#ty everybody for the kind words on song 1 it got me in the groove to make more!

[iguanadonis]

i'm a pianist making a star trek music album

here's song 2, an electroswing arrangement of Alexander Courage's TOS theme and Uhura's "Beyond Antares"

song 1 here

[ricardosousalemos]

Liquid Liquid: Liquid Liquid EP/ Successive Reflexes EP/ Optimo EP

Three EPs. Forty-two minutes of music. The four guys who made it all began as Liquid Idiot, a band looking for a sound in 1979 at Rutgers. Relocated to Manhattan, they became Liquid Liquid, one of several minor inversions that yielded major results. By 1981, bassist Richard McGuire, singer Sal Principato, drummer Scott Hartley, and percussionist Dennis Young were sitting in the gulch between worlds.

The no wave bands of the late ’70s were changing shape, moving toward an end that was still years away. If you went with DNA, New York rock was going to be sharp, small, and fractured. If you went with Sonic Youth, the next thing was guitars, and lots of them, none tuned in a familiar way. New York radio was entering a glory day of dance music fed by sources both commercial and loose, the synthetic update of ’70s funk played by live bands. Secret Weapon’s “Must Be The Music,” D Train’s “You’re The One For Me.” At night, rap was finding its first home at WHBI, in Newark, with “Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack.” DJs at clubs like Danceteria and Mudd Club were playing all of these records.

Meanwhile, Liquid Liquid belonged to the downtown rock scene only by virtue of being a live band. They certainly didn’t play rock’n’roll. Self-taught, they were seeking what McGuire called “the big beat,” short, repetitive songs related to rhythm-based artists like James Brown and the rap emerging from his songbook. But Liquid Liquid was too oblique to be mistaken for anything with a known name like funk. By the end of their career, the band had recorded one of the most important songs to come out of New York in the ‘80s. They never had to decide who they were. New York decided what the band was.

At first, though, it was up to a man named Ed Bahlman. He owned a record store at 99 MacDougal St. out of which he ran a label called 99 Records. In four years, he put out 15 records, the bulk of them essential. Though Bahlman’s taste ended up much more on the “big beat” side of things, his first release was from the other side of downtown: Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1. By 1981, Branca’s band would feature Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, and his first full-length, The Ascension, would be released on 99 Records. This music was after real bigness. The resemblance to detuned symphonic music became explicit when Branca enlarged his ensembles and started naming his pieces “Symphony [X],” going up the ordinal ladder as the records came out.

Branca’s use of massed strings and volume made clear that there was irony in the Liquid Liquid approach. Their bigness wasn’t about amplitude or volume. The 99 bands that favored rhythm—Liquid Liquid, ESG, Y Pants, Bush Tetras—built big records from small pieces. A 99 band sounded more or less like McGuire’s cover for the first Liquid Liquid EP: a human figure suggested as an explosion of curves, not all of them there. Looking back at the turn of the century, the strain of guitar music that ran from Branca into Sonic Youth seemed like the most significant contribution to American independent music. Seventeen years later, history has flipped and it’s now a toss-up. When LCD Soundsystem launched in 2001, one of their direct inspirations was Liquid Liquid. The big storm of guitars had happened, so Murphy went back to the small big beat, filled in the missing pieces, and finished a draft of New York begun twenty years earlier.

If you love the Liquid Liquid EPs, it is tempting to view them as lost scriptures, examples of a magical, lesser-known way to render rhythm. If you lean on them, though, that’s not how it works. Liquid Liquid was deft and basic, as good as untutored music gets. Any wise choice was qualified to replace any learned move. Liquid Liquid songs foreground beat, but at least half of them are a step too soft for the dancefloor. The would share bills with ESG, sisters from the Bronx who managed to reduce James Brown from three elements to two, and Konk, a party band with a horn section that was unabashedly after the dancing.

But if Liquid Liquid showed any undeniable influence, it was DNA, the one band any musician of that era—jazz, noise, DJ culture—will cite. Arto Lindsay sang in English while making it sound like another language. His guitar playing had no truck with known tunings, opting for small noises nothing like the Hoover Dams Branca built. Bassist Tim Wright played elegant and melodic lines, the most songlike aspect of songs that avoided songs. Drummer Ikue Mori played in her own orbit and time. DNA sounded like they had recovered recordings from a country that has yet to be found. In four years, they were gone.

Like Lindsay, Principato sang nominally in English. He mangled his lyrics with echo and pronunciation, leaving behind a few decipherable words: time, out, better, phenomenon. Because of no money, the first Liquid Liquid EP featured two studio tracks and three live tracks recorded at Hurrahs in February of 1981. The low fidelity of the live recording brings out the precision of motif in “Bell Head,” a conversation between an agogô, an alarm bell, and a marimba. The tuned metal and wood are backed by a rudimentary beat, something you’d learn in the second weekend of drum camp. Principato sings one word every two bars: “Here!” “Heart!” (Then, ramping up the excitement: “Would be! Stick man!”) The digital delay keeps the tail of his voice in the game, and you end up being able to hum a song that has no bassline, no guitar part, and no traditional singing. This was about framing. Tying Liquid Liquid to the swollen bursts of no wave fails. They weren’t big beat. They were proper patterns.

Liquid Liquid’s second EP, Successive Reflexes, released later in 1981, was done in a studio and emphasized their refusal to make anything obvious. Of everything they put out, this is their most slippery stuff. This is the haze of dub without any overt reference to reggae. McGuire plays harmonics on his bass as often as he plays notes. Principato drags out his syllables and hints at quiet ecstasy. If you dropped this record onto another continent and stripped out the names, someone might think it was Satie pieces rearranged for percussion.

The big beat becomes itself on their third EP, Optimo, recorded at Radio City Music Hall Studios. (This was not as spacious as the name suggests.) Of the four immaculate songs, one secured Liquid Liquid a permanent place in the pop songbook. “Cavern” is rooted to McGuire toggling between the notes A and C on his bass, playing the kind of hitched, self-fading line that no trained player would ever be able to write. It is as much the sound of being unable to play as it is some kind of clever phrasing. It is beyond clever when paired with the drumming, percussion, and vocals. “Cavern” is always there, already rotating and coming at you from behind the sun and under the earth.

“Cavern” found its way onto late night FM radio. It played on the new “Zulu Beat” show hosted by Afrika Islam on WHBI, popping up between improvised raps and snippets of old Dazz and Mandrill records. It was another effortless and inexplicable New York groove, but no obvious smash until Sugar Hill Records got their hands on it. The Sugar Hill house band replayed the song, and Melle Mel rapped about the dangers of cocaine over it. “White Lines (Don't Do It)” was initially credited to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, but Flash took his name off of it, since the only person involved other than the band was Melle Mel. On future pressings, Mel became Grandmaster Melle Mel. One name was still missing, though: Liquid Liquid.

“Cavern” had already been included on volume nine of Lenny Roberts’ biblical series of bootlegs, Ultimate Breaks & Beats. “White Lines” eclipsed that, going from regional to national hit in a month. People who don’t know Liquid Liquid from a frog will say “White lines!” if you hum the bassline from “Cavern.” In 1995, “White Lines” was the rap song Duran Duran decided to record. God bless them—in the twelve years before their cover, the publishing had not been sorted out. Duran Duran’s version of “White Lines” triggered a legal balancing after millions of copies of “White Lines” had been sold.

The story of what happened between 99 and Sugar Hill is as much rumor as fact. Nobody in the band knows exactly what happened between Sugar Hill’s Sylvia Robinson and Bahlman. McGuire remembers Bahlman being asked by Sugar Hill to “take a ride” and sort out the publishing dispute. Another 99 Records employee, Terry Tolkin, recalls a brick thrown through the front window of the MacDougal street shop, though no band members (or anyone else) is on record as having seen this happen. “White Lines” made the band famous, though it made them no money until a band from England decided they want to warn everybody about cocaine all over again.

So come for “Cavern,” a wonder of nested movements and elastic power. Stay for the most understated dance music downtown ever produced. Or the most overstated stencils. Something. Maybe a phenomenon.