Rad Bodies and Heads

Body/Head's Improv Heroes — A selection of inspiring writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers curated by Kim Gordon and Bill Nace.

Body/Head curate the back section of Huck 42 – The Improv Issue, with the rad bodies and heads who inspire them through their inventive uses of improvisation. With Byron Coley’s No Wave radness, Ikue Mori’s improvised noise, Jake Meginsky’s DIY instruments, Michael Morley’s lo-fi experimentals to Lucrecia Martel’s sinister cinema, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace show their eyes are open to a wide range of improvised creativity.

Byron Coley

Once a music critic of the 80s scene, Byron Coley took it up a level in ‘08 when he wrote No Wave: PostPunk, a coauthored book that picked apart a still thriving subculture of punk. The No Wave movement saw the rise of Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch, velvety sounds in a kneejerk reaction to New Wave’s popier refrains a stylistic trait that leaked into cinema and the arts. Byron adds colour to what he put down in black and white six years ago.

Byron recommends:

Magik markers

Jim Jarmusch

The Julie Run

Banksy

Read more about Byron Coley in Huck 42.

Ikue Mori

Raised in Tokyo but born from New York City’s no wave era, Ikue will forever be known as the drummer from DNA. But she continues to draw from the sound of the antiestablishment as well as her culture’s classical arts heritage, evolving the unruly element of the subpunk genre into improvised electronic synthetics that somehow fit with the composedness of contemporary jazz riffs. “I use noise, I make noise, personal sounds that I cannot describe”, says the Japanese phenomenon.

Read more about Ikue Mori in Huck 42.

Jake Meginsky

Originally hailing from Springfield, Massachusetts, experimental musician Jake Meginsky now lives and works between New York City and the arty suburb of Northampton, MA. Invention is at the heart of Jake’s performances before he even strikes a note. He builds his own customised instruments and electronic circuitry, combining them with percussion, modular drum machines and sampling software. Constantly transgressing the boundaries between acoustic and electronic, analogue and digital, Jake floats with similar ease between performing, composing, sound installation and live scoring. In a dazzling array of projects, side projects, labels and collaborations, Jake has worked with everyone from Milford Graves and Bill Nace to nmperign and the Emergent Improvisation Ensemble. But whatever the nature of his output, improvisation is always the essence of Jake’s art.

Read more about Jake’s adventurous improvisation in Huck 42.

Michael Morley

“NZ in the late 1970s is a bizarre dream of isolation, neoclassical oppression and postWorld War II, postcolonial, antipodean socialism gone bad”, explains Michael Morley, whose dreamy lofi experimentals resonated with an 80s youth increasingly being encroached upon by a culture of ordinariness. The artist blurred the lines of genres like punk rock, new wave, disco, funk and rock, stumbling his way into an unusual native sound that echoed the no wave vibrations happening across shores in NYC.

Read more about Michael Morley in Huck 42.

Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker whose made three features and many shorts since her debut /El 56/ in 1998. One of the pioneers of New Argentine Cinema – a film movement characterised by its refusal to provide explicit comment on politics as well as its focus on the margins (social and geographical) and ‘small stories’ – Martel is an arthouse auteur who focuses her lens on the experiences of women, especially the complexities of sexuality, religion and patriarchal society. She also happens to be one of David Jenkins’ (editor of HUCK’s sister film mag Little White Lies) favourite filmmakers.