365 Days of Song Recommendations: Aug 26

Optimo — Liquid Liquid

It’s obvious, I suppose, but I love music discovery. Not new music, necessarily. That’s shoved in your face, if you stand on the right corners of the Internet. I’m talking specifically about the ways we stumble into bands and tracks, branching out like tentacles in all directions from a single point of origination, finding long dissolved bands that 99 out of 100 people have never known.

Let’s discuss one such band today because that’s my mood.

I came across Liquid Liquid via Melle Mel’s hip-hop classic “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” The Sugar Hill Records house band ripped Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline groove. It’s fucking iconic, but it’s not attributed to the proper musicians. Liquid Liquid’s label took Sugar Hill to court, won, but failed to collect a dime because the label went into receivership.

This goes way beyond sampling, so spare me your old fair use gambit. I love a good sample, but this is straight up thievery.

Liquid Liquid came out of the No Wave movement of the late 70s and early 80s, which reacted against the recycling of rock and roll cliches in punk and other emerging genres. No Wave musicians wielded dissonance and noise and atonality — and it all feels a little bit of a misnomer. While certainly avant-garde in form, Liquid Liquid relied on a groove or a mood and filled in the gaps with unconventional musicality and instruments. Not noise, so much as experimentation without artificial limitations. The originators of the subgenre such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks had something different in mind than the danceable beats conjured by Liquid Liquid as the sound evolved into the more electronic and full-flavor 80s.

It’s punk — but only if punk really didn’t give a fuck. Sonic nihilism. Some even attribute the “No Wave” moniker to French New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, who famously said “There are no waves, only the ocean.”

Liquid Liquid borrowed from samba, afrobeat, reggae. You could just make up a type of music. Liquid Liquid probably used that, too.

The Brazilian-inspired groove in “Optimo” comes from its percussion — snare drum, bass kick drum, cowbell, claves and a rototom. What’s a rototom? I had no idea either. It’s a rotating drum without a shell, set inside an aluminum frame, that increases or decreases pitch based on tension relative to the rim. Yeah… none of that made any sense until I saw them in action either…

Add nonsense lyrics, a steady, driving bassline, and some sonic effects and suddenly cacophony becomes a feeling, and you don’t want it to end. 2 minutes and 46 seconds of pure samba-flavored No-Wave, Dance-Punk bliss. You know what? Just loop it. Let it run all day on repeat and you’ll feel like high-stepping down your street in feathers, a one-lunatic, Liquid Liquid-inspired Carnival.

This iconic No Wave track is the 238th song on the exclusive #365Songs playlist!