The Lydian Spin: Recent Episodes
Lydia Lunch
A series of lively, deep and often hilarious interviews conducted by Lydia Lunch, one of the most vocal spoken word artists of this or any century and Tim Dahl, musician and general know it all.
While Lydia and Tim have been busy on their respective tours, finding time to record new episodes has been challenging. In the meantime, take a trip down memory lane revisiting a memorable moment from the early days. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in January of 2019, Lydia and Tim sat down with the legendary burlesque star and actress, Kitten Natividad. In this candid conversation, Kitten shares how she transitioned from a conventional career to burlesque, her experiences with director Russ Meyer, and her fond memories of Tom Selleck and Sean Penn's bachelor party. Sadly, in 2022, Kitten passed away. welcomed Lydia and Tim into her home as they navigated the early challenges of podcasting. She was cheerful, whip smart, and very very funny.
Kevin Rutmanis is a bassist and experimental musician, known for his work with bands like Cows, The Melvins, Tomahawk, and hepa.titus. Recently, he has teamed up with visual artist Gina Skwoz for the project Lords and Lady Kevin, creating boundary-pushing music. Their latest release, Last Days At Hot Slit not to be confused with the Andrea Dworkin book of the same name is due out December 6, marks a collaborative effort with Trevor Dunn.
This episode of The Lydian Spin is filled with haunting reflections and fierce critiques. Lydia opens by reading a sharply worded Daily Beast op-ed from Michael Ian Black on the high stakes of the upcoming election. She then dives into the Shimmy Disc release Poe: To One in Paradise (for Hal Willner), a limited edition LP that celebrates Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic verse. This 13-track album featuring luminaries from across poetry, literature, theater, and music—honors the late Hal Willner.
On Side A, listeners are treated to To One in Paradise by Joan as Police Woman, Eldorado by Edgar Oliver, To My Mother by Thurston Moore & Eva Moore, The Valley of Unrest by Eric Mingus, A Dream Within a Dream by Britta Phillips, and Evening Star by Teller.
Side B includes Fairy-Land by Anne Waldman, Dreamland by Lydia, The Sleeper by Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, Silence by Chloe Webb, Imitation by Rick Moody, The Lake by Jennifer Charles, and finally, an archival recording of Allen Ginsberg reading The Bells. Kramer's composition ties the collection together with an atmospheric score, keeping Poe’s spirit alive for a modern audience. A special thank you to Kramer for allowing the Lydian Spin to play the album. Happy Halloween!
Writer, Oxbow alum, Bunuel frontman and friend of the Lydian Spin, Eugene Robinson, joins Lydia and Tim to read from his memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row and share other entertaining stories from his life. Catch Lydia and Eugene at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall on November 9th.
Drummer Sim Cain played with the Rollins Band from 1987 until 1997. Before joining Rollins Band, Sim played in the instrumental trio Gone, alongside future Rollins Band bassist Andrew Weiss and Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn. He has also recorded with artists like David Poe, Marc Ribot, David Shea, and played in Elliott Sharp's Terraplane group. Cain appeared on Ween's 2004 album Quebec and performed with blues legend Hubert Sumlin in the early 2000s.
Babeth Mondini-VanLoo is an artist, filmmaker, and cultural ambassador. She studied art under Joseph Beuys in Germany and earned a Master's in Film & Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977. Babeth is the programming director and founder of the first Buddhist television station in the West. Her art, often described as Social Sculpture, emphasizes spiritual activism. She has created over 60 documentaries on topics such as the science of the mind, Buddhism, punk music, and poetry. Her subjects have included the Dalai Lama, Joseph Beuys, Meredith Monk, the Sex Pistols, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Babeth directed the 1990 film Kiss Napoleon Goodbye which starred Lydia and Henry Rollins. Her work has been exhibited and is held in collections worldwide.
Jim Jones is the legendary frontman for Thee Hypnotics, The Jim Jones Revue, and the explosive new project Jim Jones All Stars. Since the late 80s, Jim has been known for his wild, and intense live performances. Lydia, Jim and Tim discuss a myriad of subjects including: touring, underground rock n roll, and in the distinctly British sense, cunts.
Composer/guitarist Nick Sadler was the guitarist for the rock band Daughters. In addition to this he has played bass and co-authored songs for the band Way Out. Nick also composes music for film and television.
Steve First is an actor, writer, and comedian known for his roles across TV, film, and stage. He gained recognition starring in the Gold Spot commercials for Orange and as a supporting actor in Little Britain. As his alter-ego Lenny Beige, he created and starred in numerous TV shows and live performances. Steve's acting credits span popular shows like Holby City, Friday Night Dinner, and The Serpent Queen, as well as films such as Disobedience and Walk Like a Panther.
Peter Jesperson, is a legendary figure in the music world—DJ, label founder, tour manager, and lifelong music enthusiast. He is best known as the former manager of The Replacements and founder of Twin/Tone Records, Peter joins Lydia and Tim to talk about his journey through the industry and his memoir Euphoric Recall, which is a deep dive into his incredible career.
A San Antonio-born vocalist, lyricist, and artist, Suzy Bravo has performed in heavy metal, punk, blues, and soul bands. Formerly the front woman for bands like The Rocket 350 (later Suzy Bravo & The Rocket 350), Witchcryer and Temple of Love., she is also in the Plasmatics cover band named Tits Out..
Nicky Miller is a Berlin-based, genderqueer interdisciplinary artist with roots in France and Vietnam. Specializing in film, performance art, and creative writing, Nicky’s work explores LGBTQ+ sexualities and identities, often tackling politically sensitive topics like sex work, BDSM, and queer practices. Their award-winning films, including Twisted Distinction and Pink Lips, have been showcased at international queer film festivals, challenging societal norms and redefining perceptions of queer identities.
Travis Jeppesen, is an American novelist, poet, artist, and art critic who is currently based in Berlin. He has authored several notable works, including The Suiciders, Poems I Wrote while Watching TV, and See You Again in Pyongyang. His latest book is Settlers Landing.
Jennifer Charles is a proud childless cat lady writer, singer/songwriter, actor, and poet, best known as one half of the New York cult band Elysian Fields. She has performed and collaborated with artists worldwide, singing in over 10 languages. Notable projects include Lovage with Mike Patton and Dan the Automator, and her Sephardic Diaspora group La Mar Enfortuna. Elysian Fields has created original music for television, film, and stage, including works by Jim Findlay and the French dance company Affari Esteri. Jennifer originated the role of Girl Angel in the Pulitzer-winning opera Angel’s Bone and played Emily Dickinson in BAM's Lightning at our Feet. Elysian Fields recently released their 14th record, What the Thunder Said. Jennifer also launched a new project called Bohemian Flesh with Thomas Bartlett and has recorded audiobooks, including Edith Wharton’s The Touchstone. In her free time, she creates art, gardens, cooks, travels, and cares for her cats.
Chris Mars, is an American painter and drummer best known for his drumming in the iconic Minneapolis band The Replacements. After leaving the band in 1990, he pursued a solo music career before shifting his focus to visual art, where he gained recognition for his nightmarish, surrealist paintings. Chris continues to create art inspired by personal themes, including his brother's struggle with schizophrenia.
The Lydian Spin's latest double feature showcases interviews with members of two standout bands: Catatonic Suns and Tina Kit. Catatonic Suns brings a mesmerizing blend of '90s indie DIY sensibilities with layers of psychedelia. Tina Kit captivates with their energetic, howling performances, represented by photographer and musician Cole Flynn Quirke. Patrick Shields, Jake Christman, and Caleb Strobl, the entire band, speak for Catatonic Suns.
Steve Wynn, frontman of The Dream Syndicate, has released over 25 albums and had more than 300 songs recorded by artists like REM and The Black Crowes. He has played over 2000 shows in more than 25 countries. He is also known for his solo work and projects like Gutterball and The Miracle 3. Steve joins Lydia and Tim from New York to read from his book I Wouldn't Say it if Iit Wasn't True: A Memoir of Life, Music, and The Dream Syndicate.
Acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been a key figure in the Outrider experimental poetry community for over four decades. Her work, rooted in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain traditions, elevates feminist and activist themes through powerful performances. A prolific author with over 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman and The Iovis Trilogy Waldman also co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Mark Kramer is a musician, composer, and record producer whose creative ideas can be found all over the American cultural landscape. He is known as the founder of the record label Shimmy-Disc. He was a member of New York Gong, Shockabilly, Bongwater, and Dogbowl & Kramer, and has toured with Butthole Surfers, B.A.L.L., Ween, Half Japanese, and The Fugs. As a producer, Mark's notable work includes collaborations with Galaxie 500, White Zombie, GWAR, Daniel Johnston, and Urge Overkill.
Richard Cabut is an author, journalist, and musician. He is the author of the post-punk novel Looking for a Kiss, which has been adapted for the screen. Richard's journalism has been featured in prominent publications like The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, NME, and The Independent. He co-edited the anthology Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night and contributed to several other notable works. His short fiction and poetry have been published in various acclaimed books and magazines. Additionally, he played bass for the band Brigandage and co-wrote tracks for The Necessary Animals.
Marianna Simnett is an artist and musician newly based in New York, known for her vivid and visceral explorations of the body as a site of transformation. Her psychologically charged works challenge both herself and the viewer, creating radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales, and desires. Her current work titled Winner is on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which the Berliner called "a campy love letter to the world’s most laddish sport(soccer) and its players"
Hey have you heard the news? Jesus Lizard is back! They've dropped a new album and are hitting the road for a tour. To celebrate this exciting comeback, we're jumping on the Jesus Lizard bandwagon. So, we're bringing you a replay of our classic interview with the one and only David Yow.
Matt Katz-Bohen, began playing piano at age 7, expanded his repertoire to include cello, violin, and guitar. An alumnus of New York City’s LaGuardia High School, he became the guitarist and Music Director for the drag queen rock troupe The Touchables, collaborating with notable artists like Jody Watley and Lady Miss Kier. Introduced to Debbie Harry at the Squeezebox party, Matt soon joined Blondie on keyboards for their 2008 world tour. As a co-writer of Blondie songs and a musical director for NYC’s Bowieball party, he has also written for RuPaul and toured with Boy George and Tony Bennett.
Timo Ellis is a musician, composer, and producer from New York City. Over the past two decades, he has appeared on nearly 100 albums and collaborated with artists like Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, and Mark Ronson. His music spans genres, including rock, punk, metal, soul, and electronic. Timo's progressive sludge band, Netherlands, has been active since 2010. He also composes and produces music for TV, web, and film, with clients like MTV, CNN, and Harper’s Bazaar, continuously creating new music daily. Timo will join Tim, Lydia and Kevin Shea on tour this summer as part of Big Sexy Noise
Blag Dahlia has been a force in the punk rock scene for nearly four decades, starting with his 1985 band The Suburban Nightmare, which soon evolved into The Dwarves. Despite never achieving massive commercial success, The Dwarves have left an indelible mark on both hardcore and punk. They’ve always eschewed mainstream conventions, forgoing major label support in favor of raw, unfiltered expression. As such, they're live shows, notorious for their intensity and unpredictability. The Dwarves have a new album out titled Concept Album.
Raoul Björkenheim, a Finnish-American guitarist and composer, has spent four decades crafting original music from New York City and Helsinki. Known for his expressionistic and lyrical guitar style, Raul calls his ongoing work "investigative guitarism." His eclectic discography spans over 50 albums, including ambient soundscapes and free jazz, with compositions ranging from duos to big bands. Though his large-scale works for symphony orchestra remain unrecorded, he has scored music for over ten films and dance productions. Collaborating with renowned musicians like Bill Laswell and Mats Gustafsson, Raul's work is featured on labels like ECM and Rune Grammofon. His accolades include the Georgie Prize, the Young Finland Award, the Emma Prize, and three Nordic Music Award nominations.
John Colpitts, also known as Kid Millions, is a drummer, composer, drum teacher. He is best known for his work in the band Oneida and his percussion group Man Forever. Check out his latest Man Forever album Music From the Accident. This coming July, Oneida releases a new album Expensive Air out on the Joyful Noise label.
Austin Texas denizen Gary Lindsey, is the dynamic frontman of Gary Lindsey and the Pleasure Tide . He joins Lydia and Tim to discuss his travels, life in music including performances alongside Hank Williams III. Gary is a versatile artist capable of donning different musical personas, from gypsy roots jazz to beatnik poetry, akin to the transformative spirit of Tom Waits.
New York City pianist/keyboardist Alexi Marcelo believes in the power of music as a positive and uplifting force. He studied at the Harlem School of the Arts and then went on to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he focused on African-American Music/Jazz Piano Performance and Composition under the tutelage of renowned saxophonist Yusef Lateef. Alexi and Tim were classmates at UMass, and it was there that they became close friends and musical collaborators. Since those halcyon days in Western Massachusetts, he has performed all over the world, including at the North Sea Jazz Festival, Etnafest in Italy, Alice Tully Hall, and more. Alexi is featured on recordings with Yusef Lateef, Adam Rudolph, Mike Pride, and Malcolm Mooney. Currently, he is working on a new album that should be released in the coming year.
There is a lot happening at the Lydian Spin! Lydia and Tim are both touring and we're recording and editing the next batch of interviews, set to debut next week. Meanwhile, Lydia, a big Melvins fan, is thrilled about the recent release of their new album, Tarantula Heart. To share her excitement, this weeks episode features a new intro combined with a rebroadcast of an interview with Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne. This interview, conducted during the peak of Covid restrictions, also serves as an interesting snapshot of where we all were just 200 episodes ago. Enjoy!
The cover photograph for the second and final Richard Hell and the Voidoids album, Destiny Street features a woman standing in the background. For years, this woman was unfairly credited as "unknown woman." However, the truth is that the woman is Anne Militello, who would go on to become an accomplished lighting designer and professor at CalArts. Anne's journey began while working for the now infamous rapist Harvey Weinstein back when Weinstein and his brother were concert promoters in metro Buffalo. Seeking to leave The Nickel City but not yet prepared for New York City, she embarked on a five-day bus trip to San Francisco, packing a tin of pot brownies, which were completely consumed along the way.
Upon arriving on the west coast, Anne leveraged her experience working with lights in college to gain work at a music venue. The manager who hired her was Sylvester, who later became a disco legend. One night outside the Magic Theater, she encountered a man dressed like a trucker who seemed to be out of place and ignored by her cohort of punker rockers. Feeling sympathetic, she struck up a conversation with him. The man told her he was a playwright and wanted her to read his new play, which she did and really liked. The trucker turned out to be Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard and they became great friends.
With Shepard's encouragement, she relocated to New York City and immersed herself in the theater scene. Over time, Anne established herself as a world-renowned lighting designer, working with luminaries such as David Lynch, Tom Waits, The Wooster Group, and Lou Reed. Today, Anne resides in Los Angeles, where she operates Vortex Lighting.
Meredith Monk is truly an American treasure. She is a composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist. Her unique contributions to music and experimental theater have spanned over six decades. Meredith's body of work combines elements of music, voice, movement, and visual art. Through these mediums, she explores the myriad ways one can freely as a human express themselves. Meredith's art has made her a visionary of the avant-garde. We are thrilled and lucky to have her on the Lydian Spin.
Jeffrey "Chairman" Couch fronts the Portland, Oregon band Nasalrod, known for their frenetic, genre-bending, manic art-punk style. Nasalrod's music attempts to look beyond punk's boundaries, all the while retaining the genre's adventurous spirit. Jeffrey and Lydia crossed paths at one of her last Portland shows, where he invited her to participate in Nasalrod's latest video. Although Lydia declined, she was impressed by the band's music and invited Jeffrey to appear on the Lydian Spin.
Dan Levenson is a visual artist based in Los Angeles who engages in installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. His artistic endeavors revolve around the concept of an imagined institution, the State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ). Dan's paintings adhere to the formalist teachings of this fictitious academy, employing metrically sized canvases divided geometrically to produce rational and reproducible abstract compositions. Through performance, installation, and video, he further develops the narrative of this fictional institution. Each painting bears a unique title, symbolizing a student from the State Art Academy, Zürich, with no repetition of names. In 2004, Dan used a computer script to generate hundreds of millions of distinct names by combining surnames from the Zürich phone book with common Swiss first names. From this extensive list, 135,000 names were randomly selected and published in a book, with the titles of his paintings drawn from the same pool in random order.
Berlin based band Cuntroaches is composed of Claire Panthère(drums), David Hantelius(bass) and Martina Schöne-Radunski(guitar, vocals). Together they unleash a ferocious blend of hardcore-infused no wave. Their music is a cacophony of intoxicating chaos. They have a new album coming out on Skin Graft Records.
Trans woman Swedish-US American writer Alvina Chamberland, co-authored All that is mine: Rape, Stigmatization and Reparation, which was published in 2015. In 2018, she released Locked Out – A nostalgic account of growing up for freaks. Her works have appeared in journals and newspapers in Swedish and English. Her book Love the World or Get Killed Trying is out now.
Ben Greenberg has played in over 50 bands, including The Fugue, Archaeopteryx, Bloody Panda, The Men, Little Women, and his project Hubble. He attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, joining the avant-garde band Zs. Ben is also involved in recording music through his recording studio Circular Ruin, having recently recorded Couch Slut's latest album.
Sandy Ewen, is an experimental guitarist, artist, and architect based in Brooklyn, NY. She focuses on texture and timbre in her guitar playing, using various objects and extended techniques. Her recent recordings include collaborations with Jason Nazary, Maria Chavez, Lisa Cameron, Roscoe Mitchell, Damon Smith, Weasel Walter, and Keith Rowe. Sandy has played internationally at festivals such as the Moers festival, Wels festival, and Molten Plains festival. Sandy also creates video art, digital animations, slide projections, and microcollages to accompany her music.
At 14, budding draftsman and tattoo artist Eddy Deutsche left his birthplace, Detroit, for the west coast, immersing himself in the local punk rock scene. It was there that he honed his tattooing skills through trial and terror. Initially struggling to get a start as a professional due to his young age, Eddy eventually found a mentor who guided him into the industry. Now residing in Nashville with his children, he continues to pursue his passion for tattooing. In this episode, he reflects on his journey from a rebellious punk rock kid to a respected figure in the tattooing world. Check out more of Eddy's illustrations and books at Raking Light Projects.
Cynthia Ross co-founded the all-girl band the B-Girls in Toronto before relocating to New York City. The band quickly made a mark, touring with acts like the Clash and sharing stages with Iggy Pop, Blondie, and others. In this episode, she reminisces about her musical journey, her relationship with Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys, and shares some of her poetry and writing.
Wayne Kramer, the guitar force behind MC5, has passed at 75. His raw sound and defiant spirit set the stage for punk rock. From Detroit's streets to global stages, his music was a call to arms. Beyond the music, he championed change, founding Jail Guitar Doors U.S.A. His legacy as a rebel and visionary lives on. Rest in power, Wayne. As a tribute this week we are replaying Wayne's appearance on the podcast.
Musician and friend of the podcast Thurston Moore discusses his latest book, Sonic Life which has garnered widespread acclaim. The book is a meticulous work of research and a heartfelt homage to Thurston’s formative years. The memoir paints a vivid picture of the downtown Manhattan music scene of the late 1970s and ’80s. Sonic Life is an essential read for fans of music and cultural history alike.
M. Lamar is a composer whose work spans the genres of opera, metal, performance, and visual arts, crafts narratives of radical transformation. Holding a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and starting at Yale School of Art before dropping out and shifting to music, M's work has been presented globally, including The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, and MoMa PS1’s Greater New York. M's diverse artistic expressions pushes the boundaries of convention and contribute to sparking conversations on identity and societal change.
Music Journalist Katherine Taylor, just published her new book She's a Badass: Women in Rock Shaping Feminism, which was released on January 16th, through Backbeat Books. The book features the stories of twenty influential female rock musicians, spanning from the 1970s to the present. The introduction emphasizes the significant role each of these women has had in promoting feminism, either through activism or personal example. The book includes interviews with trailblazers like Suzi Quatro, Ann Wilson, Exene Cervenka, Lydia and others, exploring their journeys, challenges in the music industry, and how they paved the way for future female artists. She's a Badass offers a compelling documentation of the journey of women in rock over the past fifty years, which has helped to contribute to a more inclusive landscape for today's artists.
Due to a birthday celebration, there will be a slight delay in the release of Episode 236. The episode will be available late Friday afternoon.
Born in Cucuta, Colombia, in 1977, Alex Brahim is an independent curator. At the helm of Fundación El Pilar, he spearheads the international initiative 'Juntos Aparte - Encuentro Internacional de Arte, Pensamiento y Fronteras,' unfolding in Cucuta since 2017. Alex's multifaceted approach extends across theory, production, programming, communication, and cultural activation. Alex is a dynamic force in the art world, curating impactful exhibitions like Critical Botox , and numerous other programs that reflect his interests and commitment to the intersection of art and diverse audiences.
Author and friend of the podcast Jack Sargeant returns. He is an author who focuses on underground film and culture. Notable works include Flesh And Excess: On Underground Film, Against Control, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, and Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression, which was republished as Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground. Jack's writings cover underground film, outsider art, photography, and performance. In addition to his writing, he serves as a curator and programmer of film and art, occasionally engaging in visual artistry. Jack is also a co-founder of the Transgressive Cultures Conference in Paris. His books, including Against Control, are available through via bookshops and new technology called the internet super highway.
Gainesville, Florida's, Andrew Chadwick AKA Ironing, is an active figure within the Southern experimental music scene. He has an extensive catalog of 24 albums on his Bandcamp page. Andrew also engages in tours across the country, local performances, and curating over 233 Action Research events. Ironing's musical style encompasses a diverse range, including noise, bass drop EDM, pure pop, tape loops, and various other influences, all creatively amalgamated on his ironing board which is piled with tools in which he can use to manipulate his records and tapes. Andrew is currently on tour in the Northeast. Today(Friday 12/29/23) he played New York and should be in Richmond VA tomorrow.
Roddy Bottum, the seasoned Faith No More co-founder and keyboardist, made waves in the early '90s by publicly coming out, which at the time defied norms in the rock scene. In 2012, he shared his experience with Out Magazine, highlighting the excitement and danger of being openly gay at the time. Now, collaborating with boyfriend Joey Holman, Roddy launched MAN ON MAN during COVID isolation, with the aim of staying creatively active. Their debut song, Daddy, challenges gay stereotypes, celebrating love in isolation all the while presenting a raw and unpolished facet of queer community. This past summer they released a new album Provincetown and the duo also concluded a European tour in early December.
Finally, wishing you all a holiday season filled with warmth and joy. Your support and enthusiasm is the heartbeat of Lydian Spin and has and continues to be a great gift!
JG Thirlwell, is an accomplished composer, producer, and performer, with a diverse and prolific career. Known by various pseudonyms such as Manorexia and Foetus, he has released over thirty albums, showcasing a dramatic intensity and cinematic quality across genres. His collaborative spirit extends to numerous artists, including Karen O, Nine Inch Nails, and Nick Cave. Beyond music, JG is an acclaimed graphic artist, recognized for solo sound installations exhibited globally. His versatility is evident in scoring for shows like Archer and The Venture Bros, as well as motion picture scores. In January 2024 in Orlando, Florida, the Alterity Chamber Orchestra will premiere a series of chamber works written by JG, featuring the new orchestral piece Magnus Morris and a woodwind quintet titled Hernea.
Colin Marston is a record producer and musician based in New York City. He is the owner of Menegroth The Thousand Caves Recording Studios in Woodhaven, Queens. Colin is recognized for his versatile contributions as a multi-instrumentalist, proficient in guitar, bass, and keyboards. When not on tour with bands like Behold... The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Krallice, and the reunion lineup of Gorguts, he is recording, producing, mastering, and mixing music. In this capacity, Colin has worked with a diverse array of artists, including Imperial Triumphant, Genghis Tron, Jarboe and Liturgy.
Richard Edson is a multifaceted artist with notable contributions to both the music and acting. In 1979, he co-founded the San Francisco art rock band The Alterboys, where he played both drums and trumpet. Richard was also Sonic Youth's original drummer from 1981 to 1982, and he concurrently played drums for Konk. Post-Sonic Youth, he played trumpet for The Offs on their 1984 album. Transitioning to acting, Edson built a career with over 75 film roles, making impactful appearances in classics such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stranger Than Paradise, Platoon, and Do the Right Thing. Lately he has been playing some live gigs with Tim and Matt Nelson.
Ric Royer, a writer and performer, is known for crafting narratives that are both mordant and morbid, as well as staging plays characterized by absurd wonder. As the founder and artistic director of Psychic Readings Co, a performance collective established in 1999, Rick has consistently entertained, frightened, and confused audiences with interdisciplinary productions. Currently residing in the Catskills, Rick collaborates with long-time music partner G Lucas Crane, engaging in various music and performance projects such as The Coincidental Hour. Ricks's literary works, include novels Gonzales , and his latest novel, which he reads from on today's episode, Niagra Falls is out now on Jeff Schneiders Pig Roast Publishing imprint. Additionally, he co-hosts the radio show I Have Seen Niagara and, with G Lucas Crane.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of the Lydian Spin listeners out there. We hope you all have a happy and safe Turkey day!
Vocalist Alan Dubin is known for his role in the drone metal band Khanate. In the early 2000s, Khanate, with Alan's distinctive and tortured vocal approach, pushed the boundaries of doom metal, creating an atmosphere of everlasting torture and despair. His haunting screeches, particularly in tracks like Under Rotting Sky, were spine-chilling and penetrated any semblance of comfort. After Khanate disbanded, Alan continued on with the experimental unit Gnaw. However, the release of Khanate's To Be Cruel in 2023 marked a surprise reunion, showcasing Alan's continued vocal dominance alongside guitarist Stephen O’Malley's insane guitar. Beyond his musical endeavors, Alan is also a professional film/video editor, contributing to various TV commercials, shows, films, and music videos.
Film director and musician Marc Hurtado is actively involved in bringing the iconic music of Suicide to life on stage. He has achieved this through films such as The Infinite Mercy Film (2009), Saturn Drive Duplex (2011), Saturn Drive Duplex Redux (2014), Infinite Dreamers (2016), and Saturn Drive (2016). Marc is currently on tour in Europe alongside Lydia Lunch, they both join the episode from England. Additionally, Lydia's Tour Manager, Sébastien Greppo, a great friend of the podcast, is also part of this episode.
Jochen Arbeit is a German musician whose career is marked by his influential contributions to bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Die Haut. Beyond his collaborations, Arbeit has also made a name for himself as a solo artist, lending his musical talents to various artistic mediums, including dance theater and movies. His solo works have showcased his versatility and innovative spirit. In addition to his past achievements, Jochen Arbeit has also partnered with Sonja Kosche to explore the limitless realms of sound, demonstrating his enduring commitment to pushing artistic boundaries and experimenting with the auditory landscape.
Dave Dictor, the frontman of the punk rock band MDC, originally hailing from Long Island, New York, pursued his education at Boston University and the University of Texas in the 1970s. Dave co-founded the Reejex in 1979, which later evolved into MDC (Millions of Dead Cops). Relocating from Austin to San Francisco in 1982 and then to Portland, Oregon in 1995, MDC made a significant impact in the early American hardcore punk scene with their politically charged lyrics. The band used various names with the MDC moniker, and Dave Dictor, alongside his band, released influential material through Jello Biafra's label, Alternative Tentacles. After a hiatus in the '90s, they returned in 2000 with new members. In 2016, MDC released Mein Trumpf, a politically charged album, and their anti-Trump slogan was chanted at protests, and adopted by Green Day during a live performance.
John Robb is an English musician and journalist renowned as the bassist and vocalist for the mid-1980s post-punk band The Membranes. He is a prolific writer, contributing to and managing the Louder Than War website, as well as overseeing a monthly music magazine by the same name. John has authored multiple books on music and occasionally appears in the media as a music commentator. In addition to his writing and journalism, he also serves as the frontman for the punk rock band Goldblade. Notably, he has been organizing the Louder Than Words music writing festival in Manchester every November since 2014, and he is a TEDx speaker and a spoken word artist.
Sally Gates is a New Zealand musician and composer currently based in New York. Her avant-rock trio, Titan to Tachyons, recently launched their second album, Vonals under John Zorn's Tzadik Records. This album has received widespread critical acclaim, earning a spot on Spin's Best Metal list and being described as "harnessing virtuosity with an enticingly organic fluidity" by The Wire.
In 2022, Sally was honored with the Wellington Jazz Festival Composer Commission. She returned to her home country to debut her composition Thought & Terraform for solo guitar at the Wellington Opera House, along with a series of other performances across New Zealand.
Sally is known for her "slinky, avant-noir guitar work." She frequently collaborates with various improvisational music groups in New York, notably as a 'secret guest' in a John Zorn ensemble. Some of her recent collaborators include Trevor Dunn, Zoh Amba, Brian Chase, Greg Fox, and Sam Ospovat.
Before her move to New York, Sally Gates released original music as a member of the Miami progressive-metal band Orbweaver. She toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, performing alongside acts such as Gigan, Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, and Relentless Attrition.
Little Annie, is an artist known for her diverse creative pursuits. Her career spans across music, painting, poetry, writing, stage acting, and even pastoring. She started her musical journey at the age of 16 with Annie and the Asexuals and later ventured into the UK music scene, collaborating with influential figures like Crass and Rubella Ballet. Under the moniker Annie Anxiety, she blended poetry and music, releasing her first EP Barbed Wire Halo in 1981. Little Annie's musical versatility led her to work with renowned artists like The Wolfgang Press, Current 93, and Lee 'Scratch' Perry. She took a hiatus from music in the '90s to explore painting, becoming known for her vivid and surrealistic artworks. Annie eventually returned to music as Little Annie. Beyond her musical career, she engaged in theater, collaborating with actor Bill Rice and touring with Marc Almond.
Franz Stahl, guitarist of seminal hardcore band Scream, helped shape the band's journey from its inception in 1979. Alongside drummer Kent Stacks(AKA Kent Stax), bassist Skeeter Enoch Thompson, and his brother Pete Stahl, Franz attended school in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia, where they discovered the punk and new wave scene of Washington, D.C. Influenced by the Bad Brains like many other DC punk bands, Scream's fusion of punk with rock and roll set them apart. Their collaboration with Ian MacKaye and Eddie Janney led to the recording of Dischord's first full-length album, Still Screaming, in 1982. Over the years, they experienced lineup changes, with Franz's friend Harley Davidson joining on second guitar, and eventually, a local drummer named Dave Grohl. Scream's legacy endures, with their latest album, DC Special, set to release in November of 2023 on Dischord Records.
Denton, Texas native Rick Eye is a guitarist involved in several bands, including Bitch Teeth, Gay Cum Daddies, Flesh Narc (his main band), and Vomitatrix, with whom he is currently on tour in Europe with bandmates Tim, Weasel Walter, and Gyna Bootleg.
Early in his career, Rick faced a crucial decision: whether to relocate to a cultural hub like New York or to cultivate a cultural scene in Denton. Fortunately for Denton, he chose the latter path. Rick began establishing connections with artists he admired and started bringing them to his town. As a result, Denton has evolved into a thriving center of cool.
Presently, Rick is responsible for booking events at the beloved Rubber Gloves club in Denton, a venue that Tim considers the coolest music club in the United States.
Lydia and Tim are currently on their respective tours, with Tim currently in France alongside Vomitatrix, while Lydia is touring the Southwest with Kevin Shea. This week's episode features a live recording of a spoken word show that took place in Albuquerque last week. The show kicks off with an opening performance by Jessica Helen Lopez, a nationally recognized and award-winning slam poet who proudly holds the title of 2012 and 2014 Women of the World City of Albuquerque Champion. Following Jessica, the show continues with captivating poems and performances by Julia Storch, Maria Aaron Jones, Katie Farman, Rhiannon Frazier, Diane Delgado, and several more talented poets. A complete list of names will be provided soon, as some names were challenging to discern from the audio recording.
Friend of the podcast, musician, and artist Rick Froberg, who fronted Drive Like Jehu and many noted bands, sadly died on June 30th of this year. We have wanted for the last couple of months to do something to remember him, so in his memory, we are replaying his episode. Rick was as talented as he was kind, and he will be assuredly missed.
Abby Travis boasts a prolific career that spans back to the early 1990s, encompassing both significant contributions to music as a touring artist and a sought-after session player. Her diverse musical journey has seen her collaborating with artists such as The Go-Go’s, Cher, Beck, Elastica, KMFDM, Eagles of Death Metal, and Masters of Reality. Other highlights include a performance at the 2017 Women's March in downtown L.A., where she shared the stage with U2's The Edge, Juliette Lewis, and Rage Against the Machine's Brad Wilk. Abby currently lives in Upstate New York and continues to record.
For the past 30 years, Matt Shapiro's mission has been to embrace the "dark, weird, extreme, and wrong." As the former co-owner of Elbo Room and a beloved promoter within the Bay Area, he's indelibly marked San Francisco and Oakland's music scenes. Notably, he facilitated the transition of Elbo Room's Oakland location to new ownership, safeguarding its ongoing musical legacy. As he prepares for his upcoming move to Leipzig, Germany, Shapiro's lasting influence on the Bay Area's music landscape remains palpable.
Dubbed the "Godfather of Punk Rock Comedy" by Chicago Now, JT Habersaat's one-hour special Swamp Beast, snagged the top spot on the comedy charts. He has also had appearances on Comedy Central, roles in Troma Films including Toxic Avenger 4, and a touring roster featuring icons like Eddie Pepitone and Doug Stanhope, as well as being the driving force behind Austin's Altercation Comedy Festival. Currently, he's channeling his creativity into his third book, an oral history of stand-up comedy.
Aaron Dilloway, a prominent figure in the American experimental/noise scene, has long been celebrated for his innovative use of rhythmic loops, found sounds, and vocal improvisations, often employing contact microphones for distorted effects, His performances balance dark energies with playful absurdity. Aaron is a co-founder of the Michigan noise outfit Wolf Eyes, and collaborator with a host of notable artists, he has left an indelible mark on the genre. He is also the owner Hanson Records in Oberlin Ohio. In October, Aaron will be performing at the Fridman Gallery in New York.
This week's guest on the podcast is Donita Sparks, a very talented musician, songwriter, and close friend of Lydia. She is the co-founder and lead vocalist of the legendary all-female rock band L7. With her unmistakable voice and fierce guitar skills, Donita has been a driving force in the rock scene for decades. Her dedication to social and environmental issues shines through in L7's upcoming single and video, Cooler than Mars, scheduled for release on September 12th. The song passionately urges humanity to prioritize the present and focus on urgent matters rather than becoming fixated solely on the allure of future life on Mars and space exploration. Beyond her work with L7, Donita collaborates with Lydia and other musicians in contributing to the Marianne Faithfull charity record. L7's momentum remains strong, with an extensive tour across the United States in September, followed by shows in South America throughout October and November, concluding in Australia in December. With shows selling out rapidly across all markets, Donita and L7 continue to leave an indelible mark on the music industry and beyond.
This week's episode deviates from the traditional Lydian Spin mold as there will be no intro or interview. Instead, join Lydia on tour with Tim and Matt Nelson in the spoken word outfit Murderous...Again. And if they didn't come to a town near you, don't worry because today's episode features a live recording of their show last week in Palo Alto. Immerse yourself in the evocative atmosphere of Murderous...Again. Lydia provides the spoken word accompanied by Tim on bass and Matt on saxophone, bringing the experience right to you, as if you were in the audience.
Gregory Jacobsen is a visual artist and performer renowned for his fusion of beauty and horror in his art. He collaborates with bassist Alex Perkolup, a long-time musical partner from Cheer-Accident, to bring this nightmarish artistic vision to life. Their joint project, Lovely Little Girls, showcases Gregory's masterful use of lush colors to adorn unsettling, mutated, and maimed bodies and frames, creating a mesmerizing and disturbing experience for viewers.
Poet Eva H.D. authored Rotten Perfect Mouth, Light Wounds (with photographer Kendall Townend), The Natural Hustle, and the short film Jackals & Fireflies, which was directed by Charlie Kaufman. Her poem Bonedog appeared in the 2020 Netflix film I'm Thinking of Ending Things, also directed by Charlie Kaufman.
Author Craig Clevenger's debut novel, The Contortionist's Handbook, garnered critical acclaim for its masterful exploration of identity and deception. Craig's second novel, Dermaphoria, further solidified his reputation as a maestro of the noir genre, effortlessly blending themes of memory, drugs, and paranoia. With his latest work, Mother Howl, Craig delivers an enthralling novel that follows the son of a serial murderer as he navigates the treacherous path of reinvention and escape from his haunting past.
Author Nolan Knight is known for his books including Gallows Dome, The Neon Lights Are Veins, and Beneath the Black Palms. He hails from Los Angeles and is a fourth-generation Angeleno. Nolan previously worked as a staff writer for the prominent music publication, L.A. Record. His short fiction has been featured in various respected publications such as Akashic Books, Thuglit, Crimespree Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Tough, and Needle. He currently resides in Long Beach.
Photo By: Sebastien Greppo
Virginie Despentes is a French writer and filmmaker. Her writing explores themes of gender, sexuality, and power, often challenging societal norms and conventions. Virginie gained widespread recognition with her novel Baise-moi(Rape Me), which was later adapted into a film. Her works often feature complex and flawed characters, highlighting the realities of contemporary society. Virginie has a style that is unapologetic and direct which she uses to address issues of social inequality, violence, and the struggles of marginalized individuals. She continues to be a prominent voice in contemporary French literature and film.
Guitarist Kawabata Makoto is renowned for his association with the band Acid Mothers Temple and his experimental approach to the group's sound. His guitar work encompasses a wide range of techniques and effects, reflecting his exploration of various genres such as psychedelic rock, noise, and improvisation. Kawabata's contributions to Acid Mothers Temple have helped establish the band as a prominent figure in the underground music scene, known for their captivating live performances and boundary-pushing compositions.
photo by: Orestes Gonzales
Pat Irwin, has been making music for over 40 year. He has continuously pushed boundaries with his captivating soundtracks for renowned television series such as Dexter: New Blood, Nurse Jackie, Bored To Death, and animated classics like Rocko's Modern Life, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Alongside his TV contributions, Patt was a member of the legendary B-52s and serving as a founding member of two influential New York/No Wave bands, The Raybeats and 8 Eyed Spy. Presently, Pat records and performs with the ambient music ensemble, SUSS.
Oran Canfield's upbringing took him across various locations, including Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Central America, New Mexico, Arizona, and the San Francisco Bay area. While attending the San Francisco Art Institute, Oran began his career as a drummer and became heavily involved in San Francisco's underground music and art communities. Along with his involvement as a drummer for numerous bands, including Child Abuse and Chaser, he also owned and operated a recording studio and cooperated a music venue featuring experimental and creative jazz music. He has also been a bike messenger, piano restorer, housecleaner, limo driver, and sex-toy maker. Early in 2001, after seven separate stints in rehab, he got clean after attending an experimental treatment center in the Caribbean islands. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a musician and freelance art handler. Oran's memoir, Long Past Stopping, chronicles his personal journey, including his upbringing, involvement in the underground music scene, battles with addiction, and eventual path to recovery.
On another note, today(June 2nd) is Lydia's Birthday. Happy Birthday Lydia!
Adel Souto is a writer and musician from Miami, Florida, who is now based in Detroit. He began the fanzine Feast of Hate and Fear in 1990, later opting for the internet in 2001. He has released a ‘best of’ FHF entitled Some Words (2010), Schizotypal (2011), which uses ritualistic automatic writing, and a book of poetry, 200 Throwaways (2012). He has also translated works by the Chilean occultist Miguel Serrano (2009), and is currently clanging metallic objects in the industrial outfit 156. The podcast begins with 156's Me Olam, Ad Olam and ends with 156's Kokomo.
Mike Doskocil, the frontman of Drunks With Guns, continues to excite audiences with his persona and controversial actions. Mike's energy propelled the band's presence in the St. Louis music scene. From launching burritos at unsuspecting performers to his captivating stage charisma, Doskocil is the epitome of rock and roll rebellion. Drunks With Guns early performances, including opening slots for renowned acts like 45 Grave and Samhain, solidified their reputation. Following their disbandment, Doskocil and bandmate Stan pursued separate paths, each releasing their own versions of Drunks With Guns records. Despite facing obstacles and rumors of failed tour plans, the band made a comeback in 2018. This reunion reignited interest, leading to additional shows and recording projects. In fact, Drunks With Guns is currently on tour this spring and summer, with an upcoming live performance on May 27th at TV Eye in Brooklyn.
Author, journalist, editor, and friend of the podcast, Chris Campion, who is known for his contributions to publications like The Guardian, The Times (UK), Rolling Stone, and Vice, discusses his powerful new book out on ZE Books, The War Is Here: Newark 1967. Chris delves into the gripping narrative surrounding the photographs captured by Bud Lee, who at the time was a young photographer for Life magazine, during the riots that unfolded in Newark in July 1967. If you are in the Newark area on June 13th, head over to the Newark Public Library to sit in on a panel discussion about the book, which will include the Mayor of Newark Ras Baraka.
Photo by: Julian Ibbitson
Cathi Unsworth is a renowned British author celebrated for her captivating crime novels and exceptional music journalism. Beginning her career as a writer for music magazines such as Sounds and Melody Maker, she later pivoted to crime fiction, publishing her first novel, The Not Knowing, in 2005. She has since written several acclaimed novels, including The Singer, Bad Penny Blues, Weirdo, and That Old Black Magic. Cathi's writing is admired for its vivid portrayal of London's criminal underworld, skillful weaving of music and popular culture into her stories, and attention to detail.
Her most recent book, The Season of the Witch, explores how goth culture was shaped by the politics of its era. The book delves into how various societal issues like the miners' strikes, privatization, the Troubles, and AIDS, coalesced with innovative, atmospheric music, culminating in a sound that resonated with a generation of disenchanted youth, both within Britain and internationally.
Kyp Malone is a musician and visual artist best known as the guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter of the band TV on the Radio. In the late 1990s, Malone moved to New York City and became involved in the music scene. He formed TV on the Radio with his friends Tunde Adebimbe and Dave Sitek in 2001. The band quickly gained a following for their unique blend of rock, soul, and electronic music. Kyp has also released solo music under the name Rain Machine and has collaborated with other artists. In addition to his musical pursuits, Malone is an accomplished visual artist, and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world.
When Nick Launay was seventeen years old, he achieved a remarkable feat, landing his first producing credit on Robin Scott's 1979 chart-topping hit single Pop Muzik. And that's just the beginning of his incredible story.
As an assistant at Townhouse Studios, Nick found himself in the right place at the right time when the original engineer took a quick pee break during a Public Image Limited recording session. In an unexpected twist, PIL's frontman John Lydon took advantage of the moment and locked the door, entrusting Nick with the controls. As a result, Nick went on to produce PIL's acclaimed album Flowers of Romance.
Nick's producing talents soon made him a sought-after producer in post-punk, working with some of the biggest artists. The Birthday Party, Kate Bush, and Lou Reed are just a few who have benefited from his producing.
Phil Caivano is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer known for his work with the legendary rock band, Monster Magnet. Alongside his role in the band, Phil has collaborated with a range of other artists and bands, including The Ribeye Brothers and Blitzspeer. In addition to his collaborative work, he has also released a solo album titled Caivano. Later this year, Phil will be going on tour with Monster Magnet, which will be their first tour since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Last month, Dix Denney, co-founder and bassist for the Los Angeles punk rock band The Weirdos, passed away. A couple of years ago, Weasel Walter and Lydia sat down with his brother John for an interview, which we are sharing with you today. John, along with his brother Dix, founded The Weirdos in 1975, and the band is considered one of the most important LA punk bands of all time. The band released the iconic albums Destroy All Music and We've Got the Neutron Bomb in the late 1970s. John and Dix helped shape the early Los Angeles punk scene with The Weirdos' sound, which blended punk, garage rock, and surf music.
Gregg Foreman is an American musician, producer, and DJ. He is best known for his work as the keyboardist for the indie rock band Cat Power. In addition to his work with Cat Power, he has played with several other prominent acts such as The Black Ryder, Delta 72, and Pink Mountaintops. Foreman has also produced and engineered albums for various artists. Recently Gregg has been working on an album with Kat Von D. He has been involved in a number of musical projects throughout his career, and his versatility and proficiency in a broad range of musical styles have earned him critical acclaim.
Josie Wreck is a musician and artist who identifies as a transgender Xicanx. She has made significant contributions to the music industry as a vocalist, guitarist, DJ, and host of the podcast Aural Displeasure. Josie gained recognition in the mid-2000s in the Orange County punk, goth, and art scenes, where she performed with the 3-piece band HEIDI WU and as a solo acoustic artist. She has been involved in several bands, including Popsical, QTPi Xpress, and Moonlight Squalor. Additionally, Josie manages and releases music under her own Bandcamp.
John Tottenham, the happiest man in the poetry business, joins Lydia and Tim for a second time. To recap, John is the author of The Inertia Variations, an epic cycle on the subject of work avoidance, indolence, and failure. Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, a sequence of mean-spirited love poems, was published by Penny-Ante Press.
A sonic and cinematic interpretation of The Inertia Variations by The (Matt Johnson) was released in late 2017. While he would never call himself an artist, his paintings and drawings have been exhibited at galleries in Los Angeles and New York.
John's final collection of poetry, The Hate Poems, representing the dregs of his output between the years 2012 and 2015, was published by Amok Press in late 2018. John has also written a novel.
Mark Morgan was the guitarist for the legendary noise/avant-rock outfit Sightings, a band that got its start in 1997 when Mark put up flyers looking for musicians in New York record shops. He also did a stint in one of the lineups of To Live and Shave in LA with Rat Bastard and Tom Smith. Currently, Mark's band Rump State is going on tour in Europe later this month.
This week, Tommy Grenas, also known as Tommy L. Cyborg, joins the Lydian Spin. Tommy is a singer, songwriter, synthesist, and electronic musician who began his career in 1982 with the Belfast garage band The Swamp Rats. His career continued in 1987 with the Los Angeles-based Pressurehed. In 1992, Tommy founded Farflung, and then in 1995, he co-founded the Anubian Lights with Len Del Rio. Tommy played guitar in Nik Turner's Space Ritual and the legendary band Hawkwind. He also performed with Helios and Chrome. Additionally, Tommy has played and collaborated with Lydia, The Brain, Cluster, and many others.
Photo by Nedda Asfari
Rita D'Albert is a multi-talented producer and creative force behind the wildly popular Lucha VaVOOM - a Mexican wrestling, burlesque, and comedy extravaganza that has captivated audiences around the world. Her innovative approach to blending the worlds of wrestling, burlesque and rock and roll has earned her critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base. Rita is also an accomplished musician, having played with a number of bands over the years, including the legendary all-female garage rock group The Pandoras. With her love of music and her passion for spectacle, Rita brings a unique and high energy perspective to all of her creative endeavors.
This week's episode is the Valentine's Day Cleanser Special.
Valentine's Day can be overwhelming, whether you're single or in a relationship. So, to help you take a breather and clear your head we put together a special mix of Lydia's songs and spoken word. Whether you're feeling the post-Valentine's Day blues or not, sit back, relax and enjoy.
Pieces Include:
- Smoke in the Shadows(0:00 - 4:45)
- Wretched Possibility(4:50 - 9:45)
- The Summer of My Discontent(9:48 - 14:21)
- End of My Rope(14:23 - 17:42)
- Another Man Comin'(While the Bed is Still Warm)(17:43 - 22:22)
- Tiny's Tight Spot(22:22 - 33:54)
- Your Love Don't Pay My Rent(33:54 - 37:31)
- Bad For Bobby(37:31 - 40:47)
- Mahakali Calling(40:47 - 45:12)
- Cursed Folly 3(45:12 - 48:20)
- Where You Gonna Run(48:20 - 52:35)
- Still Burning(52:35 - 59:57)
Since 1999, Eastern European punk band Gogol Bordello, led by Ukrainian frontman Eugene Hütz, has been filling up rooms with an energy that could run a whole city - latest album Solidaritine is no exception, going back to their hardcore roots. The band has lit up stages around the world alongside System of a Down, Primus, Rancid, Dropkick Murphys, dueted with Regina Spektor, appeared in films like Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated with Elijah Wood and Filth and Wisdom helmed by Madonna, cutting albums with legends Rick Rubin and Steve Albini. Russia's war in Ukraine is personal for Eugene & the band, who have been tirelessly advocating for Ukrainian solidarity, partnering with Nova Ukraine, ArtDopomoga and beyond.
Masha Alyokhina is a member of Pussy Riot — a feminist collective of artists and activists that came to prominence in 2012 when five members, including Masha staged a performance of the group’s anti-Putin song Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Pussy Riot members were arrested and convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" and the three were sentenced to two years in prison for the offense. Masha has been recognized as a political prisoner by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Amnesty International named her a prisoner of conscience due to the severity of the response of the Russian authorities. After multiple arrests and periods of imprisonment, Masha left Russia and has openly criticized the war in Ukraine. She continues her work as an activist, artist and musician.
Since the early Eighties Martin Bisi has run Brooklyn's legendary BC Studio where he has worked on albums with the likes of Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Swans, William Burroughs, Helmet, Jim Thirlwell (Foetus) and even Afrika Bambaata. BC Studio was originally founded in 1979 under the name OAO Studio. Initially Martin was working alongside Bill Laswell and Brian Eno, but by 1983 they had left the partnership and the studio was renamed. Since then, Martin has continued to work with a wide array of artists and styles, from No Wave through to Hip Hop.
Jim Sclavunos is a Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer. Jim has been a member of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds since 1994 and is a co-founding member of Grinderman. Alongside Lydia, he was an integral part of the New York No Wave scene in bands Teenage Jesus & The Jerks and 8 Eyed Spy. Jim was co-editor of No Magazine, before joining Sonic Youth to record their first album Confusion Is Sex.
Jim has been writing and recording new material and producing various projects, as well as continuing his regularly featured DJ slot on Soho Radio. The first release from his lockdown collaboration with singer Polly Scattergood In the Absence of Light came out in 2021. Jim also made his acting debut in director Mars Roberge’s feature film Mister Sister playing the role of Sonny. He has also appeared in the BBC period drama The Pursuit of Love. Jim continues to tour and record with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
This week Lydia and Tim sit down with Kelley Deal and Josephine Wiggs. Dayton, Ohio native Kelley is a musician who has been a member of many bands including, Protomartyr, The Amps, The Kelley Deal 6000, and The Last Hard Men. English Bassist Josephine has been in her share of bands as well, including The Perfect Disaster, Honey Tongue & Ladies Who Lunch.
Kelley and Josephine are also bandmates in the much-beloved band The Breeders. August 2023 will mark the 30th anniversary of band's smash hit Last Splash. To celebrate, their record label 4AD will rerelease the album with new material. In the fall, The Breeders will be touring to support the album.
Howard Paar is an award winning music supervisor who is originally from London who continued his career in Los Angeles thanks Sir Freddie Laker's legendary Laker Airways. He has won The Guild Of Music Supervisors Awards in 2016, 2017, 2018 & 2020 respectively for Diary Of A Teenage Girl, 20th Century Women, Before I Fall and Native Son.
Howard first worked in LA as a club creator/DJ/promoter. His work back then was known for developing emergent new music scenes particularly ska, mod and the paisley underground. His club, The O.N .Klub in collaboration with Sugarhill Records, was also the first locale to play a rap show in Los Angeles. Howard subsequently became an independent publicist representing clients including MTV, Ian Hunter & Mick Ronson, N.W.A., Jimmy Cliff, Eric Burdon, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Bunny Wailer and Michelle Shocked.
Howard then went on to become Vice President, Media & Artist Relations at Polygram Records before transitioning to the role of Vice President, Soundtracks. In this role, he worked on many soundtracks including The Big Lebowski and Gregg Araki’s Nowhere as well as creating opportunities for Polygram artists to write themes for TV shows including King Of The Hill and Ellen. In 2001, Howard was nominated for a Grammy for the soundtrack for the award-winning documentary Dogtown & Z Boys.
Along with being a music supervisor, Howard is also a novelist. Top Rankin', his punk/ska noir novel, was released in May of 2021, which follows his first novel Once Upon a Time In LA, published in 2015.
Drummer Derrick Bostrom is a founding member of the seminal band Meat Puppets, which are hard to accurately pin down to any specific genre. Derrick co-penned several songs, including the majority of their self-titled debut. He remained a member of the band until 1996 when the band went on hiatus and then rejoined the Meat Puppets in 2018.
Happy holidays! Here is another Christmas special to get you through all the travel and familial tribulations.
Photo by Jasmine Hirst
Artist, musician, composer, boxer and trained attorney Liz Lamere joins Tim and Lydia, to talk boxing, music, and her late husband Alan Vega.
The holidays are wreaking havoc with the regular routines here at the Lydian Spin. As such, Episode 179 will be released Friday east coast time. - Simon
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Victoria is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Victoria uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.
Her DIY approach to deconstructing the concepts of “materiality, value and mass production” both integrate and re-contextualize the formats of the readymade and assemblage techniques. The album art for her debut LP, Hair Birth, utilizes copper to transform the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. In 2021, Victoria produced a series of cut-up records in cast resin embedded with found materials. In other performances, she pioneered the use of Needle Nails, which are acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, that allow her to play up to 5 record tracks at once.
Victoria has performed solo across North America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe as Evicshen and as half of the duo TRIM in North America and the UK. She currently teaches at Stanford University and the School of Visual Arts NY.
Bassist Steven McDonald along with his brother Jeff, then only teenagers founded the band Redd Kross in 1978 in Los Angeles. Since 2015 Steven has been the bassist of the Melvins.
Dave Buddin is a serial composer you should know. To quote Brad Cohan, "David Earl Buddin is a beer-swillin' chain-smoking', gloriously prolific pioneer of electronic music". He spent close to 15 years as roommates with Tim, Simon and Dominika Michalowska in Brooklyn. Dave was much more than a pal who helped pay the rent. He was the thought leader of the house who was always suggesting books, artists and projects that broadened horizons, and more importantly, made every day a huge amount of fun. He named the house(s) The Center of Advanced Research which still lives on as a wifi hotspot.
In 2012, The Village Voice named Dave New York's best composer. His other musical pursuits include being the ringleader of (quoting Cohan again) "the honky tonkin' trio of high rolling drunkards, American Liberty League". He along with Dominika and Kevin Shea founded the noise trio Nebadon. He also worked a day job as the musical director for Park Slope's Grace United Methodist Church.
Dave founded and was the real editor in chief of the Modern Man Manual. Currently Dave resides in Hilton Head South Carolina where he his working on his extremely entertaining memoirs and writing music.
Happy Thanksgiving!
In the early 80s Stuart Swezey began his creative career organizing the Desolation Center events in the desert and at sea that featured music groups such as the Minutemen, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, and Meat Puppets among others. He directed a documentary by the same name about the events. Stuart is a founder of Amok Books—the influential extreme information, cult L.A. bookstore, and publishing house. His book Amok Fifth Dispatch: Sourcebook of Extremes of Information in Print was nominated for the Best Nonfiction Book Title in the FIrecracker Alternative Book awards. Stuart also produced the acclaimed feature documentary Better Living Through Circuitry about rave and DJ culture. Stuart also has worked in television. He has been a VP, Development for Original Productions (Ice Road Truckers, Black Gold), Alternative Programming exec for Syfy Channel, documentary film producer, and reality television producer and show runner.
Drag terrorist Christeene describes herself as a “switchblade” who is a raw spirit of ferocious music, unabashed sexuality and fiery intimate stank. She is a twisted southern gothic vision whose live shows involve raunchy dance routines, on-stage peeing and butt plugs sent over the crowd on balloons. Yet she’s also vulnerable, kind and warm, and this the balancing act that allows her to expose hypocrisy wherever she goes.
Ox. Bow front man, writer and friend of the Lydian Spin Eugene Robinson is the guest this week. The last time he was on, it was pre-lock down and Eugene was editor at large for what was at the time the high flying OZY Media. Several variants later OZY crumbled due to financial chicanery and Eugene moved on to working on his memoir and being a vice president at the taste making ad firm Wong Doody. If you can't wait for Eugene's memoir, subscribe to his Substack.
This week, drummer Kevin Shea drops by for a chat. He has been filling in for Bob Bert in Retrovirus as Bob is on hiatus drumming for Jon Spencer. Kevin is a great drummer who has played with Talibam!, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Bar Shea Dahl, Storm and Stress, Rhys Chatham, Sexy Thoughts, American Liberty League and many many other bands.
Lydia's friend and L.A. native Lawrence Lewis is a self professed production nerd. He has produced films, commercials, as well as immersive live events. One of Lawrence's first jobs was driving Warwick Davis around while filming Leprechaun 2!
Lawrence also hosts the podcast Producer's Happy Hour where he and co-host Christian Kendrick have an honest discussion over drinks, about what it means to be a good producer. Each episode features an interview with a film industry professional from various departments in order to better understand what kind of production support the guest needs in order for them to perform their job at the highest level.
Bass player David J was a founding member of the influential post-punk band Bauhaus in 1978. He wrote the lyrics for many Bauhaus songs, including the single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead. He sang lead on Who Killed Mr. Moonlight?. In 1985, David, his brother Kevin, and Daniel Ash, all former members of Bauhaus, formed Love and Rockets, which had a hit single with the song So alive.
In 2014 David wrote an autobiography, Who Killed Mister Moonlight. In the book he explores his work in bands as well as a solo performer. He also delves deep into his exploration of the occult, drawing together a diverse cast of supporting characters, including William S. Burroughs, Alan Moore, Genesis P. Orridge, and Rick Rubin.
*Technical Note**
As many of you know the Lydian Spin gang has been away from home. As a result, recording has been happening on unreliable setups. Unfortunately the audio for the intro this week was corrupted and not useable. Intros will continue as expected next week.
Jozef van Wissem is an avant-garde composer and lutenist. He plays an all black, one-of-a-kind custom-made baroque lute. His works often have a Christian-mystical appeal. In 2013, Jozef won the Cannes Film Festival Soundtrack Award for Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.
Over the years, Jozef has collaborated with Zola Jesus, Tilda Swinton, as well as with his long-time collaborative partner and friend, Jim Jarmusch, with whom Jozef has recorded four albums with. In February 2021 Jozef premiered a new black Baroque lute on Dutch National TV. The instrument had the Latin words “Ex Mortis” inscribed in the neck.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, and 100 Boyfriends, a collection of stories. Brontez is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band The Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock.
We are saddened to learn that actress and burlesque star Kitten Natividad died yesterday. She was the first guest on the Lydian Spin. Kitten was gracious and patient enough to invite us into her home and let us interview her while we tried to figure out how to record a podcast. She was cheerful, whip smart, and very very funny.
Eric Paul has been in many seminal Providence bands including Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars and Doomsday Student. He is also a writer who has published several books, the most recent is A Suitcase Full of Dirt. Eric lives with his wife and child in Providence where he teaches writing.
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from France. She accesses concepts as diverse as noise, contemporary classical, free jazz, and experimental traditions, but adheres to none of them. Her music mixes deep melancholia with harsh noise-walls at ear-bleeding levels, and was described by the New York Times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities”.
Over the last two years, Lydia and Jasmine Hirst have been working on a documentary about artists and mental health titled Anxiety Depression and Rage.They are currently raising money via GoFundme to finish the film. To donate go to https://gofund.me/2415f0e7 . All help big and small from podcast listeners is welcome and appreciated.
Photo By Roe Ethridge
Stephanie LaCava is a New York writer. She began her career at American Vogue and her work has since appeared in The Believer, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, and The New Inquiry.
Stephanie's first book, An Extraordinary Theory of Objects, is a memoir which combines narrative nonfiction and illustration. Her 2020 novel, The Superrationals, is about female friendship, set at the intersection between counterculture and the art industry. Stephanie's second novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You was just published by Verso Books this month. The novel centers on a protagonist named Margot, the daughter of two famous musicians, who cannot feel physical pain.
Alexander Hacke was born in Berlin. A musician from the start, he joined Einstürzende Neubauten in 1980 at the age of 14, as well as playing in numerous influential underground-groups and writing, recording, releasing and performing music under the pseudonym Alexander von Borsig. Throughout the eighties and up to the present Alexander has collaborated with many artists and continues to produce records and score music for theater, feature and documentary movies.
Since 2001 Alexander has been collaborating with American artist Danielle de Picciotto who was a singer in the band Space Cowboys. In 2015 he put out his autobiography KRACH - Verzerrte Erinnerungen.
James Johnston is well known for his work as a musician, with his band Gallon Drunk, as a former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, as well as for his work with PJ Harvey. He is also a noted painter. Jame's paintings are bold and loose, marked by rich and striking use of color. His work has been used for book covers, album artwork, and featured in a variety of arts publications. Jame's Paintings are also in many collections including the collection of the University of Chicago Center in Paris.
Over the last two years, Lydia and Jasmine Hirst have been working on a documentary about artists and mental health titled Anxiety Depression and Rage.They are currently raising money via GoFundme to finish the film. To donate go to https://gofund.me/2415f0e7 . All help big and small from podcast listeners is welcome and appreciated.
Legendary British punk rock band Eater released their debut album, The Album in 1977. At the time, most of the band members weren’t even old enough to drive a car. This is likely why the album ended up getting pummeled by the demands of their label, and the fickle trends of the British music business at the time. The band finally has had the chance to revisit the master tapes and reissue a restored version of their debut album, now titled Ant. Andy Blade joins Lydia and Tim to discuss the reissue, what it was like being one on the youngest punk bands at the time, meeting Lou Reed and John Lydon, as well as Eater's upcoming tour with Dinosaur Jr.
On a separate note Lydia and friend of the podcast Jasmine Hirst have been working on a documentary titled Anxiety Depression and Rage, which is a series of interviews with artists, writers and musicians about their struggles with mental health. Jasmine and Lydia are now looking to raise money to finish the documentary. Please checkout the Gofund page which can be found HERE
Artist Edwin Pouncey works under the nom de plume Savage Pencil. His art has mauled and entertained a generation with a stinking psychedelic cesspit of corpse cluttered comix. As a music journalist, Edwin's writings and Trip Or Squeek cartoon strip are featured regularly in The Wire. He has an insider’s knowledge of the many bands whose records and performances he has reviewed over several decades.
In 1980, Jerry Lang, Chris Tense, and Henry Bogdan formed Poison Idea, a Portland Oregon based punk band that gave voice to the disenfranchised all over the world for over 30 years. Jerry and his bandmates also went all in on drugs and drinking, spiraling out of control and blowing both the band and their lives apart. Jerry wrote Black Heart Fades Blue a three part memoir in which he reckons very honestly with this past.
Danielle de Picciotto is an American born, interdisciplinary artist, living in Berlin since 1987. She was the co-founder of the Berlin Love Parade and has performed and exhibited internationally since 1989 together with Crime &The City Solution, Gudrun Gut, The Space Cowboys and her husband Alexander Hacke, founding member of Einstürzende Neubauten. Danielle has released two books, writes regular essays for culture magazines and is known for her intricate spoken word interwoven into her music. She plays the violin, hurdy gurdy and autoharp but has also always been part of the electronic music scene. Her music combines both worlds in a dreamy, experimental and unique fashion. As the interdisciplinary artist that she is, her art, which she exhibits and installs internationally, also accompanies her music as fantastic, interwoven visuals morphing drawings into strange shapes and forms.
During the nearly 50 years of his career, English drummer/singer/composer Charles Hayward has developed idiosyncratic attitudes and insights into music and sound. Charles was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with the European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun. Charles also did a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's Charles has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith, Monkey Puzzle Trio and Albert Newton.
Nate Young and John Olson of legendary Michigan noise outfit Wolf Eyes visit the podcast. Since 1998 the band has generated a tidal wave of releases adding up to over 500 titles; mostly limited from 2-100 copies. Released on American Tapes, Hanson, AA, Warzone, and countless other independent/homemade labels.
Photo By: Jasmine Hirst
Penny Arcade is an internationally respected performance artist, writer, poet and experimental theatre maker known for her magnetic stage presence, her take no prisoners wit and her content rich plays and one liners. She is the author of 16 scripted plays and hundreds of performance art pieces. Penny's work has always been focused on giving voice to those marginalized by society. Her willingness to speak truth to power at the expense of her career has made her an icon of artistic resistance. Since 1992 Penny has collaborated with Steve Zehentner , a former architect turned video producer. In 1999 Penny and Steve launched The Lower East Side Biography Project Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia an oral history video project, a weekly cable series that is broadcast and streamed. The series purpose is to introduce highly self individuated people to the general public.
Happy 4th of July! To celebrate we got another prescient 4th of July Special.
Note: Sailing Simon Slater made a mistake and added the wrong track at approx 2:20(sorry!). This has now been fixed.
Author and good friend of the podcast Jerry Stahl returns to discuss his new book Nein, Nein, Nein!, One Man's Tale of Depression Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust. The book is a hilarious and fearless recounting of a guided bus tour Jerry took to a series of Nazi concentration camps. Nein, Nein, Nein! hits bookstores July 5th. Preorder the book now at the Akashic website.
Singer, songwriter, record producer, and artist Jennifer Herrema formed the band Royal Trux with Neil Hagerty in 1987. The band split in 2001. Jennifer then went on to form new bands, RTX, and the Black Bananas. She has produced and mixed records with other artists including Bad Wizard. Jennifer has also published numerous articles on music, art, fashion, and lifestyle subjects in various publications including Vice Magazine.
Self proclaimed herpes of the entertainment industry film director and studio bigwig Lloyd Kaufman and his company Troma Studios are icons of cinema. Lloyd has directed many classics including The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die and Class of Nuke Em High. Troma has produced and or distributed terrific films such as Die You Zombie Bastards, Blood Sucking Freaks and Frankenhooker. Lloyd's newest film #Shakespeare’s Shitstorm is a scatological take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Michael Zilkha grew up in London and moved to New York in 1975. After interviewing John Cale for Interview Magazine in 1977, he and Cale started a short lived record label, Spy Records. After Spy Records Michael founded Ze Records. Very quickly, Michael signed many No Wave acts such as The Contortions, Cristina, Suicide, The Waitresses, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
By 1984 Michael stepped back from the record business. He then took a job as an Editor at Atlantic Monthly Press and in 1986 moved to Houston where he and his father founded Zilkha Renewable Energy, which under its present ownership remains one of the largest renewable energy companies in the United States. Currently Michael is the founder and owner of publisher Ze Books.
Hey All,
Because of Lydia's very nice birthday dinner the podcast release this week will be delayed until tomorrow.
Jamie Stewart is the front man and founder of the band Xiu Xiu. Xiu Xiu's music is drawn from British post punk and synth pop, modern Western classical, noise and experimental musics, Asian percussion musics, American folk, torch singers, house, techno and 1950s rock n roll. Jamie and best friend Angela Seo started the band in 2002 while living in San Jose, California. Since then Xiu Xiu has relentlessly toured all over the world since. The music has been called “self flagellating”, “harsh”, “brutal”, “shocking” and “perverse” but also “genius”, “brilliant”, “unique”, “imaginative” and “luminous.”
John Duncan is an American multi-platform artist whose body of work includes, performance art, installations, contemporary music, video art and experimental film, often involving the extensive use of recorded sound. His music is composed mainly of recordings from shortwave radio, field recordings and voice. His events and installations are a form of existential research, often confrontational in nature. John currently lives in and operates out of Bologna, Italy.
Actor Norman Reedus is best known for playing The Walking Dead fan favorite Daryl Dixon, and also playing Murphy McManus in the cult classic Boondock Saints. Norman's other gig is host of the motorcycle-themed documentary series on AMC aptly titled Ride With Norman Reedus. Each week, Norman and a different co-rider tour a part of America, stopping to visit with locals along the way. This week marks Norman's debut as a novelist. His book The Ravaged was released this week by Blackstone Publishing.
This week Lydia and Tim are joined by Malcolm Jarry and Lucien Greaves from The Satanic Temple. The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.
The temple has applied their mission to publicly confront hate groups, fight for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, apply for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provide for religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women's reproductive autonomy, expose harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with their tenets.
Edgar Oliver is a performer, playwright, and poet who has been active in New York’s downtown theatre scene since the early 1980s. He began his career performing poems and monologues at venues such as The Pyramid Club and ABC No Rio. As a playwright, many of his works have been staged at La MaMa and other downtown NYC theaters.
Edgar Oliver was born in Savannah, Georgia. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in art history. His film roles include That’s Beautiful Frank, Henry May Long, and Gentlemen Broncos, and his television work includes appearances on Oddities and hosting Odd Folks Home for the Science Channel. He has published one novel, The Man Who Loved Plants, and produced four collections of poetry that have been published by Oilcan Press. He is one of the most beloved storytellers at The Moth. He regularly collaborates with Brooklyn-based musical collective The Octave Doktors. His sister is Helen Oliver Adelson, a visual artist.
Shilpa Ray released her album Teenage and Torture in 2011 on Knitting Factory Records and found her a fan in Nick Cave who started telling music journalists she was a favorit. Cave brought her on tour as support and recorded the song Pirate Jenny with her. Then Cave hired Shilpa to sing backup on his Bad Seeds tour. Shilpa has also served as main support for Man Man and Acid Mother’s Temple as well as the opening act for Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and A Place to Bury Strangers. Shilpa just released her new album Portrait of a Lady via Northern Spy.
The nicest guy in the DJ business, Jonathan Toubin joins Lydia and Tim this week. Jonathan is best known for is New York Night Train Soul Clap and Dance-Off, which has been called "the most popular soul dance party in the world" by SXSW. It is the only soul dance party to have had an entire night dedicated to it at Lincoln Center. In 2014, Jeffrey was voted Best New York DJ in the Village Voice Reader's Choice Contest. When you have sometime, go to his club TV EYE in Ridgewood Queens and say hello.
Episode 143 is a special treat. It is the live recording of Lydia's performance with Joseph Keckler and Jex Blackmore at the UFO Factory in Detroit. A special thank you to Casey Schwochow for the recordings of the event.
Tansey Rosset is the daughter of legendary publisher Barney Rosset, who was one of the most important and influential publishers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the most important figures in the history of the battle against censorship in America.
Barney bought Grove Press in 1951 and immediately published some of the most famous and controversial titles of the twentieth century—Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.
In 1957, Barney Rosset launched The Evergreen Review with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy. For the next sixteen years, Evergreen introduced many world-class writers to American readers, such as Beckett, Genet, Grass, Ōe, Duras, Paz, Walcott, Nabokov.
Tansey was kind enough to join Lydia and Tim and recount her memories of growing up with her father. She currently lives in Michigan, where she works as a nurse practicioner.
Tim McLoughlin’s novel, Heart of the Old Country, was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series and was the basis for the 2008 film The Narrows. He is the editor of the multiple award-winning anthology Brooklyn Noir, and is the 2003 recipient of Italy’s Premio Penne award. Tim's latest book and compilation of stories and essays is Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He lives in Brooklyn.
William Winant is a percussionist who describes himself as a technician of the sacred. Spin Magazine describes him as "the avant-elite's go-to percussionist for more than 35 years". In 2014, William was nominated for a Grammy. He has performed with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich and Musicians, Yo-Yo Ma, Frederic Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Joan LaBarbara, Annea Lockwood, Joelle Leandre, Oingo Boingo, Mr. Bungle, Sonic Youth, and the Kronos String Quartet.
John Moran is a composer, choreographer, and theater artist. He began his career composing large-scale operas, but later began choreographing detailed works in which performers silently mime and lip-sync his precisely timed musical compositions. He often employs repetitive structures in what he calls sound-scores that consist of spoken word, recorded music, and layered noises. Moran describes his recent works as theatrical portraits of people that he meets and asks to record their vocals in a studio setting.
When John was a teenager growing up in Lincoln Nebraska, he gave a tape of his work to Philip Glass after a Glass Ensemble performance. This lead to John Moving to New York 1988, and sleeping for several years behind Phillip Glass's couch.
From 2005 to 2011 Moran created works for the dancer Saori Tsukuda in which they portrayed representations of themselves, touring internationally under the name John Moran... and his neighbor, Saori.
In 2013, Moran completed a trilogy of solo performances, Etudes: Amsterdam (The Con Artist), and Goodbye Thailand (Portrait of Eye) that won Best of Fringe in Amsterdam and Spoleto. His works have featured performers such as Uma Thurman, Iggy Pop, Allen Gingsberg, and Julia Stiles.
MacDowell Fellow, Chavisa Woods, is the author of four books, including Things To Do When You're Goth in the Country, and 100 Times, (A Memoir of Sexism). Chavisa was the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kathy Acker Award in Writing, and Cobalt ‘s Zora Neale Hurston Prize for Fiction. Her work has received praise from the New York Times, The LA Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Stranger, and many other media outlets. She currently serves as the Executive Director of a nonprofit art and literary organization, A Gathering of the Tribes. Her literary work primarily focuses on the lives of those living in conservative, rural America. She has appeared on The Young Turks, NPR’s 1A in and her work had appeared in Tin House, LitHub, Electric Lit, Full Stop, The Brooklyn Rail, The Evergreen Review, New York Quarterly, and many other publications.
Jex Blackmore is an artist and activist best known for their performances in civic spaces. Their work, which is focused on the relationship between moral religious rhetoric, sexuality, and political policy, takes aim at institutions of social and sexual oppression. Their work is featured in the Magnolia Pictures documentary, Hail Satan?, which was an official selection at Sundance 2019. They have exhibited installation and video work internationally. Most recently, their installation Sex Militant, held at Chicago's Co-Prosperity Sphere, was listed as one of the best art exhibitions of 2019 by the Chicago Reader and was protested by the Catholic Church. In 2020, their experimental endurance film An Undue Burden, premiered at the Ann Arbor Film. In 2022, they took an abortion pill on live TV which created a viral campaign for mail order abortion.
Richie Stotts was a founding guitarist of the Plasmatics. Taking inspiration from Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he sported an enormous mohawk. Richie would also cross dress in various costumes like a nurse uniform, or a french maid dress. He did this In an effort to keep up with his constantly outrageous bandmate Wendy O. Williams.
After leaving the Plasmatics in 1984, Richie pursued a solo career with his band King Flux and then went back to school where he eventually earned a graduate degree in Geology from Indiana University. Fun fact, Richie appears in a brief cameo in 9½ Weeks. He is the guy with the blonde mohawk and chainsaw tattoo.
Back in 1995 Johnson City Tennessee artist Bryan Lewis Saunders began creating a self portrait of himself every day. As an artist, he also set out to look for experiences that would affect his perception of self and the world around him. To achieve these ends, he came up with an experiment titled Under The Influence. Everyday during the duration of the experiment, Bryan took a different drug or intoxicant and drew himself under the influence.
In addition to his visual art practice, he also performs spoken word and he was the subject of a documentary called Art of Darkness about the his drug experiment, which, he says, left him lethargic and with mild brain damage that wasn't irreparable.
Bruce LaBruce is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed nine feature films, including his most recent, Saint-Narcisse, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2020. As a visual artist he has had numerous gallery shows around the world, the latest of which, called Obscenity, a photography exhibit, which caused a national ruckus in Spain in 2011. His feature film L.A. Zombie was notably banned in Australia in 2010.
Bruce has written a premature memoir called The Reluctant Pornographer, and has had two books published about his work: Ride, Queer, Ride, and Bruce(x)ploitation. Most recently, Bruce has been honored with film retrospectives at both TIFF/Bell Lightbox 2014, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2015. The MoMA retrospective featured all nine of his features as well as a program of short films. All of the films have now become part of MoMA’s permanent film collection.
Like 90% percent of all other male musicians, guitarist Eugene Chadbourne started playing pop music hoping to get the attention of girls. Very quickly he grew bored of the conventional styles and gravitated towards avant-garde jazz. Since then Eugene has been as The Quietus aptly points out "one of the most absurdly prolific left-field musicians of all times". He has recorded at least 358 albums with everyone from Anthony Braxton to Camper van Beethoven.
Aside from his prolific guitar work, Eugene also plays a broken Electric Rake , and is an author. His book Dreamory is a 1000 page collection of his tour and dream diaries, teenage and draft dodging memoirs and much more.
Past guest Kier-La Janisse returns to discuss her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and her new Blu-ray box set compendium of Folk Horror All Haunts Be ours.
Rat Bastard is the major instigator of the Miami noise scene. He is a purported to be a member of not only the legendary To Live and Shave in LA, but also a member of TLSLA 2,3,4 & 5. For decades, Rat has also recorded and booked bands in Miami. In his home studio, he's recorded everyone from Marilyn Manson to Blowfly.
Lydia and Tim celebrate the birth of 2022 in two parts, with past guests. In part one, they reflect on the past year with Adele Bertei, Sydney Silver and Ian White. In part two they keep the reflection and story telling going with Eugene Robinson and Ron Athey. Happy New Year everyone!
Tim Stegall is a punk journalist and musician based in Austin, TX. He has been writing about punk rock and underground culture since just before his 20th birthday in 1985. Tim went from contributing to classic fanzines like Flipside and Your Flesh, to turning pro in the early '90s at Alternative Press and The Austin Chronicle. He's concurrently led a "fundamentalist punk band" called The Hormones from 1985 to the present day. He has written liner notes and bios for such luminaries as The Weirdos, New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, Iggy Pop, and Manic Street Preachers. In the last few years, he's become a punk historian, especially through his work at Alternative Press' website. He is currently working on his first book, a history of Austin's punk scene from 1975 to the present, being serialized in The Austin Chronicle.
Due to the holidays, the latest episode of the Lydian Spin is going to be released tomorrow(12/25/21), not today(12/24/21). Hope every listener has a pleasure filled yet safe holiday.
Jennifer Sirey is a Brooklyn based artist. Her process-driven sculpture engages organic materials and natural phenomena, incorporating glass, liquids, wax, bacteria, algae, and wood in monolithic, architectural forms. For years Jennifer has been refining a process of growing Acetobacter, or Mother of Vinegar as a building material to construct living sculptures.
Stu Spasm is the first guest to return for a second interview. He comes back to tell Lydia and Tim more about his band Art Gray Noizz Quintet as well as to elaborate on some of his other projects, including a book he is writing, and the sculptures he makes of public figures that occasionally include his own pubic hair. Lydia is back in New York and Tim continues his travels where he dials in somewhere between Boston and New York.
Eric Gardner is a professional drummer who has worked with some of the biggest names in the business. Eric started off touring with Gnarls Barkley, and has since toured and recorded with Cypress Hill, Iggy Pop, Morrisey, Steve Vai, MC5, Slash, Beck, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and numerous Tom Morello projects. He even got a chance to work with film score and Oingo Boingo legend Danny Elfman on 2012’s Oscar Winner Silver Linings Playbook. Eric also happens to be one of Tims oldest friends and earliest musical collaborators.
In every generation, there are those who resist the sweeping tide of proscription and conformity. For New York based artist Gio Black Peter, such a reaction comes naturally. Through his work, he is able to break through the hardening shell of uniformity and tap into something more honest.
At its core, Gio’s art is a provocation and, whether addressing issues of violence or oppression, alienation or love, it seeks to spark a reaction in its audience. While that reaction may be visceral and dejected, or ecstatic and inspired, the ultimate aim is to fuel awareness, both of the self and society. In that, Peter’s art is a mirror of his own life—the two are, at times, indistinguishable. Cleary Gio's provocations are striking a nerve as he constantly having to battle against unwarranted censorship on social media.
Artist, musician, record label founder and owner of Minneapolis' Grumpy's Bar, started Amphetamine Reptile Records (AmRep), in the early 1980s. Amrep originally run out of a hand grenade crate kept under Tom's Marine Corps bunk, was conceived as a way for Tom to release records by his band Halo Of Flies. The label quickly became his full-time job and thrived into the 90s, releasing music by the Melvins, Helmet, Cows, Boss Hog and many others.
It was also in the 90s when Tom fashioned his own popular line of Zippo lighters, festooned with artwork by Frank Kozik, Shag, Shepard Fairey, R. Crumb and Coop. Soon after that, Tom began to explore linoleum cut printing, which was paired with the records he was putting out. The combination of the music and the prints transformed the records into a high energy bombastic art object.
We want to thank our fans for reaching out and pointing out that the stream for the latest episode featuring the great Admiral Grey was not working. The issue should be fixed. Please try listening again. If you are still having problems, please let us know.
Admiral Grey is known as the virtuosic frontwoman for Cellular Chaos ,and as a veteran underground NY multidisciplinary artist and performer in both the experimental music (Glass Lamborghini, Drayton Sawyer Gang) and theater scenes (Sister Sylvester, The Nerve Tank, The Drunkard's Wife). She has composed music, writing, video, theater, costume and puppets since she was a child, with her works across genres and mediums carrying a recognizable thread of humanist existentialism, clowning and pageantry, sincerity mixed with satire, tragicomedy, and a repurposed maximalism she calls Povluxe - a style of luxurious extravagance created out of poverty items like thrift, cheap goods and trash. She is currently producing a sweeping multimedia piece called The Human Dream Project which takes recordings of people intimately describing their dreams and illustrates them through puppetry, stop-motion animation, original music, and video art.
Welsh poet and playwright Patrick Jones is one of Wales most prominent literary voices. In addition to his writing, Patrick has done so many other things. In 1993 he founded the Blackwood Young Writers Group. He taught adult literacy, worked as a hospice aide and was employed at a factory in Chicago, where he did not even know what the product was. The underlying theme in all of his activities writing and otherwise, is social justice, and trying very hard to be the voice for the disaffected.
This past October, Parthian Books released the 20th anniversary edition book of Patrick's poetry titled Fuse / Fracture (Poems 2001-2021).
Lydia and Tim ring in the Halloween weekend with members of Lydia's coven. Jasmine Hirst, Elise Passavant & Sadie Mae discuss a wide range of spooky subjects including, but not limited to psychic encounters with Andy Warhol, LSD laced gold leaf, the commodification of Halloween, swollen 16th century witch hands and penis snatching. This lively episode concludes with the Lydia and Rowland S. Howard's duet I Fell In Love with a Ghost. Happy Halloween!
Tim Biskup is a Southern California artist whose practice is focused mainly on abstract and figurative painting, but also extends into sculpture, printmaking and music. He went to art school before entering the animation and illustration industries, where he honed his technical skills. In 1999 he gathered a community of artists and began hosting live art auctions at bars around Los Angeles. He quickly found an audience for his personal work and began a career showing his art in gallery settings. His complex color and design theories pushed forward a decidedly populist aesthetic which has continued to develop and morph over the years. From early 2017 until early 2020 he hosted open studio events at a small gallery space called Face Guts in Glassell Park, CA. In October of 2019 Tim’s retrospective monagraph/autobiography Tree of Life was published by Chronicle Chroma.
Mariam Atash is an attorney with experience in the business, government relations, media and nonprofit sectors. She serves on the United States Institute of Peace Gender and Law Working Group. She has also been an adjunct professor of law at The University of La Verne School of Law.
Mariam was a senior advisor to the Commercial & Trade Counsel at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, DC. She has taken part in numerous international conferences and speaking engagements on issues related to economic development, legal reform, women’s rights, and civil society capacity building.
Zohra Atash, Mariam's sister joins her on this episode to discuss their involvement with the Nooristan Foundation, which is a non for profit that provides education for Afghani street children, trains impoverished women to become entrepreneurs and helps bring electricity and education to remote villages in Afghanistan. Throughout the conversation both Mariam and Zohra offer some deeper insight into the current events happening in Afghanistan.
Sean Carnage is a big fan of rock, noise concerts, art, gay stuff and technology. In fact, over the past 40 plus years he has been either a promoter, writer, publisher, filmmaker, archivist and all around enthusiastic participant of all of the above.
In the 1990s in Cleveland Ohio Sean teamed up with his friend Brenda Mullen and published U.S. Rocker Magazine. He and Brenda built the magazine over a decade into Northeast Ohio's number 1 free underground music magazine.
In the early 2000s, on the advice of Nandor Nevai, Sean moved to Los Angeles where he worked as an assistant to Larry Flynt. After working for Mr. Flynt, Sean continued to promote avant-garde acts throughout Los Angeles. He also became a producer of The Queer Edge with Jack E. Jett & Sandra Bernhard , which aired on the pioneering Queer Television Network.
If that is not enough, Sean helped invent a whole genre of pornography(Alt Porn) and filmed 29 mini documentaries, one of which featuring Ronnie James Dio goes viral and racks up millions of views on YouTube.
Bassist Trevor Dunn began studying the electric bass right after his older brother brought home a 7” of Detroit Rock City. Soon after that, he quickly joined two bands, one was Ful Choke and the other, was Gemini. In 1986, Trevor, along with Mike Patton and Trey Spruance started the band Mr. Bungle. Mike Patton's success as the lead singer of Faith No More paved the way for Mr. Bungle being signed to Warner Brothers.
In 2000, Mike relocated to Brooklyn, NY. Currently he plays in several bands such as Endangered Blood, Dan Weiss, Starebaby, SpermChurch and various projects under the direction of John Zorn. Mike also occasionally plays with Wendy Eisenberg, The Melvins, Kris Davis & Oliver Steidle. He also recently founded the record label Riverworm Records. The first release on the fledgling label comes from Trevor’s project SpermChurch, a poly-electro, pan-genre duo featuring the him alongside Sannety, who covers the electronic portion of the pairing. The album can be purchased at: spermchurch.bandcamp.com
Vanessa Skantze is a Butoh artist who has performed and taught in the US and Europe for over 20 years. She became a student of Jinen Butoh founder Atsushi Takenouchi in 2003; having already co-created the sound/movement improvisation ensemble Death Posture in New Orleans. Currently based in Seattle, Washington, Vanessa is a co-founder of Teatro de la Psychomachia, a DIY space that has hosted national and international performing artists and musicians for more than a decade. Collaborations with sound artists have been a constant practice in solo and group performances; Vanessa embraces the art of deep listening improvisation as an essential communion with the body instrument and all life.
When you are done with listening to Vanessa's interview, check out Tim's new solo album Solo.
The album can be purchased now on bandcamp.
As a boy, Tyler Hubby began making films and photographs. While in high school, he was mentored by then unknown director David Fincher. Later on, Tyler went on to study film and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute with "low-fi" underground film legend George Kuchar.
His subversive and irreverent short films and videos detailing fetishism, co-dependency and bodily mutations have screened internationally, and are featured in Jack Sargeant's book Cinema Contra Cinema.
Tyler has documented artists such as Faust, Keiji Haino, John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Rhys Chatham, Arnold Dreyblatt, Zeena Parkins, Jonathan Kane and Tony Conrad. Furthermore, he has edited over 30 documentary films. Most notable among them are The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a biography of mentally ill artist/musician Daniel Johnston; The Final Member which follows the curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum as he attempts to complete his exotic penis collection; The Great Invisible, which won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW 2014. Tyler also served as an additional editor on the Oscar nominated Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
Tyler wrote and directed Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, a feature documentary about iconoclastic multi-media artist Tony Conrad that was named as one the best films of 2017 by Artforum.
Music critic Byron Coley wrote for Forced Exposure magazine in the 1980s until the magazine ceased publication in 1993. Prior to Forced Exposure, he wrote for NY Rocker, Boston Rock, and Take It! . During 1980s and '90s, he was a contributing writer to Spin. Byron has contributed liner notes to albums by The Flesh Eaters, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo, John Fahey, and numerous others. He has also appeared in documentaries about artists Half Japanese, Minutemen, Jandek, and The Holy Modal Rounders. Byron is also a published poet and occasionally gives public readings of his work. He also wrote a biographies of Chuck Norris and the Mötley Crüe.
In 2010, Byron became involved with Feeding Tube Records in Northampton, Massachusetts, a record store where he sells rare items from his personal collection.
Merrill Garbus is a founding member of the band Tune-Yards. The other regular member of the band is her partner Nate Brenner. Back in 2009, Merrill recorded the first Tune-Yards album Bird-Brains on recycled cassette tape using a voice recorder and then self released it. The album was well received and led to the band being signed by 4AD records several months later.
Since Bird-Brains Tune-Yards has released four more albums including Sketchy, which was released this past March. Merrill has described Sketchy as a rediscovery of the joy in making music. She and Nate also do soundtrack work. In 2018 Tune-Yards scored the excellent Boots Riley movie Sorry to Bother You.
Bil Brown is a lens-based artist living and working in Los Angeles. Whether working in portraiture, fashion, or photojournalism, Bil’s imagery captures energetic moments of the conscious world, as well as the foreboding of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advancing ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Bil pushes the boundaries of his visual storytelling as a “concrete-poetry” infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu.
Bil’s still photography has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows. His 2018 show at the Leica Gallery LA, PROTEST, documented the protests following the 2016 election of an American President. In 2020, during the global pandemic, Bil started a teaching series with Leica Akademie entitled Fragments Toward the History of Photography and plans on publishing a series of short run books covering the time leading up to and during the tumultuous 20th year of the 21st Century.
Originally a writer, Bil is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School where his teachers included co-founder Allen Ginsberg. In the late 1990s Bil co-founded the Prague School of Poetics, which received grants from the Rockefeller Center, the NEA and Arts International. The school supported, published and ran community projects for artists and writers in Denver, Louisville, New York, Chicago and Prague. In 2000, The Prague school put on the summer festival of international arts Prazska Skola Poetiky. The festival focused on the relationship of the Avant Garde between the Americas and Eastern Europe. Participating artists included Czech Surrealists Jan and Eva Svankmejer, Lydia, and Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.
Bil lives in Los Angeles, CA with his family and often travels to Europe and Asia, and across the Americas.
Jack Sargeant PhD is the author of various books on underground film and culture, including Flesh And Excess: On Underground Film, Against Control, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, and Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression (republished as Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground). He has written introductory essays for works by Lydia Lunch, Joe Coleman, McLean Stephenson, and Karolina Urbaniak and Martin Bladh, among others. His writings focusing on underground film, outsider art, photography, and performance have appeared in numerous publications, journals, magazines, and liner notes. Jack has also written on true crime, death, and various other unusual subjects. He's also a curator and programmer of film and art, and an occasional visual artist.
In pre-pandemic days Jack enjoyed participating in public readings and talks. He is a co-founder of the Transgressive Cultures Conference, in Paris. Against Control and other titles can be purchased through the usual online sources, or via your local indie bookshop.
Billy Chainsaw is an artist whose work uses a mix of pulp and the arcane to engage with ideas of mortality, magic and sensuality. Working with paints, screen prints, photographs and decals, Billy has developed a personal collection of imagery and gestural approaches which are recognizable yet seemingly open to infinite interpretations too.
Billy cites the beat author William S. Burroughs as his "ghost muse". Like Burroughs, Chainsaw's art represents a collision of the matter of fact and the fantastical, the elemental and the quotidian, the highbrow and the lowbrow.
Billy's work has been exhibited in many galleries including the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Fleetwood Gallery in San Francisco. For many years he was also a film critic and cultural commentator, writing for publications such as Empire, Bizarre and Kerrang!
Vocalist Shirley Manson has been the lead singer of the band Garbage since 1994. The band became one the best selling acts of the 1990s. Nearly thirty years later the band has just released their seventh album No Gods No Masters, which is a socially conscious mix of goth and pop. In addition to her music Shirley has done a bit of acting. In 2008 she was in the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles.
Shirley lives in Los Angeles with her husband sound engineer Billy Bush. You can see her perform live this summer, as Garbage will be on tour with Alanis Morissette and Cat Power through this coming fall.
Without further delay we bring you Bob Calhoun. Bob is a San Francisco Bay Area author, journalist, and former punk wrestler and peepshow emcee. Since 2015, he has recounted his city's most gruesome and lurid events in his regular SF Weekly column, Yesterday's Crimes. His punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood & Cornmeal, is a national bestseller. His most recent book, The Murders That Made Us: How Vigilantes, Hoodlums, Mob Bosses, Serial Killers and Cult Leaders Built the San Francisco Bay Area tells the story of San Francisco through some of the cities most violent and depraved denizens.
Bob will be reading live along with Lydia and Eugene Robinson at the Make Out Room August 5th.
Most of the Lydian Spin is in Los Angeles today. This means this week's episode(107) will be arriving a little later than usual as everyone is excited to attend Lydia's performance tonight. Episode 107 should drop Friday late morning. If you are in Los Angeles come out and say hello!
If you are in Los Angeles July 29th, come out to the Moroccan Lounge and see Lydia, Sylvia Black(Episode 14), Lisa Kekaula(Episode 106) and Adele Bertei(Episode 89) perform live. This a special spoken word and musical event in celebration of the Lydia Lunch - The War is Never Over documentary premiering at the Nuart on July 30th. Get your ticket now while supplies last.
Since 1990, singer Lisa Kekaula has been the lead vocalist of The Bellrays. From 2003 to 2007, Lisa was part of a cast of vocalists who sang live with the surviving members of the MC5. Lisa has also been featured on many singles and album tracks for other artists including, British house music band Basement Jaxx, and Crystal Method.
In 2014, Lisa contributed vocals to two tracks for the Re-Licked album of Iggy and the Stooges songs re-recorded by former Stooges guitarist James Williamson. Lisa has also done recordings with Williamson to help fight Hawaiian homelessness.
Lisa is married to Bellrays guitarist Robert Vennum, also of the Bellrays. In 2014, Lisa and Vennum released an album under the name Lisa and the Lips.
Musician(drummer, percussionist, composer) Ian White is known for being the drummer of the London band Gallon Drunk. Ian is also a member of Lydia's band Big Sexy Noise.
This year Ian via his instrumental solo project Blyth released an album titled Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which has been described by the Reprobate Press as "thunderous, organic-industrial collision of percussion and brutal instrumentation – a sound that at once obliterates and raises to levels of ecstasy, the soundtrack to a twisted road movie that doesn’t exist. In a world of increasing musical conformity and bland repetition, it’s an impressively original work". The tracks Tongue Tied and Confessions of a Justified Sinner are included in this episode for your listening pleasure.
Along with his musical pursuits, Ian is also an avid collector and trader of religious art and artifacts.
This week the Lydian Spin celebrates year two of the podcast. Lydia and Tim take time to look back, take stock, and of course share some of their fondest memories. Thank you to all guests both past and future who have made this podcast so much fun to do.
English rocker Faris Badwan is best known as the lead vocalist of The Horrors. Before beginning his association with The Horrors, he played with The Rotters. Faris is also an artist who briefly trained as an illustrator at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Check out some of his paintings below.
Matilda Joon is a lover of words and language. She is also an avid diary writer, a wild child, teenage runaway, actress, and artist. Matilda created art and chaos while having a rock club in a basement where all the cool bands came to play in the 90's. The rock club led to a Swedish television show called Chaos TV. Matilda also has done performance art, and spoken word sourced from her backlog of journals. The Swedish audience were split between those who loved it and those who hated it. Last year, born out of frustration and boredom Matilda started a new spoken word project called JOON BABY JOON with music added from both Aron Aronsson guitarist in the legendary Swedish cult band The Leather Nun and the American poet and musician Ian Ottaway.
Sloppy Jane is a sometime eleven piece avant-rock act led by this week's guest Haley Dahl(no relation to Tim). The band is a revolving cast of collaborators. Elements of the live show include: laughter, choir vocals, xylophone, saxophone, kazoo, television, slide whistle, vomiting blue dye, a naked body, a rotting suit, guitar, bass, drums, tambourine, ruby red slippers, violent shifts in genre and speed, a make-believe maestro, and a set that does not stop moving once it has started.
Haley currently resides in Los Angeles where she has been recording new music in various caves in and around Los Angeles.
Moby was born in Harlem in 1965, and grew up playing in hardcore bands in and around New York City. Moby found commercial and critical success with his fifth album Play which, after receiving little recognition, became an unexpected global hit in 2000. Moby has not toured since 2014, but continues to record and release albums; his nineteenth studio album, Reprise, was released in May 2021. A vegan for 34 years, he lives in Los Angeles where he enjoys hiking and considers animal rights activism to be his day job.
Sydney Silver is a founding member of the seminal, all-female punk band The Lunachicks. The band released six albums and toured internationally for almost thirteen years. The New York Times described them as “feminist, trashy, righteous, foul-mouthed and certainly fun.”
Sydney and her bandmate's have a book out titled Fallopian Rhapsody: The Story of the Lunachicks. which was released this past Tuesday by Hachette Books. The book is a coming-of-age tale about a band of NYC teenagers who would eventually become the Lunachicks. These teenagers forged a sisterhood, found salvation, and fervently crashed the gates of punk rock during the '90s, accidentally becoming feminist icons along the way. More than that, the book is a story about the enduring friendship among the book's three main character: Theo Kogan, Gina Volpe and Sydney, who formed the Lunachicks at LaGuardia High School in the late '80s and had a record deal with Blast First Records as teenagers, as a result of being discovered one night by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore.
In addition to being an author, Sydney also is a successful entrepreneur. In 2005 she opened the acclaimed Roebling Tea Room in Willamsburg Brooklyn. Currently she runs Boss Coaching, which provides life and business coaching services.
Writer Lucy Sante was born in Belgium near the German border. Her Family emigrated to the United States several times between 1959 and 1963, finally Settling in New Jersey. After college, Lucy attended Columbia University, but did not graduate.
Since 1984, Lucy has been a teacher and a writer. Currently she teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College. She is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her publications include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, and The Factory of Facts and Folk Photography. Her latest work is Maybe the People Would Be the Times, a collection of essays.
Bassist and vocalist Gail Ann Dorsey spent close to two decades in David Bowie’s band. Her other steady gig, was with Lenny Kravitz. Gail has also worked with many other artists, including Boy George, Charlie Watts, Tears for Fears, Gang of Four, Jane Siberry, The National, and others.
Originally from Philadelphia, Gail studied film for a bit at Cal Arts, but dropped out to pursue a music career in New York. She then moved to London in the 1980s, where in 1998 she released her first album, The Corporate World. After having found some success as a solo artist, Gail quickly became an in demand session and touring bassist. She has continued work on her solo material, and it has become a primary focus now that Covid-19 has halted live music performances.
Owen Kline is a New York based director, actor, screenwriter and cartoonist, who is best known for his role as Frank Berkman in The Squid And The Whale (2005). From early high school through his 20s, Owen has been spitting out an endless slew of self-generated DIY media including: comic books, sardonic fanzines and small joke books, novelty records and film shorts, including the delirious Jazzy for Joe (2014) starring the late talk show legend Joe Franklin as himself raising an abandoned child found on his doorstep. Owen's Fowl Play (2013), about a low-rent gang of aspiring cockfighters in Flushing, Queens, was selected by Josh & Benny Safdie for their Le Cinema Club repertory program in 2017.
His forthcoming feature length directorial debut is about a young cartoonist trapped in a self-destructive dream world of his own making. The film which is also penned by Owen is titled Two Against Nature, and is produced by the Safdie Brothers and will be released by A24 films in the near future. Owen can be heard every Friday at 4 on his KPISS.FM radio show Run ‘Em Off.
Nine months ago Youtube commenter Eric Gabbard wrote the following about the seminal San Diego band Drive Like Jehu:
I’ve listened to a “shit ton” of music in my life...obsessively at times...and I’m about to turn 46. This band was amazing. I keep coming back to it. I was a teenager at the time and listened to this, along with the Melvins, Fugazi, and another big one was Faith No More’s Angel Dust. Great times driving around at night listening to this disc without a care in the world... So goddamn good
Musician and artist Rick Froberg fronted Drive Like Jehu and many noted bands that have inspired the same type of devotion and admiration in music fans like Eric. These bands include Pitchfork, Hot Snakes, and The Obits.
Rick also has a devoted following as an artist. To date, Rick has created album covers and posters for all his bands—often under the moniker "Rick Fork". He has worked at Funny Garbage (Gary Panter’s interactive design company), contributed illustrations to the New York Times, created a line of T-shirts for Altamont Apparel, and shown his art at galleries across the country.
Before the world heard of KISS, the New York Dolls, Marilyn Manson, or Ozzy Osbourne, there was Alice Cooper, the original shock-rock band. Dennis Dunaway is a founding member of the band. As teenagers in Phoenix, Dennis and lead singer Vince Furnier, who would later change his name to Alice Cooper, started the band that would take them from Hollywood, to Detroit and finally to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
In 2015 Dennis wrote the book Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! , which is a riveting account of the band's creation in the '60s, the heyday in the '70s, and the legendary characters they met along the way. Dennis currently records and tours with Blue Coupe featuring Joe and Albert Bouchard of Blue Öyster Cult fame and singers Tish and Snooky who also happen to be the founders of Manic Panic.
Andy Shernoff is the founder, songwriter and bass player for the proto punk band The Dictators. He has over 200 credits as a musician, producer and songwriter. Andy also has 35 film and television credits including the movies Kindergarten Cop and Boys Don't Cry and television shows Billions, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and LillyHammer. His mantra is "everyday you make music is a good day".
Andy currently resides in the Hudson Valley with his wife Carla Rhodes and his trusty hounds Duchess and Maybellenne.
Born in Siberia, Slava Mogutin is a New York based Russian-American multimedia artist and author exiled from Russia for his outspoken queer writing and activism. A third-generation writer and autodidact journalist and photographer, he became the first Russian to be granted political asylum in the US on the grounds of homophobic persecution. Informed by his bicultural dissident and refugee experience, Slava’s work examines the notions of displacement and identity, pride and shame, devotion and disaffection, love and hate. Slava is the author of seven books of writings in Russian, as well as three monographs of photography, Lost Boys, NYC Go-Go, and Bros & Brosephines, and two illustrated collections of poetry, Food Chain and Pictures & Words. He's the winner of Andrei Bely Prize for poetry and the Tom of Finland Foundation Award for artistic achievement.
For more info please visit:
vimeo.com/slavamogutin
instagram.com/slavamogutin
amazon.com/author/slavamogutin
facebook.com/slava-mogutin-photography
Wayne Kramer was the lead guitarist of the legendary Detroit band the MC5. The band used music to fight many of the political battles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The band's raucous and uncompromising performances also provided a complimentary soundtrack to the race riots that plagued Detroit during the 1960’s. The MC5’s political convictions ultimately led to FBI interventions and arrests.
In 1975, Wayne was sentenced to federal prison for selling cocaine to an undercover agent. After his release, Wayne co-founded the non-profit group Jail Guitar Doors USA. The organization uses music and other art practices to provide incarcerated individuals a creative outlet, spiritual rehabilitation and a framework for coping with difficult situations. To date, Jail Guitar Doors USA has provided instruments to over 100 prisons.
Lydia and Tim have stitched together a brisk episode to help get you into the Easter spirit. Lydia begins by giving a very interesting treatise into the meaning of Easter and why she believes Jesus was a homosexual drug dealer. Tim then presents the research he has been doing all week into April Fools' Day. Tim has gathered strong historical evidence that suggests that not only is April Fools' on the wrong day, but that the holiday is celebrated on the wrong month entirely.
The episode is brought to a timely conclusion with an interview with French artist Paul Toupet. Paul sculpts wax puppets, which resemble children-like figures and rabbit masks. His sculptures with nucleated eyes are adorned in torn tissues or feathers and frequently have hair braids vomiting from the mouth. Paul is influenced by African art, European religious art, and his own exotic tastes. Through his work, Paul is trying to highlight how the world can be peaceful and scary at the same time.
A special thank you goes out to Sebastien Greppo who pulls double duty this week. On most weeks, Sebastien kindly handles all things social media for The Lydian Spin. This week, he also lends a hand translating back and forth between French and English so that Paul, Lydia and Tim can talk.
Happy Easter!
Adele Bertei is a multi-disciplinary artist —poet, writer, actor, performer, singer, songwriter, and filmmaker. She was an original member of New York incendiaries, the Contortions, while working as personal assistant to Brian Eno. Adele has appeared in several indie films, most notably Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, and MoMA has acquired two films featuring Adele in lead roles. Her all girl punk-funk band The Bloods was the first out band of queer women. She has toured with, provided backing vocals, and written songs for Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, Whitney Houston, Sophie B. Hawkins, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Sheena Easton, Oleta Adams, Lydia Lunch, and the Pointer Sisters. Adele’s work as a vocalist includes her duet with Thomas Dolby on international hit “Hyperactive!” and the lead on Jellybean’s dance/pop hit “Just a Mirage”.
Opening for writers Kathy Acker and Allen Ginsberg among others in the late 1970s, Adele's stories and essays appear in compilations The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, edited by Eileen Myles, and Women Who Rock, edited by Evelyn McDonnell. Her first memoir Peter and the Wolves was released in 2020 on Smog Veil Books, and Why Labelle Matters, a book of hymnals to the band who gave the world "Lady Marmalade".
The book was released on March 23, 2021 and is now available from the University of Texas Press.
Rich Keller is a four time Grammy Award nominated engineer and producer. Rich earned twenty nine platinum albums. These records have sold seventy five million albums to date. Artists Rich has worked with include Nipsey Hussle, DMX, Nas, Jay Z, Alicia Keys, Puff Daddy, Swizz Beatz, Notorious BIG, Lil Wayne, Mariah Carey, Method Man, Jada Kiss, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, Rick Ross, and Ja Rule. Rich’s started his career in hip hop since 1992, thus he has earned official “OG” status.
Rich attended North Texas State University and the City College of New York where he studied jazz bass with legendary bassist Ron Carter. He also happens to be one of the first people Tim met when he moved to New York.
Gary Lippman received a law degree from Northwestern University and has worked with New York’s Innocence Project.
Gary’s play Paradox Lust ran off-off-Broadway in 2001 and his writing has been published in such notable publications as The New York Times, The Paris Review, and VICE, while his visual art can be seen at apocalippy.com.
Having lived in Illinois, Florida, California, and France, Lippman can now be found in what used to be called “Fun City” with his Hungarian wife Vera.
Gary Lippman received a law degree from Northwestern University and has worked with New York’s Innocence Project.
Gary’s play Paradox Lust ran off-off-Broadway in 2001 and his writing has been published in such notable publications as The New York Times, The Paris Review, and VICE, while his visual art can be seen at apocalippy.com.
Having lived in Illinois, Florida, California, and France, Lippman can now be found in what used to be called “Fun City” with his Hungarian wife Vera.
Check out Gary's latest novel Set The Controls For The Heart Of Sharon Tate.
Tanya Pearson is a Public Historian and Director of the Women of Rock Oral History Project, a collection of digital interviews and written transcripts documenting the lives and careers of women-identified rock musicians. A documentary film based on the project is currently in production. Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, Tanya's contribution to the University of Texas Press’ Music Matters Series, will be published in July, 2021. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Bust Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, and some blogs, and journals. Tanya is a staunch proponent of lesbianism, aging, not eating animals, senior dog adoption, punk rock, and Judy Garland. When she's not working she enjoys writing, rock climbing, playing in her band Feminine Aggression, and watching The Golden Girls with her dogs, Samuel and Andrew. Follow Women Of Rock Oral History Project on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Immediately following this week's the interview, Tanya reads an excerpt from chapter 2 of her upcoming book. The piece is titled Trauma is a Gateway Drug.
Karen Fiorito is a vegan artist and activist residing in California. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally and featured in major publications such as Art in America, Hyperallergic, Art Forum and ArtNews. She has also been featured in such books as American Women Artists in Wartime, Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Todayand The Design of Dissent.
Fiorito has received grants from Change, Inc., the Puffin Foundation, the Pollination Project, A Well Fed World and LUSH Cosmetics for her public art projects. Her current public billboard project, Got Drought? has been touring the United States since 2015. She is also noted for her controversial Trumpocalypse billboard in downtown Phoenix, which gained international media attention.
Jarboe is a singer-songwriter multi instrumentalist and painter, who came to prominence as a member of the band Swans. She was born in Mississippi, and raised in New Orleans, Which along with her FBI father helped define her early musical ideas.
The Swans first album, Filth (1983) mesmerized Jarboe, and as a result, she sought out Swans founder Michael Gira. Jarboe joined as a vocalist and keyboardist and debuted on the 1986 album Greed.
Jarboe left Swans in 1997 and embarked on a solo career, releasing records including Sacrificial Cake and Anhedoniac. She has continued to self-release solo albums and, in 2012 recorded vocals for two tracks on the Swans' album, The Seer. Like most performers, Jarboe's last tour was cancelled, but she continues to captivate her audience with her recordings and paintings.
Joseph Keckler is an operatic bass-baritone. He gained notoriety for his performance pieces, concerts, and music videos. One notable piece, Shroom Trip Opera, which is the true story of a bad trip he once has had was dubbed by Indiewire as a "classic". Sarah Silverman described it as "mind blowing".
He has performed at Lincoln Center, Adult Swim Festival, and the Centre Pompidou. Check out Joseph's collection of essays: Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World(2017). Currently Joseph is an artist in residence at The Ringling Museum of Art.
For your listening pleasure, two of Joseph's performances are included in the episode. The first is his cover of a Screaming Jay Hawkins I Put a Spell on You, and the second Apocalypse is his own song.
Twenty years ago San Francisco author Laura Albert began to write novels using the literary persona JT Leroy. JT was a West Virginian transvestite prostitute, who applied his trade in and around Appalachian truck stops. At thirteen he was a junkie and a cutter. By nineteen, he had moved to San Francisco and started to write.
JT's identity came from Laura's own need to create a persona through which she would able to confront and write about the sexual and physical abuse, she herself had experienced as a girl.
In 2000, Laura as JT LeRoy published the novel, Sarah. The book was a sensation. The New York Times Book Review called the book "deft and imaginative". Success meant that there was a massive audience that wanted to meet JT. Laura met this demand as it she puts it "for Harry Potter to come alive" by recruiting her then sister-in-law to play the part of JT. Laura adopted a Cockney accent and played the role of JT's agent and assistant.
Laura's ruse transformed JT Leroy from noted novelist to an A list celebrity. Hollywood came calling. Actress Asia Argento bought the rights to the LeRoy novel The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and made the book into a film.
In 2006, the inevitable happened, JT Leroy was accused of being a hoax. The New York Times published the article Unmasking of JT LeRoy: In Public, He's a She. The article fueled by misguided anger framed Laura's work as a con and avoided any meditation on the reasons why Laura did what she did. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the media followed suit and piled onto the JT Leroy as greatest literary hoax theme and in doing so, missed the opportunity to dig deeper into the role of identity in art and the sheer inventiveness of what Laura had done.
Overtime the media frenzy disappeared, but the global audience for the JT Leroy books did not. Fans of the books continue to be moved and respond to the stories because of what Laura calls "the felt authenticity" in the work. Laura is still writing.
Check out the new Sarah & The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things audiobooks narrated by a series of narrators including Shirley Manson and past Lydian Spin guest Michael Imperioli. Two excerpts from the audio book are included in the episode.
Mark Hosler is a founding member of the audio-visual collage group Negativland. Their newest album is called The World Will Decide.
Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from mass culture and the world around them, Negativland creates surreal rearrangements that say and suggest things that the pieces never originally intended. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
After being sued, by the band U2, Negativland became more publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of copyright laws. Mark even found himself in Washington DC on Capitol Hill as a citizen lobbyist for copyright and art issues. All of their art and media interventions have intended to pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America.
Pat Loud along with the rest of her family helped invent reality television. The Loud family was the subject of the PBS program An American Family.
Created by producer Craig Gilbert, the show was a sensation when it aired in 1973. Pat and her then-husband, Bill Loud, allowed a camera crew to film their family of five over seven months in 1971. The purported intention of the show was to chronicle a typical American family, but instead ended up showing the separation and divorce of Bill and Pat. The show is also credited as having televisions first openly gay character. Son Lance's coming-out was one of the main subjects of the show.
Pat passed away on January 11th. According to her obituary in the New York Times, critics at the time called her a materialistic "self-absorbed affluent zombie”. However, unlike Kris Kardashian, Pat was the farthest thing from a vacuous cash fiend. Pat was kind, loved her family unconditionally, and was wildly creative. After American Family had aired, and she completed her divorce from her husband she moved with her children to New York. She found work with Ron Bernstein as a literary agent, and later worked with fashion designer Rudi Gernreich.
In the late 1990s, Pat moved back to California to care for her son Lance who was sick with H.I.V. . She also reunited with her husband Bill, which was one of Lance's final wishes.
Pat was 95 when Tim and Lydia went to visit her. She was joined by her son Lance's best friend and Mumps band mate Kristian Hoffman.
Ricky Powell captured some of the wildest moments in New York fashion, music, and art with his portraits of the downtown New York scene of the 80s and 90s. He befriended the Beastie Boys and joined the band on tour as part of their entourage. In this episode he tells the story of his epic journey to join the Beastie Boys who were on tour with Run DMC in St. Petersburg, Florida. Planes, Forties, and Pick up Trucks.
If the Tribeca Film festival would have happened last year, one of the films that would have premiered would have been the documentary The Individualist, which through testimonies from those were on the other side of Ricky’s camera—including Natasha Lyonne, Debi Mazar, Mike D, Laurence Fishburne, Chuck D, and LL Cool J—tells the story of Ricky's rise, then fall, then rise again.
Lydia and Tim ring in the New Year and say good riddance to 2020 with friends, Donita Sparks, Eugene Robinson, Weasel Walter, Kid Congo Powers, Carla Rhodes,David Yow, Zoe Hansen, Lori Barbero, andRon Athey. Happy 2021!
Happy Covid Christmas! To help get you through this wonderful time of the year, Lydia and Tim talk Christmas and listen to and chat music. For your enjoyment artists discussed include:
- traditional Inuit Music
- Betty Davis
- Phil Collins
- Mars Volta
- New Order
- Koko Taylor & Willy Dixon
- Charles Ives
- Rowland S. Howard
- Ying Yang Twins
- Soccer Mommy
For a special stocking stuffer, checkout Lydia and Weasel Walter's cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs.
Matt Korvette spent his youth in Nazareth Pennsylvania trick to treating at the Andretti family(race car fame) compound. Then when he got older, he headed off to Keith Haring's hometown of Kutztown to attend college. For the past 16 or so years Matt has been the front man of the Philadelphia band Pissed Jeans, where, as Vice puts it he has been "howling about the absurdities of modern life such as office-supply deliveries and joggers". Pissed Jeans 2017 Album Why Love Now was produced by Lydia and released on SubPop.
Bobby Gillespie, co-founded Primal Scream in 1982. Screamadelica, the band’s third studio album, won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992. He was previously the drummer for The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Bobby was born and raised in the Mount Florida district of Glasgow. His father is Bob Gillespie, is a former union official and Labour Party candidate. From his father he says he learned a lot about progressive politics and fighting for justice. Bobby is married to stylist Katy England. They have two sons together, Wolf and Lux.
Alex Ward is a composer, improviser, and performing musician. His primary instruments are clarinet and guitar. He has also performed on alto sax, piano/keyboards, bass guitar, and as a vocalist.
Alex's involvement in improvised music dates back to 1986, when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey. Since 2006, he has been heavily involved in both solo and collaborative composition, predominantly of instrumental music. He has been a member of many other groups including ensembles led by Eugene Chadbourne, Simon H. Fell and Duck Baker.
Alex is a frequent collaborator of both Tim and Weasel Walter. In fact, Alex has toured with the both of them as a member of Weasel's Flying Lutenbachers project.
Born in Philadelphia in 1930 David Amram was raised on a dairy farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where, he says, he loved hearing “the old hog callers, who excelled in this special style of performing art,” he writes. “Whether or not they impressed any hogs, these farmers made me see that you can find music and beauty anywhere if you pay attention. They also made me see that you can transform anything into a form of expression all your own.”
In 1951 David Amram started his professional life in music as a French Hornist in the National Symphony Orchestra. After serving in the US Army, he moved to New York City in 1955 and played French horn in the legendary jazz bands of Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and Oscar Pettiford.
David also created and performed in the first ever jazz and poetry readings in New York City with novelist and close friend Jack Kerouac, with whom he collaborated with for over 12 years.
David also composed the scores for many films including Pull My Daisy, Splendor In The Grass and The Manchurian Candidate, as well as being appointed by Leonard Bernstein as the first composer in residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966.
Over the decades, Amram has preserved his artistic adventures in three memoirs: Vibrations, Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac, and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat. He’s currently working on the fourth, to be entitled David Amram: The Next Eighty Years.
Miron Zownir began taking pictures during the heyday of punk in West Berlin and London. Later Miron moved to the United States, where he captured the hidden subcultures of places like New York. In 1995 Miron went to Moscow, to document the homeless crisis in the city, a tragedy he felt could not be ignored. His often heartbreaking and dark images have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. His title “the Poet of Radical Photography” bestowed upon him by writer Terry Southern is apt even today.
In the summer of 1968 artist Fayette Hauser was picked up hitch-hiking by Nancy Gurley, the wife of James Gurley, the guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company. Nancy brought Fayette to San Francisco and into the belly of the counter-culture.
She began to live communely with other artists and in the fall of 1969 Fayette co-founded the avant-garde experimental theatre troupe The Cockettes. Fayette performed, designed costumes and photographed the troupe until the it's demise in 1972. In the summer of 1972 Fayette went to Seattle to perform with Tomata du Plenty and his troupe Ze Whiz Kidz. By the following fall, Fayette and Tomata had moved to Lower Manhattan to perform in the New York underground theater scene.
In 1975 Fayette moved to Los Angeles, where she became a professional photographer and graphic artist, photographing and designing album covers for many of the artists in the music scene of Los Angeles in the 70's and 80's. Fayette also created a small design business called Atelier Fayette which featured wearable art, one-of-a-kind clothing. Her clients included The Rolling Stones, New Kids on the Block, Arsenio Hall and Diana Ross.
In 2002 directors David Weissman and Bill Weber directed the documentary on the Cockettes, aptly titled The Cockettes. This past May Fayette's book The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy 1969 - 1972 was published by Process Media. The book recounts her memories from her time in the troupe.
Martin Rev along with his band mate Alan Vega were two of Lydia's first friends in New York City. The sounds created by Martin and Alan are some of the era’s most influential. In fact, their band Suicide is often recognized as the first group to ever describe itself as punk.
Suicide never worried that much about whether or not their music and provocative stage act upset audiences. During the interview Martin recalls stories of audience outrage, while on tour with bands such as The Cars and Elvis Costello. In 1977, the duo released the self-titled debut album, which is still recognized as one of the decade’s most important. Suicide's music informed much of the post-punk, noise, industrial, synth-pop, electro and techno that came after them.
Melvin Gibbs is a Grammy nominated songwriter and musician. His many achievements include playing with Ornette Coleman, being a member of the bands Defunkt, Decoding Society, the Sonny Sharrock Band, Rollins Band as well participating in Power Tools with Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Melvin is a long-time member of the band Harriet Tubman, whose record The Terror End Of Beauty was cited as the best jazz album of 2018 by the New York Times.
In this interview Melvin discusses growing up in Brooklyn on the boarder between Ditmas Park and East Flatbush, his musical influences and friends, including best friend Vernon Reid, and why bass players frequently become great record producers.
In 1997 Mark Ames founded the now infamous Moscow independent weekly The Exile. Mark and co editor Matt Taibbi quickly became Moscow media celebrities. The paper was known as much for the content, which was a combination of rigorous investigative reporting and scurrilous satire of the Kremlin elite, as it was for the equally outrageous stunts performed by the staff. In 2001 Mark and Taibbi presented then New York Times Moscow bureau chief Michael Wines the Exile's Worst Journalist in Russia award, by arriving unannounced at the Times offices and slamming a strawberry pie infused with five ounces of horse semen in the poor bastard's face.
By 2008 Mark had annoyed many in Vladimir Putin's orbit and was warned by friends that he was risking jail time if he stayed in Russia. He returned to the US. Mark currently lives in Rochester New York with his wife and children. He is the of author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and co-author of The eXile: Sex, Drugs & Libel in the New Russia.
Comedian Margaret Cho once described comedians as "the working class of show business". Margaret's body of work is difficult to pigeon hole with a single adjective. She is an artist, activist, comedian, actor, and a musician. Margaret has developed a loyal following from her brilliant, non-conformist and often controversial comedy.
Margaret has also done a lot of acting in film and television. The complete list of acting accomplishments is too long to list here. Recent roles include appearances in HBO's High Maintenance, Law and Order Special Victm's Unit, and Sharknado 5: Global Warming.
Like Lydia, she also has her own podcast The Margaret Cho.
The work of artist Penny Slinger includes photography, collage, film and sculpture. Slinger emerged out of the tumult of the 1960s. Like many of her generation, she went on a quest for personal freedom and sexual liberation. Penny, channeled these journeys and desires into her collages and sculptures. All of these works are rooted in a visual language that Penny describes as 'feminist surrealism'. This language is used to explore and investigate notions of the feminine subconscious and psyche. Penny is her own muse and in many works she uses her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.
In 2017 Director Richard Kovitch released the documentary Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows. The documentary is an enthralling examination of Penny's amazing life and work.
Alex Zaitchik is a journalist whose beat covers politics, media, and the environment, essentially the kindling that is girding American culture at the moment. He has written for The Nation, The New Republic, the Intercept, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the Baffler, the International Herald Tribune, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Believer. He was a staff writer and editor at the New York Press, the eXile in Moscow, and was the founding editor at the online magazine Freezerbox and the Prague Pill, an alternative newspaper in the Czech Republic.
Alex has written three books that make for great election season reading. His first book, was Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. His second book, The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump's America was published in August 2016. Out of the Ooze: The Story of Dr. Tom Price was published in June 2017.
Thurston Moore's new album By the Fire drops today. Almost 40 years earlier in 1980 Thurston started Sonic Youth, which was a major force in bringing experimental rock n roll and noise to the MTV masses.
Since then, Thurston has gone on to work with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Branca and many others. Presently he performs and records solo, with various ensembles, and in his own band, The Thurston Moore Group. Lydia and Thurston share a friendship that goes back to the early eighties. In today's podcast, this friendship and many other topics are covered including poetry, song writing, record collecting, art, and music. Thurston also reads from his book of poetry titled Musical College.
Cathi Unsworth’s Bad Penny Blues is republished this autumn in a new edition from Strange Attractor Press. This fictionalized investigation into the Jack the Stripper murders – 1960s London’s biggest unsolved case – comes with a new Introduction from Greil Marcus and an afterword in which the author details just how haunting the process of recreating the book’s milieu became.
The landscape of 1959 London, was a fertile mix of writers, musicians, politicos and pop artists who were joined by slumming aristocrats trawling for thrills in the jazz clubs of Westbourne Grove. All of human life – including a vicious and misogynist serial killer, who managed to outwit the largest manhunt in Metropolitan police history.
The fiend left his prey naked, with injuries that baffled investigating officers. Dubbed ‘Jack the Stripper’ by a press eager to inflate the lurid connotations of his victims’ occupations. Cathi says it was the rage she felt for the victims' lives – already nasty and brutish enough that were cut short and buried under mounds of prurient dirt that compelled her to write their stories. Her aim was to give them back the voices they were denied and let the readers see what the life of a so-called "Good Time Girl" in post-War, pre-Swinging London was like.
Originally written in 2009, the book was described by David Peace as “the English Black Dahlia” and was selected as a favorite lockdown read by listeners of BBC Radio London’s Robert Elms Show this summer.
For more, see www.cathiunsworth.co.uk and www.strangeattractor.co.uk where you can hear more of Cathi and Fred discussing this story.
John Dwyer is a founding member of the band Thee Oh Sees, with whom he has recorded 22 studio albums. John is also a former member of Coachwhips, Pink and Brown and The Hospitals. In 2003, John co-founded Castle Face Records.
Earlier this summer, Castle Face Records announced the release of an album from his new group, Bent Arcana. Joining John are: keyboardist Kyp Malone, percussionist, and vocalist Ryan Sawyer, bassist Peter Kerlin, saxophonist Brad Caulkins, keyboardist Tom Dolas, guitarist Marcos Rodriguez, violinist Laena Myers-Ionita, tenor saxophonist Joce Soubiran, and percussionist Andres Renteria.
In the late 90s, John set out from his home town of Providence, Rhode Island to find another city to live in. He settled in San Francisco after encountering and liking the fact a rude barista who while talking on her cell phone referred to him as "some asshole". Listen to this episode to hear him tell this story and more. Other subjects discussed include: John's many accomplishments, bands, improvisational music, what brings out his Rhode Island accent, getting Carson Daly to drum for 9 minutes, how John became friends with Weasel Walter, and his fist fight with Episode 44 guest Nandor Nevai.
Kier-La Janisse discovered her passion for horror movies at a young age. Her interest morphed into a multifaceted career. In 2010, She founded The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, which is a horror school. Kier-La has also written several books including, A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and the acclaimed House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films(2012).
While she was in college majoring in Medieval Studies, Kier-La used some of her student loans and her income from working at a video store to launch the CineMuerte International Horror Film Festival. Due to her efforts with the festival she was able to bring greater awareness to lesser known films and directors that have as a result gone on to gain acclaim. Kier-La also programmed for the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Texas, and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror. Her debut effort as a director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in this year.
Bibbe Hansen grew up in New York around two of the biggest art movements of the 20th century Fluxus and Pop Art. Bibbe’s father, was Fluxus artist Al Hansen, whose first performance piece was pushing a piano out of a bombed-out building in Germany while he was serving as a soldier. This performance would later be covered by Bibbe’s two sons, Beck and Channing Hansen.
Bibbe was an active participant in her father’s work and tagged along with him to film screenings and art openings that were attended by Andy Warhol, who she would later collaborate with on films. The collaboration started when as a teenager, Bibbe wound up getting into trouble and going to jail for several months. On her first day of freedom, Bibbe and her father went out to eat with her dad’s artist friends, which included Andy Warhol. Warhol was taken by her jail tales and cast her as a co-star in the film Prison along with Edie Sedgwick. Thus began Bibbe's immersion into Warhol's factory scene.
By the late-1960s, Bibbe moved to Los Angeles where she married her first husband, musician David Campbell. In 1984, after the marriage ended Bibbe married artist Sean Carrillo. Together they opened the now legendary Los Angeles gallery and performance venue the Troy Café. During this time Bibbe played in the band Black Fag with “terrorist drag” performer Vaginal Davis.
Currently, like the rest of us, Bibbe and Sean are in quarantine. She spends her days in upstate New York either working in her art studio, organizing the Al Hansen archive with Sean, or working on her memoir. In this episode, Bibbe shares many great stories and several poems, including one about her friend Edie Sedgwick.
Composer Cliff Martinez started his career as a drummer. He played in 1313 with Lydia. He also drummed for The Dickies and The Weirdos. After reading in a newspaper that Captain Beefheart was auditioning drummers he flew out to Los Angeles and got the job. Cliff's drumming can be heard on the 1982 Beefheart album Ice Cream for Crow.
In 1983 Cliff, joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the recording of their first album What Is This? Cliff also played on the Chili Pepper's second album Freaky Styley. In 2012 Cliff was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
A tape of "weirdo rude vocal/body noises" recorded on a MIDI percussion controller with his friends John and Dix Denney was his entrée into film and television. The tape led to a job scoring an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The tape was also, heard by Steven Soderbergh, who hired Cliff to do the soundtrack for Sex, Lies and Videotape. Cliff has since composed scores for, over forty films including Contagion, The Lincoln Lawyer, Drive, Spring Breakers, and The Neon Demon.
Photo By: Jasmine Hirst
The Last Poets is a group of poets and musicians who arose in the late 1960s from the African-American civil rights movement. The moniker is taken from poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who believed he was in the last era of poetry before guns would take over.
The various iterations of The Last Poets included Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain, David Nelson, Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan. The Last Poets had a major impact on popular culture and were one of early influences on hip-hop. Critic Jason Ankeny wrote: "With their politically charged raps, taut rhythms, and dedication to raising African-American consciousness, The Last Poets almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for the emergence of hip-hop."
The Last Poets percussionist Baba Don Babatunde, has for a quarter of a century performed with most major american dance companies and at some of the world’s greatest performing-arts venues including the Apollo Theater in Harlem. His recording career is as equally varied as it is vast. Baba Don has recorded with luminaries such as Bill Laswell, and George Clinton. The jazz idiom, rhythm and blues, and most African derived percussion styles are represented in his discography. He has long been acknowledged as one of New York City’s master teachers of African Drumming and the rhythms of the diaspora in the americas. Baba Don is presently on faculty at the Harlem School Of the Arts.
Lydia Lunch and Umar Bin Hassan / NO WAVE OUT Sizzle Reel from Some Serious Business on Vimeo.
Paul Zone turned 13 years old in 1970, he was already attending the Fillmore East, Electric Circus and Rock Concert venues in Manhattan with his older brothers Miki Zone and Mandy Zone. With a “no-camera” policy for concertgoers, Paul would put his camera down his pants and sneak photos from his seat of Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Iggy & The Stooges and T. Rex among others.
Through out the mid 1970s Paul continued photographing mostly his friends that were just forming their bands during the transition from Glam Rock to Punk Rock, artists like Blondie, Ramones, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, Talking Heads and Suicide. He photographed them in their homes, on the streets, at parties, inside and outside the clubs, on stage, backstage and in the bathrooms of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City.
Paul was also creating music at the same time he was taking photographs. Paul and his two brothers had their own band called The Fast who recorded two acclaimed LPs and toured across the USA. Paul was also the resident DJ at Max’s Kansas City.
In the 1980s, brother Mandy formed his own band Ozone. Paul & Miki formed the pop electronic duo Man 2 Man. Man 2 Man scored chart hit singles Male Stripper, I Need A Man, At The Gym, Energy Is Eurobeat & Who Knows What Evil?.
Paul’s pictorial biography book PLAYGROUND: Growing Up In The New York Underground is a comprehensive assemblage of his personal images never before released anywhere of the 1970s New York Punk & Glam eras.
Buck Angel aka Man with a Pussy has been preaching a message of empowerment through self-acceptance for very long time. Buck will tell you himself putting in the time is the only way to earn the moniker Tranpa . He initially made a name for himself in the world of adult entertainment, pushing for the porn industry to create more visibility for trans and gender non-conforming men. Then, he turned his focus towards educating the public about human sexuality by touring America as a speaker. Buck has brought his message to Yale, Cornell and he even gave a Ted Talk.
In 2017 Buck started Pride Wellness , a cannabis startup focused on the LGBTQ community. He also markets a line of sexual wellness products and sex toys. In fact, he invented the first sex toy(the Buckoff) designed for trans men. The sub text to all of Buck's generous pursuits is empowerment through self-acceptance.
Photo by: Jasmine Hirst
Zoe Hansen, writer, performer, spoken word artist - came to New York City in 1984 as a teen runaway from an upper class life in London, England and moved into the Chelsea Hotel before settling in the East Village. She has lectured at colleges and universities, hosted a year-long residency at Bowery Poetry Club, has curated spoken word and music events and has been published in numerous Anthologies, magazines and online blogs.
Zoe now resides in Los Angeles where she’s working on her ASMR youtube channel- The House of ASMR. A unique relaxation technique that triggers your senses.
She is writing & producing various forms of art in video format. Her quest for purity under the guidance of the goddess and a pagan lifestyle continues.
Find her the following socials:
Instagram TV ZoeHansen_77
YouTube The House of ASMR
Episode 53 marks the first anniversary of the Lydian Spin. To celebrate, the episode begins with an extended introduction where Lydia, Tim, and producer Simon Slater recount the Lydian Spin origin story. The guest this week is David Yow. David is best known for his musical endeavors, but he has many other talents including actor, painter, photo retoucher and cook.
In 1982, David formed the Austin, Texas band Scratch Acid with Steve Anderson, David Wm. Sims, Brett Bradford, and Rey Washam. Five years later, after releasing three albums, Scratch Acid broke up.
In 1987, the same year that Scratch Acid broke up, David and Sims formed The Jesus Lizard with guitarist Duane Denison. David's unruly stage antics helped the band quickly achieve a following. The Jesus Lizard eventually landed a spot on the Lollapalooza tour and signed to Capitol Records. The Jesus Lizard released six studio albums, three EPs and a live album.
David has had roles in several films, including Netflix's I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Southbound, Entertainment, Under the Silver Lake and Big Money Rustlas, with Insane Clown Posse.
David is a cat lover and has drawn cats for the last 30 years. In 2014, Akashic Books released a compilation of David's cat illustrations titles Copycat: And a Litter of Other Cats.
Extinction Rebellion is a global environmental movement that uses civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, as well as social and ecological collapse. Kerith Creo a member of Extinction Rebellion (XR for short) sits down to chat with Lydia and Tim about the ecological crisis our planet is facing.
Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in 2018, with close to one hundred academics signing a call to action. Shortly thereafter, the movement spread to the United States. Citing inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, the suffragettes, and the civil rights movement, Extinction Rebellion wants to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown, and do all they can to prevent another mass extinction.
Mark McCloud lives in a victorian row house in San Francisco where he has lived since 1983. Mark has transformed his home into a museum that displays around 33,000 tabs of LSD that he has carefully collected, framed, and catalogued since the 1960s. This collection makes Mark hands down the world’s leading collector of blotter art.
From time to time an undercover DEA agent will visit Mark. These visits are a fools errand as the tabs are inactive at this point, leading any who attempt to arrest Mark to be quite disappointed. Though the hallucinatory properties of the drug are gone, the art that blotter manufacturers created to adorn their sheets of acid remains.
Lydia and Tim had a long and discursive conversation with Mark at his home in San Francisco. This interview will pair well with whatever you are doing this 4th of July. Enjoy the fireworks of Mark McCloud's mind!
Buzz Osborne is a founding member of the Melvins, Fantômas and Venomous Concept. Buzz has played on more than 50 recordings on various labels, and performed well over 2000 shows. In 2012 the Melvins became the first band to release three different albums in the same year with three different lineups of the band. Setting one record was clearly not enough. That same year, the Melvins did a spring tour of the U.S., a Canadian tour, and a London show with Slayer to 10,000 people, then played shows in all 50 states, plus DC, in a record-setting 51 days.
Buzz has a new album coming out titled Gift of Sacrifice, which will be released in August. Check out the video for the song from the album I’m Glad I Could Help Out. The album was recorded with Mr. Bungle bassist and his former bandmate Trevor Dunn.
Before Albert Oehlen was a painter he was a disciplined Maoist who thought being an artist was a silly bourgeois pursuit. His notion of art and artists changed while killing time in a bar where he happened to meet a group of art students. After chatting with the students about T Rex and Albert Ayler, the students urged him to join them as a student of the great Sigmar Polke. Albert took their advice and has been a key figure in contemporary art since.
Albert came of age as an artist amid the, early-’80s milieu of Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg, grabbing public attention as part of a group of young German artists that included Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, and Martin Kippenberger, whose aim, was to shock and provoke.
Albert's paintings combine abstract, figurative, collaged and computer-generated elements. Through Expressionist brushwork, Surrealist gestures and deliberate amateurism, Albert pushes painting's essential components of color, gesture, motion and time to new extremes.
Albert discusses what it means to be an artist, his friendships, and the often absurdist sources of his paintings ideas.
In 1987, Lori Barbero wanted to learn how to play drums and start a band. That same year, she attended a Minneapolis barbecue where she met singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland. Even though Barbero was not a drummer at the time she convinced Kat to form the iconic ‘90s band, Babes in Toyland. The rest, is music history. Babes played together for 14 years (Courtney Love and Jennifer Finch were members briefly). They put out a single for Sub Pop‘s singles club, released three albums, and traveled the world before disbanding in 2001.
After Babes in Toyland broke up, Lori played drums for the bands Eggtwist and Koalas. She was also part owner of the Minneapolis label Spanish Fly Records, whose roster included Smut, Dumpster Juice, Milk, REO Speedealer, Sleep Capsule, and Likehell. Currently, Lori lives in Minneapolis and is working on a photo book that is going to be a collection of her vast archive.
The Lydian Spin has brought together V.Vale and Marian Wallace of RE/SEARCH Publications, Author & Musician Eugene Robinson of OXBOW, Filmmaker Eva Aridjis, and Weasel Walter in a special podcast to discuss the protests that are raging throughout America.
This episode opens with a musical introduction composed by Joey Koneko, followed by a short rant I wrote to vent my own frustration at the endless vulgarity of some of America’s most grievous offenses. Thank you for listening. - Lydia
Writer, fighter, lover, actor, martial artist, spoken word performer, musician - Eugene S. Robinson is the most dangerous man in music today; He has fronted the experimental metal noir band OXBOW for decades. Presently, Eugene is the editor at large at OZY.com. He has written hundreds of articles, published numerous books – my favorite being Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking. Eugene is without a doubt - my favorite bad ass on the planet. Enjoy.