly astonished to hear his partner come home talking about Ut, warning her that the new work colleague must be into some strange stuff.

It was an early incarnation of pop writer Everett True, when he was The Legend!, that woke me up to the possibilities of Ut when scribbling for Alan McGee’s legendary fanzine Communication Blur, which made up for deficiencies in literacy with its extraordinary enthusiasm which was completely contagious, vitally important, and incredibly inspirational. I seem to recall The Legend! comparing Ut to the Young Marble Giants, in terms of stark simplicity, but that could be my memory playing tricks on me. Was it the Raincoats?

And memories do play tricks on me. I somehow had got it into my head that there was an article on Ut in an old edition of much-loved Manchester fanzine Debris by Lizzie Borden, with photos by Birrer. Dave Haslam’s great magazine definitely did run an Ut feature (1987-ish), but it turns out it was by Elizabeth Johnson and starts fantastically: “For me, Ut represent one of the most intense musical experiences in the known universe. Are you ready to have your head trip with infinite velocity, sheer and primal ferocity?” She goes on: “To consider their music a random clang of guitars, erratic rhythms, and screamingly abstract vocals is to commit exorcism on their cohesive dark-sided collage.” Birrer did take the pictures, by the way.

And anyway a Lizzie Borden did write for Debris, and in fact in a slightly earlier edition reviewed Diamanda Galas’ The Divine Punishment: “She is a rare flame of brilliance shining her talent on subjects as these and illuminating them in such a unique way, that anyone who is brave enough to bear that torrent and whirlpool of sound can see them by a flaming light of truth.” The next review is of Marc Riley decimating the NME C86 cassette.

Lizzie Borden is if anything best known for the early ‘80s film, Born In Flames, which like much of the art of the time was a response to having little money. While in turn it is known for the Lora Logic/Red Crayola title track, the film itself is an absolute gem, enriched by its revolutionary feminist theme, and the more things change the more they remain the same sense.

Born In Flames features a freewheeling improvising Adele Bertei as a revolutionary preacher on a pirate radio station, somewhere between her days as a member of the Contortions and her solo “success” strangely in the wake of Madonna, with records like the great Little Lives where she sings about Jim and his saxophone and the gang hitting the East Side back in ’79 and how “crazy visions kept the fools on the run but times keep changin’ and money keeps changin’ hands when Angels with Dirty Faces turn into Babes in Moneyland.”

Ut emerged from that same downtown NYC art/punk no wave scene that has since been the stuff of so many dreams. Interestingly where DNA’s Arto Lindsay traced roots and connections to Brazil and Caetano Veloso, so the girls from Ut traced roots and connections to the UK underground and The Fall in particular. Maybe more than anyone Ut understood where The Fall were coming from and what they were saying and how they were behaving. And it seems Mark E Smith was incredibly accommodating and encouraging and supportive of Ut’s stretching of pop possibilities.

The reissue of In Gut’s House and Griller respectively highlight how far ahead Ut were as a pop unit. Their determinedly democratic approach to structuring sound reached fruition on these wonderful sets, and what is most striking is the taut tenacity that is held so strikingly in check, with an impressive discipline, along the lines of Mark E Smith hectoring his boys not to start improvising. As with The Fall and Fire Engines, there is no such thing as a conventional guitar solo in an Ut song. It’s what you always dreamed Sonic Youth would be.

Emerging from the same milieu, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon has been quoted as saying her group was always trying to catch up with Ut. The interesting thing, perhaps by dint of their background (check out Andrea’s interview!), is how Ut avoided the clichés of American rock which so attracted many contemporaries and who claimed that their upbringing was so coloured by the Black Sabbaths, Bostons, and Kiss curls of sound on the AOR radio. Despite being way ahead, Ut left behind such a slim set of recordings (you need to hear the early 12”s and live recordings by the way), whereas Kim coolly has seemed so organised, with Sonic Youth, and her X-Girl clothing range with Daisy von Furth, and side projects like Free Kitten (we love their rendition of Teenie Weenie Boppie) and the astonishing SYR 5 with DJ Olive and Ikue Mori, and before that Harry Crews with Lydia Lunch, whose own Teenage Jesus kick started so much.

Unlike many pop peers Ut knew when to stop, but devotees new and anew are urged to track down offshoots like Jacqui Ham’s Dial (and that envelope by the way contained a DAT of Dial) and Sally Young’s Quint who both continued the pioneering work of the parent group. Quint’s addition of trumpet adds a strangely warped pop veneer eerily reminiscent of Ut contemporaries the June Brides, which can only be a good thing. —John Carney

Reposted from Tangents.co.uk | © John Carney

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Interviews

Interview : Influencing (2006)

This is the final part of the interview with Ut.

It’s funny —even though the four of us never actually sat in the same room to discuss the band’s history (variety of time zones & continents made that logistically impossible), I feel as though we’ve all been having this lovely, extended conversation for the last few months. This whole experience has just been a delight from start to finish. I hope it’s been as enjoyable to read!

For reference, my original No Wave article is here.

When you’re younger you (typically) digest music in a fairly non-discerning fashion (ie, passively). What song or band marked a turning point for you, when you realized there was a real power & expressiveness in music?

 

Sally: I don’t remember ever digesting music in a non-discerning fashion. But I can mention songs or bands that really hit the mark, like the first time I heard John Coltrane or Miles Davis (I used to listen to Bitches’ Brew over and over again when I was 16 because I found it endlessly mysterious and fascinating). Or the first time I heard Marvin Gaye and Al Green sing; or Billie Holliday do “I Cover the Waterfront” and “Strange Fruit.” Or listening to Aaron Copland and being entranced by what classical music could be. I was mesmerized when I first listened to Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” and just wanted to make music that sounded like that. I was also really taken with the skewed rhythms of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. And I was totally captivated by Dylan’s singing and songwriting. His phrasing and lyrics were the most moving and evocative I had ever heard.

What were you listening to when you were 15? 20? 25? Have you rediscovered anything from that time and how did it sound to you today?

Sally: 15ish: At this age I was listening to either jazz (such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock), or folk- or blues-based music (Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Dylan, Donovan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainright III). The only rock music I tended to listen to at this stage was also either heavily folk- or blues-based (Dylan c. Blonde on Blonde and “Highway 61”, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, Derek and the Dominoes, The Doors).

20ish: The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground, The Incredible String Band, James Brown, Captain Beefheart, Mink DeVille, The Clash, Wire, Springsteen, PIL, Pere Ubu.

25ish: The Birthday Party, Einstuerzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation has always been a favorite), The Fall, Prince.

In the past few years, I’ve rediscovered jazz and appreciate people like Coltrane and Miles Davis with more understanding of what they were actually doing, which has been an enlightening experience. It’s also a strange feeling of coming full circle to what I was listening to at 15 when I first became aware of music as a deep and complex journey, but now I’m experiencing the journey on a somewhat higher and more conscious level.

Jacqui: I was obsessed with music. I had a little record player next to my bed when I was 4. My favorite songs were “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “Sleeping Beauty.” In my house there was Duke Ellington, Beethoven, “Mack the Knife”, Big Bad John, and records by the Weavers. I got into the Beatles and the Stones as they happened in elementary school. The first single I bought was “Jumping Jack Flash” when I was 11. A girl moved from Pittsburgh got me into Motown and Sly Stone. My older sister had a great record collection so when I was 13 I was hearing everything from Beefheart to the Velvet Underground.

In high school Sally and I were turned onto free jazz, Bartok and Ives by a jazz pianist friend. Another friend figured out how to rent Cocteau films for school and got us into Rimbaud. We subsequently discovered Patti Smith before she did Horses because she was doing some Rimbaud thing in NYC.

Ut | Zine Article by Elizabeth Johnson. Photos by BirrerAnother friend had an incredible avant-garde record collection and we’d hear stuff there. I was really into the blues especially Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf and Skip James. Some pivotal records were: Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61, the Velvets’ Banana album and White Light White Heat, Hendrix Are You Experienced?, Coltrane’s Live at Birdland, Don Cherry’s Complete Communion and Mingus’ Devil Woman.

In NY around the beginning of Ut I got this Tony Conrad record, Outside the Dream Syndicate by chance and loved it immediately. I was really into Television’s first single ‘Little Johnny Jewel” —and that sound inspired Ut. I’d take records out from the library where I discovered this Daglar wedding song which was in fact the saddest song I’d ever heard. I taped [the song] and carried it around in early days of London exile but I misplaced it long ago.

I’ve always been inspired by music. I remember knowing I liked the guitar sound on the Stones’ “Last Time” when I was a kid. That was the first compulsion for a sound — the first awareness. Then when I was 14 I was in a van with some older people from California and there was this music playing —I don’t know what it was but it toally arrested me. It was like Beefheart’s “Kandy Korn” —circular guitar change which has remained this seminal illusive music for me, something I am always trying to capture.

I am interested by most music even when I don’t like it. It is a continuing education. Sometimes I am more open, sometimes I am intolerant of certain sounds and phrasings. I get into different things all the time. I go through phases —in ‘85 I got really into 20th century classical music and Duke Ellington —really thinking about the structures and sounds. Sometimes I listen in this acute way. Sometimes I can only listen to jazz, sometimes I fanatically listen to Sly Stone or Al Green.

My favorite music is probably Arabic and Turkish because I am always in the mood for this tonality. There have been many crucial songs that have influenced me but the one that captures so many things that I aspire to is “Early in the Morning” recorded at a penitentiary in the 40’s by Lomax.

Nina: I was never a real musico, but of course I was a huge fan of Hendrix, the Stones and Beatles, all of Motown’s artists, The Who, Janis, Jefferson Airplane, the Animals Michael Jackson et al when I was a teenager and 20-something Soft Machine bien sure became very important. I was always a fan of “world” music; I wasn’t exposed to much jazz or blues but a bit. Having started out life in South Africa I was exposed to rhythms and sounds from there which I’m sure influenced my style of playing later. When Punk started I did not take the Clash or Pistols very seriously, I was much more into a visual creative reality in fact and it was only when I got to NYC that the music bug bit me, and it bit me hard.

What do you do when you’re not making music? And, if you didn’t have music as an outlet, what do you think you’d do instead?

Jacqui: I write as well and I’d like to make films.

Sally: I work mainly as a book editor and sometimes music and travel writer, so I spend a lot of time writing and editing for a living. I also go to the cinema, gigs and art exhibitions. If I wasn’t continuing to do music in some way, I think I’d be writing a novel.

Pop-culture item(s) that mean(s) a lot to you (that’s not music)?

Sally: I grew up as a bookworm, so books have always been iconic for me. As a child I was obsessed with J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and as a teenager I was transformed by reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Notes from Underground, along with Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry, Jean Genet’s prose and Antonin Artaud’s theories about theater. In my 20s, it was Nietszche’s philosophy that gripped me.

With movies, I wouldn’t know where to begin, there are so many that mean a lot to me, but Fassbinder, Fellini, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky are directors whose films stood out for their pioneering vision and who took me places I hadn’t been before. The most exciting film I’ve seen recently is Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

I’m also a great fan of art and my way of looking at painting was strongly influenced by the American abstract expressionists. But some of my favorite art objects come from ancient cultures. I saw an exhibition of Aztec art recently that had large sculptures of insects that I thought were among the most amazing and beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Jacqui: I was fascinated by everything and am always reading and investigating things. I thought a lot about revolution, how things grew and evolved. I’ve always written and many books and films have been essential. Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Rimbaud, Artaud and Genet were seminal. Godard and films like Mean Streets, The Mother and the Whore, and Pierrot Le Fou.

What musical artist will you just never ‘get’? For me, it’s Elvis Costello, for you it’s _______…

Sally: Frank Zappa. I’ve had people try to foist Frank Zappa on me, not understanding how I couldn’t appreciate him and thinking that it must be because I haven’t heard enough or the right thing, etc. But the more I’ve heard, the more I can’t stand it. His approach to experimentation seems so contrived and soulless to me, I can’t bear it. In fact, if someone wanted to invent an effective instrument of torture to extract some well-kept information from me, they couldn’t do much better than to force me to listen to Frank Zappa endlessly. I think it would send me right ‘round the bend.

Reposted from Warped Reality (2006)

Categories
Interviews

Interview : Internal Democracy (2006)

UT gained notoriety for its markedly democratic approach to making music, having no lead singer per se and making a point of switching off on instruments. Was this non-hierarchical approach difficult to maintain? (We’re so used to fixed focal points in bands, even ones with avant-gardist tendencies, that any other arrangement automatically seems potentially fraught.)

Jacqui: We came to it because we were all musical that way. We wanted to subvert the hierarchical thing but we were mainly into the heightened perspective you get playing from every vantage point. We were into how it expanded the sound and the character of the songs —it was thrilling for us to have all these different combinations beside the fact that we were conceptually into shaking things up. But we were not strict about it.

We had different sounds and complexions on the instruments and exploring the merge and combustion was inspiring to us. We were always discovering and attempting new things —we had the sense that all was possible. We had this way of spontaneously composing and the main thing for us was to serve the music and to take everything further.

Nina: Our “democratic” thing sprung entirely from who we were as people and our natal politics as it were, and so for us it always made sense —even if at times it caused problems, like every system in fact.

We decided to change instruments as well as all other “jobs” in the band —we had a kind-of saying that we each got to be both the “controller and the dustbin collector” at different times!

We were often accused of being aggressive in both our music and our approach so I’m not sure at that time it was ever seen in any way as a “quiet radical” thing!

Sally: Our decision to switch instruments didn’t come about as a dogmatic idea or conceptual plan. It was just more fun and stimulating that way, as we all enjoyed the experience of playing different instruments and exploring what we could do on them. We didn’t think our identity was limited to playing just one particular instrument (that is, none of us felt we were just a guitar player or just a singer or just a drummer, etc.) and it kept us in the mode of constantly experimenting without getting into ruts with any one instrument. Swapping instruments probably did have the innate effect of negating any potentially hierarchical developments within the band, as well as keeping audiences and the media from pigeonholing us in specific roles. The only difficulty we had in maintaining this approach was a practical one, as during performances it took a certain amount of time to move from one instrument to another and to set oneself up in a different sphere.

We tried to take this into account when deciding on the order of the set, to avoid the awkward time gaps that switching instruments could lead to. But our consideration first and foremost was the dynamic and aesthetic order of the songs —we’d take in practical considerations only as long as they didn’t jar with this. For example, if there were two or three songs in the set that Nina drummed on, we’d try to put these next to each other, unless the songs really didn’t complement each other aesthetically/dynamically in such close juxtaposition.

We always put a great deal of thought into the order of our sets for gigs and our tracks on albums to attain the strongest dynamic movement and progression, like arranging scenes in a play. As for people being used to fixed focal points in bands, I’m sure that audiences may well have found us disconcerting. But then I don’t think disconcerting is such a bad thing to be.

Have you attempted this arrangement in subsequent bands, or some variation thereof?

Jacqui: In [my current band] Dial I do the vocals but the composition is improvised together. It is the same process. Rob Smith and Dom Weeks are extraordinary musicians; we play mainly the same instruments but it is fluid.

What bands did you find the most kinship with (both in NYC and London)?

Sally: We felt a strong kinship with The Fall, as mentioned. Mark E Smith’s lyrics were something Jacqui and I in particular felt a great affinity with and his approach to singing and music made a lot of sense to us. As Jacqui and I lived in the same apartment in NYC, we would often end up listening to the same music. Jacqui listens to music a lot and picks up on things that are happening very quickly, and she had lived in NYC for a few years before I moved there, so she introduced me to lots of music. We also went out to gigs together all the time.

Mars and DNA were important bands for us. We also loved the “30 Seconds over Tokyo” era of Pere Ubu. We both related strongly to Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and it was really those three bands that led me into the downtown NY music scene at first.

PiL, too, were quite important, especially Keith Levine’s guitar playing. Soon after arriving in London, we saw The Birthday Party, who were a big inspiration, and we enjoyed playing some gigs with them. And yeah, we felt in good company with other Blast First bands like Sonic Youth and we got on well with The Butthole Surfers, who had a great approach to both music and humour.

Jacqui: Bands in our area around the time of Ut: Mars DNA Red Transistor Pere Ubu The Fall PiL Joy Division Television Richard Hell Voidoids Iggy Pop This Heat Birthday Party and later Neubauten, the Virgin Prunes, Sonic Youth, Bad Seeds, Swans, Big Black, My Bloody Valentine, the Dead C.

Nina: Yes, all those bands. I especially loved the Voidoids, Television, Pere Ubu, Mars, DNA, Swans, the Lounge Lizards —NYC was just saturated with great music. We were awash in it all the time, then in London we had The Birthday Party, Neubauten, PIL who were so important for their brief life, Joy Division. Of course Patti Smith for me was an enormous influence too, primarily in sense of her attitude and stance. I saw her play at the Roundhouse in London not long before going to NY and came away really inspired, ready for what happened to me when I got there —which was I got co-opted fast into The Gynaecologists because my best friend Robert Appleton (whom I knew from art school in London) had met Rhys and started a band together. They asked me to play guitar w them, which I duly did! I had never played music before except for a kind of Terry Riley-esque drumming workshop in London, I had studied mime briefly with Lindsay Kemp and was into performance art. In fact a large part of my work at art school was performance and film with my partner in crime Peri. In 1976 I chose between going to Germany to be where Joseph Beuys was teaching (except I didn’t speak German) or to NY to check it out —I went to NYC.

UT_1980.jpg
What factors led to the band’s dissolution?

Jacqui: After 11 years we wanted to do our own things. The musical bond is always present but we are onto different things now.

Sally: I think it just ran its course. We’d been through a lot together in 11 years. We’d toured in America and all over Europe (we’d even done a tour of Eastern Europe while it was still behind the iron curtain that was an incredible experience). But anyone who’s toured knows what hard work it is, especially how it puts people up close against each other in an uncomfortable way.

We’d also put out 3 studio albums, a live album and tape, and two studio EPs. The three of us were straining in different directions by the end. We had created a very fertile environment for growth, development and experimentation for a long period of time. But, in even the best groups, the time eventually comes when it’s better to go your own way. I think we managed to stay the course pretty well until then and provide a receptive and motivating vehicle for each other’s creativity.

Nina: We really gave UT our all, we truly loved creating music together. We knew that we were a match made in heaven musically, which is so rare. Also we managed not to be in competition with each other beyond small stuff. We worked hard and consistently [but] it was tough to continue after a point. There were many factors, including financial, and also although we had wonderful people helping us we never got quite as much help as we needed for the physical and organizational practicality of touring and gigging. Blast First did not organize or finance our tours, we did… I was getting itchy feet and felt a real need to get out of London. So in the end it seemed to us all the natural thing to do. I decided to go live in LA where my brother was. Amazingly I’m very glad I went, but that’s another story!

What musical projects have you been involved with since the end of UT?

Sally: I formed a band called Parachute soon afterwards, which was short-lived and only made it as far as a few gigs, as we eventually discovered as we progressed that we had different goals. I then formed a band called Quint, with a line-up of guitar and vocals, bass, drums, trumpet and violin. That lasted about five years, in which time we put out a single on vinyl (“Blueprint to a Blackout”/”Sawtooth”) and an album on CD (Time Wounds All Heals). Quint meant a great deal to me, but changes in the line-up eventually led to a band whose chemistry was askew and that wasn’t functioning properly, so it came to an end. At the moment, I’m singing with a jazz and blues band that gigs about once a month in Soho in London.

Jacqui: After Ut, I formed Dial with Robert Smith, both of us on guitar. Lou Ciccotelli was our drummer for 2 years and Dom Weeks (of Furious Pig) came in on bass and synth. In ‘93 Lou left and Rob started to play the drum machine as well as guitar.

Dial has released three CDs, Infraction, Distance Runner and 168K, all on our label Cede.

Do you listen to your own music with a critical ear, or is it possible to lose yourself in it?

Jacqui: You always get lost in music to some extent —I can be swept away while having a critical ear. A bad movie can be engrossing. Film and music operate as hypnotics.

With my own music I know the flaws and sometimes this messes up the experience but it’s a mood thing —everything we’ve released has some dynamic that outweighs the problems.

Sally: I have to admit that I find it particularly difficult to listen to my own music without a critical ear. But sometimes I manage to shake off the critic and find myself surprisingly moved by music I’ve made in the past. We’re working on re-releasing Ut material, so I’ve been listening to a lot of Ut’s music lately. Some songs feel shockingly close to home and have even moved me to tears, while others feel strangely alien. It’s a great experience to hear things you’ve done in the past when you haven’t listened to them for awhile, as time provides a distance and objectivity that allows you to hear and discover things in the music that you may not have tuned into before. Other times, you recognize the same old problems you remembered having with the music at the time. But it can potentially refresh one’s perspective.

Is it disheartening to you that women in mainstream pop are still —by and large— airbrushed and cookie-cutter, not to mention fairly problematic as role models? It’s true that the males are too, but that’s hardly moving in the right direction as far as enlightened equality is concerned. Is there anything inspiring going on in mainstream pop right now?

Jacqui: The doll-like diva thing pollutes every part of the music scene, the mainstream just flaunts the essence more, everybody is complicit. Creative role models inspire you to create —it is irrelevant if they are male or female. Every woman can be a role model for other women no matter what she does. What matters is how she handles herself.

Sally: I agree that sometimes it seems as if women haven’t come very far. But there are some exceptions. There’s a lot more women picking up instruments and playing them focusing on the music rather than how they look or whether their gender is an issue.

The drummer in my band Quint (Stephen Gilchrist, aka Stuffy) has since formed a band called The Fuses in which there’s a girl guitarist named Jen Macro who is how I’d imagined girls to be in bands by the 21st century. She’s a fantastic guitar player, completely natural (dresses like she’s hanging out in her living room), yet has a great presence and exudes both toughness and vulnerability. You can just tell she’s up there thinking about the music and her singing and guitar playing and making it happen. There’s no other agenda. It’s pure substance rather than appearance. She’s definitely the kind of girl who should be a role model for other girls who want to be in bands. Every time I see her, I find her an inspiration.

There are others like her, just not enough. A lot of girls either vie for center of attention as the diva, so to speak, or take a meek decorative background role. It’s inspiring to see a band where it feels like the gender doesn’t matter. CONTINUE TO PART THREE >>

Reposted from WARPED REALITY

Categories
Interviews

Interview: No Waves & Blast Firsts (2006)

To London-based, New York City-bred pioneering power-trio Ut, No Wave meant “…breaking things down to the raw essential, ignoring rules and inventing new ones.”

Cutting out everything but the essentials began with the name: UT. Two letters, seemingly reductive but also highly evocative —it’s a primitive, declarative sound, ut. Hard T sound like cut glass. UT. Tongue to the roof of the mouth, an expelling of air — Motion. UT. Like the photo of Yves Klein’s leap into the void that graces their first proper full-length Conviction, there’s a constant taking of risks at work here. It’s not safe, this sound. Not comforting, nor narrowly circumscribed.

To listen was to constantly risk freefall, and whether or not you landed softly was immaterial.

Writer Mark Sinker once characterized Ut as a band who, at their best, “snatch[ed] grace out of disaster.” It’s a marvelously evocative phrase, because it precisely captures the knife’s-edge of tension that the band consistently and compellingly walked during their existence, which spanned a decade-plus from the first inchoate rumblings of No Wave in New York City’s then-desolate East Village through to their lengthy time as ambassadors of abstract, gritty, often beautiful NY noise in England, where they toured with like-minded iconoclasts the Fall and were signed to forward-thinking label Blast First.

Ut —consisting of Nina Canal (Dark Day, Gynaecologists), Jacqui Ham, and Sally Young— began life in late 1978. Although founding members Sally Young and Jacqui Ham had already begun making music together, it wasn’t until a mutual friend introduced them to Nina Canal that the entity known as Ut took flight.

In the broadest sense, Ut was a democracy. Three women trading off on instruments and vocals —the set-up represented “internal democracy in a non-hierarchical structure,” to quote critic Dan Graham. They weren’t interested in having a single focal point, a Star in the spotlight, center stage. Their goals were slyer, and deeply radical: to find the beauty in chaos, the calm at the center of the storm. To wrest the purest expression out of potential anarchy. Their name may have been deceptively simple and declarative, but the music was hardly easily reduced. But then, with Ut the journey was more important than the destination. You never knew where a song might veer next —they weren’t built linearly but ran scattershot, pell-mell.

And they worked, held together with those fascinating harmonies, complex rhythmic structures that turn on a dime and powerful, irresistible bass lines that anchored everything with resolute, effortless determination. From the delicate (spirals of violin and darting harmonies on “Homebled”) to the uplifting (“Safe Burning”’s moving exhortation to “You’ve got to save yourself/For a battle that counts”) the music is full of epiphanies, small and large. As a band they were equally at home with groundswells of daunting noise as they were with quiet moments of surprising delicacy and emotional clarity. Time hasn’t dulled the intense but playful vocal harmonies —the way the voices weave around one another, the way they coo and howl and chirp. If Ut were trying to build a new musical language for themselves, they largely succeeded.

And if that sometimes made them seem a bit isolated or isolating —aloof even— it’s because they were hewing resolutely to their own path. And it seems clear from this vantage point (nearly 20 years after the release of their masterpiece In Gut’s House) that they knew precisely what they were doing. It was the rest of us who were slow in catching up, in understanding just what they were up to. Hopefully light will begin to dawn in August when Mute re-issues In Gut’s House and Griller, with the promise of more rarities to follow. (I can only hope Conviction is next in line.)

Strange coincidence first put me in touch with the band (I happen to work with Sally Young’s brother) but I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect time: Mute reissuing the Ut back catalogue, an upcoming volume of New York Noise in which they figure prominently. It’s been a busy few months for all three band members, who have suddenly found themselves in the position of revisiting the past with an eye towards presenting it to a new audience. Here’s what they had to say…

Spacer.gifThe definition of what, precisely, constitutes “No Wave” is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, thanks to the music’s genre-fluidity. But one pattern to emerge that sets the music apart from what came before is the intersection of players coming from a certain musical naïvete (or lack of training/DIY) with those who came from an academic background. Rather than there being a dividing line between the two disciplines it seems that the East Village environment encouraged not just mutual curiosity but a real cross-pollination, resulting in music that pushed boundaries (both of rock and of modern composition). Does this seem accurate to you? How would you define “No Wave”?

Jacqui: Originally there were two kinds of aesthetics going on: the sound of the so-called “No Wave” was more dirt, raw, dissonance, harder in every way, and the Soho sound was arty, intellectual, detached. This division was present even in the Talking Heads vs. Television and the Ramones, which were the East Village thing. The line was blurred, but there was a kind of reverence in Soho, in part because they were interfacing with the idea of being serious composers or they were artists coming in from that perspective.

The “No Wave” thing was more irreverent, but it wasn’t a case of academic vs. not. Only a few people were coming in from a trained perspective, but everyone was influenced by avant-garde classical composers. You heard Einstein on the Beach blaring out of windows mixing with “Lady Marmalade.” This was the environment. How much musical background people had varied, but it wasn’t necessarily influencing what they were doing, it depended on how much they were, or chose to be, indoctrinated by their past.

Nina: NYC in general has always been a creative melting pot, and THE Avant Garde city of cities, so yes, everyone was certainly influenced by those composers amongst many other influences. Some No Wavers came out of a New Music background like Rhys Chatham, Jeffrey Lohn, Jill Kroesen. There were people from literally all musical corners and many other disciplines who quickly gravitated toward this scene, which was so wide open, and either participated in a band(s) like me, Robert Appleton, Barbara Ess, or Robert Longo did (Theoretical Girls) etc. Or [else] they created their own version in other media like Rhys Chatham with Karole Armitage (i.e. Drastic Classicism).

UT-PullQuote01.gifAt the time, was there a sense of No Wave being a movement of sorts, a marked break from what had come before? Or was it a lot more organic than that? I have this possibly naïve notion that everyone in DNA, Theoretical Girls, Mars, UT, etc. all lived in the same four-block radius, shared rehearsal spaces and talked art & music together, leading to a cross-pollination of musical styles and influences happening all at once. What was it really like?

Nina: NYC in late 77–1980 was in a magical zone of sorts. I had come from London after the swinging 60 & 70’s and NY actually blew my mind completely by being a place where ANYTHING was creatively possible! The scene that happened came about organically and spontaneously and burned out fast because it went against the “normal” grain of the way of things from the start. It was at once anarchic and inclusive: everyone was equal for the blink of an eye, so the field of possibilities just went wide open — BANG, just like that. And also just as suddenly there were other people of all disciplines starting up bands to play what I call “weird loud music” or spoken word stuff too, and yes, it was very village-like in many ways, with most living in the East Village or at least downtown.

Jacqui: There was a consciousness of making a new music, of progressing. You make the sounds that you need to hear —every generation does.

There was a natural progression from the Velvet Underground to Mars, as there was from 60’s rock to the Ramones. It was organic, but it was radical. It was stripping down to the essence, taking things further, taking things as far as they would go.

How did the band coalesce? What were the early shows like? Theatrical? Confrontational? Aloof? How did audiences respond to the band’s lack of a single focal point?

Sally: Jacqui and I were living in an apartment on 5th Street in 1978 and had begun writing songs together. We were going out and seeing a lot of bands and were interested in forming a band ourselves. A mutual friend of ours and Nina’s, Peter Gordon, suggested that Nina might be a good person to play with. Jacqui knew Nina a bit and liked her and we’d seen her play with other people. We all got together in a rehearsal room in 1978 and were excited by what happened musically, so we soon became a band. Our first gig was in 1979 at Tier 3 and it was hard to tell how we went down. We had no intention of being confrontational or aloof. We were, however, trying to be theatrical in the truest sense, in terms of doing a performance that was dramatic, powerful, captivating and emotionally moving. We were just up there concentrating on making music that we felt strongly about and that made sense to us —that was our single focal point.

I don’t remember anyone at the time ever appreciating us changing instruments, and we got a lot of flak about how impractical it was. But we were very intent on making the kind of music we wanted to make, and, as I said before, that involved us not being pinned down to just one instrument or role, so other people’s disapproval didn’t prove to be much of a deterrent. However, we certainly never wanted to alienate the audience either. Personally, I would find it more dramatic and interesting to watch a band that swapped instruments, as I would be fascinated to see how each person approached each instrument differently and how the various line-ups affected the sound of the music. But that doesn’t interest people who are looking for a quick fix.

Jacqui: Sally and I had been improvising and constructing songs together and planned to do a band from high school. I met Nina in NYC. The three of us played together and it was instantaneous.

Shows were intense. That quote “snatching grace from disaster” was probably a show with a tech breakdown then the music recovered the spirit. But this also toward our aesthetic of taking things to the edge even within a musical phrase. I like the unsteady, the untamable course. We were into friction and tension is good —it is the dynamic.

What prompted the band’s move to the UK? Was it dissatisfaction with the NYC scene? Or something else entirely? How did you find Blast First?

Jacqui: We moved to England because we could gig with the Fall and make a record for free with John Loder [of London label Southern] but we had no long-range plan. At the time the scene in NYC was a ghetto, there were only 3 or 4 places to play and our record had just fallen in the ether when Charles Ball (Lust/Unlust) went AWOL. I heard the Fall’s “Spector vs. Rector” on the radio in Nov ‘80 and was electrified. The music and the speed rap monologue with characters was on my wavelength like no other.

About a month later Ed Bahlman, who ran the 99 record shop, told me the same thing and said I should get a tape to them because they were coming to NYC in the spring. So he mid-wifed this connection and it happened that Scott Piering, an American who worked at Rough Trade at the time (and who is responsible for breaking the underground to the overground) was coming with them on tour. So I passed the tape to Scott; the Fall were into us and we ended up gigging with them until we broke up. Scott subsequently helped us a great deal and was crucial to Ut.

Sally: We were interested in what was happening in the UK music scene and the fact that a band like The Fall was thriving there intrigued us. But the idea of actually going to the UK began, on a realistic level, when John [Loder] saw Ut play in NYC and said he’d love to record an album with us. We weren’t sure if he really meant it until he came back a few months later and saw us play again and said the same thing, so we started to think he must be serious. We’d just recorded an EP for Charles Ball’s Lust/Unlust label before it collapsed, which therefore never got released. And we really wanted to get some of our music out, so it was very tempting.

Around the same time, The Fall were doing a US tour and Jacqui was determined that we should play with them. So she managed to get a tape of Ut to Mark E. Smith, who really liked it and let us know he’d definitely give us some support slots with The Fall if we came to the UK. So we had two offers that were pretty irresistible.

On top of that, Nina’s brother, who had been a film editor at the BBC for many years, had a house in London that he was in the midst of trying to sell after having just moved to LA and he said we could stay there until it was sold. So we had a chance to record, do gigs with The Fall and a place to stay —going to London suddenly seemed like the obvious thing to do.

Nina: I had also been playing guitar with Rhys Chatham, and he asked me to play “Drastic Classicism” in France for a summer festival. So I took that opportunity to take a break from NYC. While I loved [it] madly and [it] had totally changed my life forever, [it] had started to feel like a vortex, ever tighter and more intense —I had the sense that I was losing touch with the rest of the world… I went to London “for a while,” not intending to stay or leave NYC. I met with Scott Piering to discuss and cement the Fall tour, etc. and we fell in love. Jacqui and Sally soon followed and I stayed in London for the next 9 years!

Jacqui: Blast First was no accident because Paul Smith was into our NYC aesthetic. He filled a gap because no other label at that time was onto the No Wave after Charles Ball disappeared. Basically Smith was recruited to our scene by Lydia Lunch. We met him in London around the same time and knew about his plans for Blast First a few years before it actually happened. Meanwhile we released Ut records ourselves on Out Records. CONTINUE TO PART TWO >>

Reposted from
Warped Reality
PHOTO BY SIMON VIDA © 1988

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Feral Epiphanies (from Plan B #13)

Ut, In Gut’s House
Griller (Blast First/Mute)

Ut: music: the syllable used in the fixed system of solmization for the note C.

White Columns Noise Fest Flyer, 1981
Noise Fest Flyer, 1981

This is where music ended.

Every gig these three New York ladies played between migrating to London in 1981 and splitting in 1990 felt like it could be their last, such was the force of their emotion, their unwillingness to compromise. Guitar strings were coerced, battered, detuned, retuned – and maybe only then returned, bruised and bewildered, to their original state. Vocals were spat out, mumbled, suddenly roared: Jacqui Ham and Nina Canal and Sally Young taking an eternity to switch between instruments (the band was truly democratic) and mic duties, seemingly unaware of the restrictions usually placed upon a band by its attendant audience (ie, to actually perform).

First time we saw Ut at a Birthday Party gig, me and my mate Geoff sat studiously on the edge of the stage with our backs towards the trio, such was our hatred for their lack of presence and seeming reliance on crap guitar tuners. A few years later, we had bottles thrown at us by Fall fans – Fall fans, for fuck’s sake – for dancing to Ut’s jagged, post-No Wave rhythms. We went on to see Ut about 45 times: sure, we were aware of Sonic Youth’s turbulent guitar-storms, of Live Skull’s almost narcoleptic haze, of the Butthole Surfers’ depraved pyrotechnics and The Membranes’ shimmering fury – but no one could touch these women for sheer intransigence and confrontation.

The deeper into themselves Ut dug, the more the audiences seemed to hate them: the gaps between songs would often became longer than the songs themselves as bickering took hold, but still they persisted, heedless yet acutely focused.

It was hard to tell where the roots of this music lay – perhaps in Nina’s previous band, Robin Crutchfield’s rackety Dark Day, or in the relentless surge of Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus, or in John Cale’s howling viola – but Ut were always something separate, something apart. When I first experienced Babes In Toyland, I tried to explain their dissonant surge in terms of Ut – but soon realised that beyond the two bands’ beautiful, scaly noise there really weren’t that many parallels to be drawn.

Ut, Griller
Griller, 1989

Ut’s reluctance to pander was matched only by their hatred of the studio – or so it seemed. A cassette, Ut Live, was released on Out in 1981, and a 12-inch followed, both of which captured Ut in their brutal, uncompromising rawness. But it took eight years after their conception in December 1978 for the band to be accorded a full-length release, 1986’s Conviction wherein the band finally documented some of their torturous unease, their fractured individuality shaped through bloody-mindedness into a coherent whole. It was excellent, as was 1987’s long overdue retrospective Early Live Life, both records as dense and emotional and fragile as you’d expect from a band who’d made a career out of onstage deliberation. It wasn’t until Ut released their final brace of records, however – the double 12-inch In Gut’s House (1988) and Griller (1989) – that they managed to truly capture the intensity of their live shows on vinyl.

Even 18 years on, In Gut’s House is astonishing: 10 songs that scrape and scour away until they reach that elusive core at the very heart of music, the core so very few bands reach (maybe The Velvet Underground on ‘Venus On Furs,’ perhaps Sonic Youth on ‘Death Valley ‘69’).

On In Gut’s House, Ut transcended their origins, their surroundings – everything and anything – most especially on the two middle songs, the violin-scarred ‘Shut Fog’ and ‘Homebled.’ The entire album is a series of epiphanies and denouements, bursts of impassioned vocals offset by clattering drumbeats and needling guitar. Lyrics were dark utterances, part Patti Smith, part something altogether more feral and vulnerable.

Griller is damn fine, too, but it pales in comparison. Maybe Ut realised they couldn’t hope to repeat the moment. The 11 songs present still shredded; deep, malicious, urgent and intricately layered. (You can tell now where its producer Steve Albini discovered the sound he later used to such devastating effect on PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me.) Brief guest member Charlie D pounded up a welter of intent on the drums: relentless, heavy, frantic and … just … blam blam blam blam blam blam blam

Everett True interviews Ut
Motivation: “Compulsion.”
Inspiration: “Contempt.”
Confrontation: “Revelation.”
Realisation: “The goalie’s anxiety at the penalty kick.

— Everett True

Reposted from the Plan B Archives, Issue 13.

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Theoretical Music

On Site
Theoretical Music: Ut + Talk Normal
Issue Project Room
New York, USA

During a panel discussion on the No Wave era, part of the three-night multimedia survey Theoretical Music, Thurston Moore shared an amusing downtown-NYC yarn. In the early ’90s, he met six-string wizard Robert Quine in a studio, and the latter attempted to initiate a blues jam. It was a futile gesture; the Sonic Youth guitarist was clueless when it came to such conventional modes. Relating the tale, Moore seemed humiliated, but also proud to have invented musical vocabularies rather than simply built on old ones. His stance echoed the remarks of bandmate Kim Gordon—a participant in another No Wave panel earlier the same evening—who spoke about how the unmooring of punk performance practices from rock & roll orthodoxy was the era’s key innovation. More specifically, it was the revolution that gave her, a self-described non-musician, tacit permission to try her hand at music.

Revisiting the primal lurch and skronk of, say, DNA, it’s easy to hear exactly what Gordon was getting at. Some of the sounds that emerged from NYC’s downtown scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s did seem ahistorical. But even as Theoretical Music organizers Branden W. Joseph and David Grubbs cultivated this viewpoint and echoed a recent rash of books (by Moore and Wire contributor Byron Coley, as well as Marc Masters) in singling out No Wave as a hermetic movement, they issued a shrewd corollary by booking the reunited trio Ut as their marquee performer. The band’s enthralling set, their first in the US since 1991, exhibited a deep idiosyncrasy, yet it also thrived on time-tested rock & roll energy.

Tellingly, the most memorable moment of Ut’s performance was also the most conventional. During “Wailhouse,” from the band’s final LP, 1989’s Griller, members Sally Young, Nina Canal and Jacqui Ham —who, as in the old days, swapped instruments throughout the night— and guest drummer Tom Surgal (of White Out) locked into an insistent, slow-churning swagger. Young’s sultry, goth-chanteuse vocal drove home the notion that the band wasn’t as far removed from the blues as No Wave fetishists might assert.

Of course, the set also featured plenty of old-fashioned artiness: Young bowing her bass with a drum stick, Ham’s steel-wool guitar scribbles, drum-set rhythms from Canal that thudded in and out of meter. At times, these gestures made the trio seem more like an insular tribe than a band, enacting its own secret rituals. But overall, Ut registered as more human and less severe than listeners who had only heard them on record (me, for one) may have expected. Despite their motley appearance —the tallish, silver-haired Canal in black clogs, Young sporting a leather mini dress and Ham looking at once disheveled and ultra-stylish in a gray suit— and marathon tuning sessions, they came off as inviting, even friendly. Canal won over the crowd between songs by cueing up a surfing video (featuring the most anti-No Wave imagery one could think of) and even amid technical travails, the three band members exchanged easy smiles. Their easygoing attitudes cut right through the arty pretension that inevitably surrounds nostalgia for the downtown New York of yore.

Musically too, Ut didn’t come across as a band tied to any movement—instead these were three distinct musical personalities meshing in multiple equally effective configurations. In the strongest of these, Ham layered her weird, plaintive whine over Canal’s rough-edged yet deeply propulsive drumming, while Young’s sturdy, repetitive bass lines provided crucial melodic hooks. Ut’s instrument-switching was no gimmick; it seemed more like a logical set-pacing strategy, such that near the show’s end, when Ham (who had spent much of the show on guitar) finally sat down at the drums to play a gangly tribal groove, it felt like a triumphant payoff. Overall, Ut exemplified the freedom of No Wave while at the same time bucking the movement’s retrospectively calcified aesthetics.

Opener Talk Normal, the NYC duo of guitarist Sarah Register and drummer Andrya Ambro, summoned a more foreboding mood. Their driving yet amorphous sound fields obscured song and left the audience to puzzle out the structural elements. Ambryo acted as a both compass, directing the pieces with brisk, repetitive beats, and engine, galvanizing them with moments of explosive intensity. The set reached a gripping climax when she shoved her stool aside and jitterbugged spastically as she pounded out dense snare and tom rolls. There was a harshness in these outbursts, echoed in Register’s eerie guitar haze and alarmed wail, but as with Ut, other emotions crept in. During a break, Ambro walked over to Register’s area and borrowed her beer for a quick chug. The guitarist grinned and patted the drummer on the back, as if to acknowledge that even in the avant-garde, rock & roll’s first principles still prevail. — Hank Shteamer

This article originally appeared in The Wire issue 322, December 2010. Reproduced by permission. www.thewire.co.uk | Photo: Andrea Feldman

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An Unnerving Calm

In Gut’s House by Ut (1987)

If five stars seems excessive for an album of squeaks, yelps and scrapes, then consider this: beauty is not a well-defined concept. To ask someone, “Isn’t that beautiful?” is to invite them into a shared viewpoint, one they might not have previously considered. Yes, that person is not conventionally good-looking, yet there is something intensely moving about how he holds himself; a fragility which fascinates the viewer, and which his portrait has somehow captured. If you’ll allow that feeling in. Many don’t, and who can blame them? Fear is a scary thing.

An Unnerving CalmI loved the idea of Ut — three noisy women who swapped instruments and argued on stage — before I ever heard them play a note, but I had to learn to love them for real once I got over the disappointment of their not being as I’d imagined. Not all that noisy, actually. Not in a crushing, masculine way, at any rate. And not a Throwing Muses precursor, either, except perhaps in their best-known, misleading song, “Evangelist,” which opens In Gut’s House. Get the skew-pop over early, girls, then on with the show.

It’s almost impossible to describe what you will find when you do allow yourself to enter these kaleidoscopic corridors, these labyrinths of unease. It is fairly easy to point to the New York No Wave scene of the early 80s as the garden from which these fracturing sounds sprang; we can look at the freedom of rhythmic invention those times allowed, when every sub-beat was not micro-timed and synchronized, when pop’s permitted patterns were yet to be fully described in terms of the histories of two monoliths called “Rock” and “Dance;” we might point to their deliberate relocation in the early 80s from the disco-bound US to an England which still permitted the perverse likes of The Fall to persist; we could try to describe Jacqui Ham’s forlorn scat in terms of freed female contemporaries such as Gina Birch (The Raincoats) or Ari Up (The Slits); we could mention a subsequent lineage perhaps taking in Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey, Huggy Bear, Coping Saw and Katastrophy Wife. These things get us somewhere close to what Ut sound like before our moment of surrender, but they are just circumstances. Every truly great band transcends their medium, and, like fellow No-Wave refugees and labelmates Sonic Youth, Ut were —ultimately, completely, indelibly— themselves.

Ut is an invitation to do nothing less than re-hear music itself. Where noiseniks like Glenn Branca and Michael Gira embraced nihilism, Ut’s art is closer to avant-gardists like Stockhausen and Cage who pointed towards the Zen stillness at the heart of life, while celebrating its chaos. The world according to Ham, Canal and Young is undeniably a restless place — witness ‘ID”s jagged drums, the darting vocal and harmonica stabs on ‘Mosquito Botticelli,’ guitar gravel scattered all over ‘Swallow.’ But over and above this there is an unnerving calm. Like one of the moving cities in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines saga, every song is an awe-striking leviathan, slow to wake but unstoppable in its crocodilian movements, accompanied by the rattling of Handre-teeth. The album reaches its stumbling peak on side three of what was originally packaged as a double twelve-inch: ‘Homebled‘ is all rickety violin and soft guitar clawings under a plangent Ham monologue, while ‘Shut Fog‘ is catacomb-dark and arachnophobic; both songs oozing such sweet, sweet resignation all that can be done is to hold on for life itself. The album ends, surprisingly perhaps, with a sunrise — ‘Landscape”s interpenetrating ice-planes suddenly meltwater under a sustaining yellow crayon guitar sun.

While they went on to produce a more muscularly powerful record, Griller, which scored more points with the hip-watchers, it is In Gut’s House – in all its sullen, cracked beauty – that will still be there a thousand years from now. — Razor

REPOSTED FROM THE PEER : AN UNNERVING CALM. | © Razor

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Ut: Primal, Uncompromising

Ut, consisting of Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham, and Sally Young, [is] a fascinating band on any number of levels. Genealogically, they span the great divide between New York’s mythic No Wave outburst of the late 1970s and the legions of bands (the most prominent among them being Sonic Youth) that would spring up in their wake and ultimately eclipse them. Politically, they are three women making challenging music. — John Tuma, Ut Archivist

Ut, In Gut’s House (Blast First/Mute)
Griller (Blast First/Mute)

Barely more than confidential to begin with, Ut was long ago swallowed by the quicksands of rock history. Now, new reissues of the trio’s last two albums show that the band was a musical UFO that somehow squeezed itself into the tight interstice between the corpse of no-wave and then-nascent indie rock.

Constantly switching instruments and trading vocals, Jacqui Ham, Nina Canal and Sally Young wrote songs that blisteringly explored a very female-centric psychic and corporeal anxiety. The band’s masterpiece probably is its second album, In Gut’s House (1988), a fantastically abrasive heap of hesitantly tribal drumming, chanted vocals and serrated guitars, with an occasional screechy violin thrown in for extra color (black, of course). The wheezy “Mosquito Botticelli,” which anchors this manifesto of uneasy listening, sounds like the remains of punk turned inside out and left to rot. Even when Ut flirts with straight-ahead songwriting, the result is claustrophobic, as if the women were desperately scraping at the closing walls of unshakable disquietude.

Engineered by Steve Albini, 1989’s Griller was the band’s swan song. The sound feels more ample, and at times the group hurtles forward, propelled by more orthodox rock drumming. But don’t expect anything soothing: Griller also suggests a certain primal vortex, ready to suck in unsuspecting listeners. And that’s the thing about uncompromising fucked-upness: It just doesn’t get old. — Elisabeth Vincentelli
Originally posted  in
Time Out NY