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The Anti-Band Movement
Dec. 30th, 2008 07:38 amAnti-Band was a brief post-post punk movement that flourished during the summer of 2009 and then was gone.
Punk told us to kill our rock stars. Anti-Band took it a step further. It wanted to tear down the whole pretentious, egotistical structure of bands, gigs and even songs themselves.
Anti-Band performances were improvised jams. Two or three people would start off the jam, laying down an avant-garde rhythm, and then slowly the entire audience would be encouraged to join in.
Recorded sounds, effects loops and circuit-bent musical toys were the original instruments. But the movement quickly developed a taste for found percussion. People would bring along plastic milk bottles, dismantled engine parts, Barbie dolls filled with rice - the weirder the better.
I only ever got to see one anti-band jam. It took place in a basement record store.
Three skinny emo kids in black carried giant cardboard boxes down the stairs, and started rhythmically dropping and picking them up on the shelves. Hipsters in the know joined in - scrunching flyers, flicking CD cases, rattling the band t-shirt hangers in time to the beat. It built up to a joyous cacophany before ending in a frenzy of ripped cardboard and thrown flyers covering the store like punk confetti.
The whole movement lasted three or four months before petering away. There are some YouTube videos, but no other recordings. Anti-Band was too cliquey, too spontaneous, too shambolic to ever last as a serious musical genre. Think of it as a cleanser, something to clear the palette so we can taste something new...
And then I woke up.
A mini-documentary on a non-existant future musical trend has to be one of my weirder dreams.
But that record store jam was damn fine fun.
Punk told us to kill our rock stars. Anti-Band took it a step further. It wanted to tear down the whole pretentious, egotistical structure of bands, gigs and even songs themselves.
Anti-Band performances were improvised jams. Two or three people would start off the jam, laying down an avant-garde rhythm, and then slowly the entire audience would be encouraged to join in.
Recorded sounds, effects loops and circuit-bent musical toys were the original instruments. But the movement quickly developed a taste for found percussion. People would bring along plastic milk bottles, dismantled engine parts, Barbie dolls filled with rice - the weirder the better.
I only ever got to see one anti-band jam. It took place in a basement record store.
Three skinny emo kids in black carried giant cardboard boxes down the stairs, and started rhythmically dropping and picking them up on the shelves. Hipsters in the know joined in - scrunching flyers, flicking CD cases, rattling the band t-shirt hangers in time to the beat. It built up to a joyous cacophany before ending in a frenzy of ripped cardboard and thrown flyers covering the store like punk confetti.
The whole movement lasted three or four months before petering away. There are some YouTube videos, but no other recordings. Anti-Band was too cliquey, too spontaneous, too shambolic to ever last as a serious musical genre. Think of it as a cleanser, something to clear the palette so we can taste something new...
And then I woke up.
A mini-documentary on a non-existant future musical trend has to be one of my weirder dreams.
But that record store jam was damn fine fun.
