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Avantgarde

Belgian avant-rock, founded 1977

Aksak Maboul

Aksak Maboul is a Belgian avant-rock band that Marc Hollander founded with Vincent Kenis in 1977, after producer Marc Moulin commissioned Hollander to make an album for his short-lived Kamikaze label. That album, Onze Danses Pour Combattre la Migraine, came out the same year. In 1979 they were active in the Rock in Opposition movement. They recorded the second album in Switzerland with former Henry Cow members Chris Cutler and Fred Frith, and it came out in 1980 on Crammed Discs, the label Hollander had just started. Hollander and Kenis then teamed up with a Brussels band and became The Honeymoon Killers. The unfinished third album, Ex-Futur Album, finally surfaced in 2014, a new double album followed in 2020, and singer Véronique Vincent died in October 2025, aged 68.

Paris, self-taught and self-recorded

Ghédalia Tazartès

Ghédalia Tazartès was entirely self-taught. On a reel-to-reel deck he spliced together his own voice, chants in invented and half-remembered languages, and instruments like Tibetan singing bowls and harmonica, and he called the result "impromuz." His 1987 album, Tazartès, drew partly on French poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé's included, and was later reissued with his 1979 debut on a single 2004 Alga Marghen CD. He spent decades in near-total obscurity. Still, his name had turned up as early as 1979 on Nurse With Wound's now-legendary list of avant-garde touchstones, and decades later that mention helped build his cult following among noise and outsider-music listeners.

Houston, Corwood Industries, 1978

Jandek

Jandek is the musical project of Sterling Smith, a lo-fi folk singer based in Houston, Texas, born in 1945, who has kept his personal history almost entirely to himself. His debut album appeared in 1978, at first credited to a band called The Units, until a Californian group with the same name forced a change. Since then he has released over 120 albums independently on Corwood Industries, a label he set up himself. Contact has been rare. In a 1985 phone conversation with John Trubee for Spin he said he was working as a machinist, and Chad Freidrichs' 2003 documentary Jandek on Corwood contained no interviews with him. Then on October 17, 2004, he played unannounced at the Instal Festival in Glasgow. It was his first live performance.

Cleveland, September 1975

Pere Ubu

Pere Ubu formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in September 1975. After Rocket from the Tombs broke up, David Thomas and Peter Laughner recruited Tom Herman, Tim Wright, Scott Krauss and synthesist Allen Ravenstine, and named the band after the main character of Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi. Laughner died of acute pancreatitis in June 1977, aged 24. The debut album, released in February 1978, sold poorly but got strong reviews and became an influence on early alternative rock. New Picnic Time followed in 1979. They broke up in 1982 and reformed in 1987, with The Tenement Year out in 1988, and went through many lineup changes after that. Thomas was the one constant member until his death from complications of kidney disease on April 23, 2025.

From Birmingham to Germantown

Sun Ra

Sun Ra was born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 22, 1914. In the 1940s he moved to Chicago, where Fletcher Henderson hired him as pianist and arranger, and on October 20, 1952, he legally changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra. In the mid-1950s he and Alton Abraham, his friend and business manager, set up El Saturn Records. The label issued Super-Sonic Jazz in 1957 and Jazz in Silhouette in 1959, both by his big band, the Arkestra. The Arkestra moved to New York City in the fall of 1961 and to the Germantown section of Philadelphia in 1968. Sun Ra died in Birmingham on May 30, 1993. The Arkestra still performs, led by veteran sideman Marshall Allen.

New Haven, guitar since 1978

Loren Connors

Loren Connors was born Loren Mazzacane Connors in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 22, 1949. He studied art in the early 1970s, then chose music over painting. He has recorded as Guitar Roberts, Loren Mazzacane and Loren Mattei, and from 1978 to 1984 he made mostly solo blues abstractions on his own Daggett label, the Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations series among them. Suzanne Langille, his life partner, sang on several recordings and helped edit his suites. He has worked with Keiji Haino, Alan Licht, Jim O'Rourke, John Fahey, Jandek and Thurston Moore. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1992, he kept recording anyway, went back to painting in the 2010s, and showed acrylics at Artists Space in Manhattan in 2018.

San Francisco to Brussels

Tuxedomoon

Tuxedomoon came out of the Angels of Light collective in San Francisco in 1977, built around Steven Brown and Blaine L. Reininger, who had met in an electronic music class. Anything that sounded like someone else was off limits. Bassist Peter Principle, performer Winston Tong and filmmaker Bruce Geduldig joined, and Half-Mute came out on Ralph Records in 1980. After a stretch in New York and the film Downtown 81, Reininger left early in 1983 and the band moved to Europe, spending some months in Rotterdam before settling in Brussels. They made Holy Wars for Crammed Discs in 1985 and played on the Wings of Desire soundtrack in 1987. They came back on record with Cabin in the Sky in 2004, then lost Geduldig in 2016 and Principle in 2017.

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