SCRAP METAL MUSIC

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This project was conceived of by Michael J. Zwicky & S. Gustav Hagglund aka “DJ Steve” in 1984-85 on the Lower East Side, New York City, USA. Zwicky, (painter, sculptor & “conventional” musician) met Steve Hagglund (experimental musician, mail & graffiti artist) on a construction job site, where they were tasked with dismantling for scrap the inner workings of the well known Xenon Disco in midtown Manhattan. Filling many dumpsters with metal components of all shapes and sizes from inside the club, they began to first notice the natural sonorous qualities the metal pieces made just by moving them, and then began to experiment with and exploit the metal’s resonant qualities further.

New York City’s Lower East Side in the early 80s was a bombed out landscape of abandoned buildings, stripped cars & urban detritus, with particularly copius amounts of scrap metal everywhere disposed of in vacant lots. Gas tanks, oil drums, flat sheets of metal, corrugated, shelving, metal studs, brake drums, etc. etc. In an exercise Zwicky/Hagglund called “Scavenging”, they began to select a particular collection or ensemble of individual sounds which would eventually become “Instruments”. These “Instruments” had an intended function that followed their form, but because they were loosely arranged and constructed, their nature changed and evolved as they were used/played.

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The very first performance of this type was given at a unique Lower East Side space called the Neither Nor Studio Store, a multi-purpose collective, bookstore/performance space/rehearsal space/gathering place for poets, artists, (jazz) musicians & miscreants. The performance itself was threadbare compared with what the concept of Scrap Metal Music was to become but still set a precedent for noise as art. “Scrap Metal Percussion Sculpture” or “Metal Sheet Music” were the original name(s) given to the first performance of what would later become known as Scrap Metal Music. This installation (and subsequent performance) was both an exhibition of sculpture, for the pieces took on a powerful aesthetic presence alone, but were also intended to be performed on or “played” or by Zwicky/Hagglund. For three days, fittingly July 4th, 5th & 6th 1985, the show took place at Jim C’s NADA Gallery at 40 Rivington St. NYC Zwicky/Hagglund performed on the “instruments” which again aesthetically speaking were intended as both sound producing implements as well as sculptural elements in overall installation. This was clearly a step forward from the first performance where the metal pieces used were not stationary so much as being manipulated in-hand by the performers. The 3 nights performance were well received, made up for in enthusiasm if not in terms of numbers. Viewers also were able to enjoy the installation itself for that three day period. There was also some degree of documentation; video and audio recording by Jim C. (of Nada Gallery) and photography by Zwicky/Hagglund. At the outset the intention of the artists was to continue to do performances on the same apparatus. Thanks to Jim C., the basement below NADA gallery and the deconstructible nature of the instruments themselves they had found a place to be stored for future events.

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The next Scrap Metal Music “performance” took place shortly after the NADA exhibition on July 17th 1985, at the C.U.A.N.D.O. building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A large scale art event put on by the Plexus International group. “In The Night Of No Moon – Purgatorio Show 85 New York” was a group effort and collaboration of over 300 artists, musicians and performers, was the first large scale event of it’s kind that would include Scrap Metal Music or be influenced by it. Taking place on the roof of C.U.A.N.D.O. it was a much larger area than NADA and in addition to the scrap metal instruments stored there, Zwicky/Hagglund altogether doubled their ensemble, expanding the range of individual pieces in terms of size, range and timbre creating more than several stations or assemblages of parts that “fit” together visually, functionally or tonally.

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To give a sense of what took place that night, the chaotic events and what Zwicky/Hagglund’s logic was behind the project, and how it was continuing to organically expand and develop, here is an excerpt from a post by Michael J. Zwicky on his “michaeljzwickyartist” page on facebook:

“…One of these shows, which were organized by the “Plexus International” Artists group were art fusion events which melded many artistic disciplines. Yes, we carried all this stuff up four flights of stairs for the performance including the garment rack on wheels that you see in the photographs. One of the things we were careful about when we constructed the instruments was to attach them loosely to one another with wire or simply letting gravity determine their configuration. The reason we did this was because if we say, welded them together they would lose a lot of their resonance. Another cool thing we discovered was that the same pieces of metal we were using for our first few performances were becoming tempered and tuned with all the blows they were taking, much in the same way as one would hammer a gong to enhance it’s tone. So this event which included around 300 or so Artists!; two notable performance pieces including a body builder that clung to asbestos covered pipes on the ceiling of the stairwell for 3 hrs. straight and a guy who was wearing a live chicken in a cage on his head as a hat. The event was attended by maybe as many as a 500 people over the course of the evening. Steve and I began the performance and as the audience began to join in the instruments were all still in their original forms. As was not unusual for these types of events the ingestion of various types of psychoactive substances on the parts of Steve and myself (and I’m sure the audience as well in many cases) was routine. On this particular night S. Gustav and I had imbibed hits of mescaline and many large cans of Fosters. Also it was not unusual for either of us to injure ourselves thrashing sharp jagged pieces of metal with our bare hands. So we were just getting started and I took a chunk out of my left hand and started bleeding profusely. I pointed this out to Steve and we went down stairs… past the guy hanging from the pipes, past the guy with a chicken on his head and out to the street to at least try to get the bleeding to stop. At this point we were both tripping balls. Going to the emergency room was discussed, but in our present states we simply decided against it, given we were much too fucked up. The bleeding did eventually stop and we decided to go back up to our gig… past the guy with the chicken, the guy hanging from the pipes and out onto the roof. What we saw there was really amazing! The instruments were all dismantled and piled in a big heap in the center of a circle of bangers, like some kind of ritual campfire around the BIG pile of metal. Bashing the stuff into pieces, they had reconfigured the whole ensemble. They were going at it!! (this type of re-arrangement would not have been possible if the parts were all welded or bolted together into solid structures). This became another interesting aspect of the piece; bangers as well as Steve and I finding new groupings and forms of instruments out of the individual loose fragments of metal). Me and Steve looked at each other and were like “Yeah, this is so fucking cool!!” We just joined the group and kept banging…”

In another excerpt from Zwicky’s page he expounds on the blurring of the line between the audience and performer:

“…The concept, “Scrap Metal Music” was conceived of by myself and one of my best friends “S Gustav Hagglund”. He was a mail and graffiti artist as well as a fellow “Noisician”. It was our first exhibit of the piece which soon became mobile and frequent. One of the ideas we discovered from performing the work was that it naturally attracted the viewer to join in; to be in a sense immersed. It delineated between the “Performer” and “Viewer” as the viewer(s) ultimately became the performer(s). S Gustaf and I hadn’t thought of this happening. That is why I didn’t even plan to do a “Performance” on the Cat’s Head Installation. I just left a pile of beaters there knowing people would naturally just start banging on it.”

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This phenomena of the viewer/audience becoming performers was very clear at the Purgatorio event; the audience had no reservations to interact, engage the piece, and in the course of playing it, dismantling, destroying, rearranging and adapting the components to suit the needs of the moment and the mass. Another excerpt from Zwicky’s page:

“…Thanks a lot Man! What the “Scrap Metal Music” came to do early in it’s inception, (for this piece was actually the culmination of a project on which I worked on for years on the Lower East Side w/ my late friend S. Gustav Hagglund). What we discovered is that Scrap Metal Music blurred or even eliminated the line between “Performer” and the audience. People look at a drawing for instance and say, “I can’t draw”, but can they not pick up a pencil and make a mark? People are (were) not intimidated by banging a piece of metal as they would be for instance playing a set of drums or a guitar. The making of “Art” in my opinion, became more demystified by participating in the piece…”

and a quote from Zwicky on the nature of being “in the pit” (the pit meaning the place where everyone is together creating Scrap Metal Music)“…

“… Everyone in the pit were equals and vital to the whole. No judgement when you’re beating the crap out of a piece of metal…”

For a period of years (1984-85 to 1990-93) Scrap Metal Music continued to develop and influence experimental music, first on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in and around the Rivington School Sculpture Garden and later in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at a series of large warehouse events, The Mustard Factory, Cat’s Head I & II, and Flytrap.

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By the time of and after the El Purgatorio Show at CUANDO Bldg. Zwicky/Hagglund had realized that with Scrap Metal Music, there was a striking dynamic visual element at play, but it also became clear that the nature of performance itself was altered in these wild soirées.

The idea that Zwicky/Hagglund could find metal treasures on their scavenging expeditions fueled a constant desire to experiment with new combinations and sonorous possibilities. Chosen for both their timbre and resonance, pieces were also collected for there impact visually with the knowledge that they might be assembled in different ways ultimately for the best aesthetic result in terms of sight and sound. There was so much trash available on the streets at that time on the Lower East Side that it was a literal paradise for persons looking for bits pf scrap. The low tech way in which they were gathered (an oldfashioned, stripped down baby buggy) and put together into instruments allowed for more flexibility, portability and functionality. Another aspect that presented itself in the course of the project was the more the metal was used in performance the more it became tuned and tempered. The pieces were kept in the basement of NADA gallery located right next to the Rivington Sculpture Garden and could be moved easily to various galleries and performance spaces in the area Including the Garden. This modular quality of the Scrap Metal equipment served to promote the organic quality of the arrangement(s) & rearrangement(s), their sculptural aesthetic & ultimate tonality. What began to happen, particularly at the El Purgatorio Show on the CUANDO roof was that people in the audience naturally seemed to want to join in and did so. What occurred was a real blurring of the line between the “Performer” and “Viewer”. The metal itself seems to hold an attraction for people who might look at a saxophone or a guitar and say to themselves “I could never do (play) that!” Or even the idea that most people when confronted with the task of drawing a realistic representation of a bowl of fruit for example as “Art”, will again say to themselves “I could never do (draw or paint) that!” But to explore further, one may counter with, “Though you cannot draw a bowl of fruit, can you not pick up a pencil and make a mark?” Or “Could you not pick up a guitar and pluck the strings?” What’s being called into question here and by what the nature of Scrap Metal Music began to take on is what constitutes the rules & boundaries of “Art”,”Music” “Performance”. The fascinating thing about Scrap Metal Music is that people (the audience) seemed to be so drawn without inhibition to pick up a beater and beat on a piece of metal. This would never happen in a typical performance setting; imagine buffer zones, fences and security guards at modern day clubs and venues as well as concerts and festivals. The mere fact that most stages are elevated creates a natural barrier separating the performer and audience. Scrap Metal Music “performances” were well attended and seemed to attract “regulars” audience members who knew they could join in and become performers themselves. The “instruments” themselves lended themselves to this audience involvement as much as it was encouraged by Zwicky/Hagglund once it became commonplace. Every show was different; some longer, more drawn out maybe slightly less chaotic compared to some that were shorter, more explosive. One show was so violent that it sounded like a prolonged car wreck, the instruments destroyed, laying in scattered pieces at the participant’s feet, spent in a matter of seconds. The impermanence inherent in the structures and configurations of individual pieces of metal into temporary instruments promoted the organic qualities of the shows and contributed to the accessibility of the events. By this time there was a regular group of metal thrashers & bangers, mostly from Rivington would show up at the scrap metal gigs.

Another thing that began to happen was a blending of Scrap Metal Music with more traditional instruments and bands. In combinations guitarists, drummers, sax players & singers would play along with the now usual thrashers and bangers. There began to be many performances and so called Fusion Events at the Rivington Sculpture Garden where different combinations of instruments were often employed with Scrap Metal Music. “Demo Moe” a groundbreaking, heavy, improvisational rock trio was a regular performer at Rivington School events and their name had become synonymous to a certain extent with Scrap Metal Music. Zwicky was the drummer for the band and for a time Hagglund became the 4th member, accompanying them with his signature threaded rod on corrugated metal sheet set-up. “Demo Moe” had gained a reputation of being so loud and chaotic in performance that the cops would often show up at their gigs and shut them down. There was one show at the Rivington Sculpture Garden where in anticipation of NYPD showing up, Ray Kelly and the crew at Rivington welded a cage in which the band was to be locked inside with their equipment to play. As if on cue, the police arrived. Although they could have went into an adjacent building to cut the power (there was a long lead into the cage from the top of the building) the cops decided the band had apparently outsmarted them. They were laughing and joking about the trouble everyone there had went to, to avoid having the performance shut down. “Demo Moe” had brought them enough times in the past for them to be familiar with the band. Though Hagglund’s tenure with “Demo Moe” did not last, there was other evidence of metal being used in groups in NY and Europe. NY bands like “Missing Foundation”, “Cop Shoot Cop” & “Swans” employed metal in their performances & in Europe (probably the most famous) “Einstürzende Neubauten”. There are countless others. This phenomenon well predated “Stomp”, the watered down, prosaic Broadway show which seemed to absorb not all but most of the fury, chaos and explosiveness of events in the mid 80’s.

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Scrap Metal Music continued to be a force by itself and in different combinations and permutations in performances and shows on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Unfortunately gentrification bore an influence on the Artist’s community there and things began to change quickly. The Rivington Sculpture Garden at it’s height, a web of randomly welded steel 30 feet tall, spanning vacant footprints of two large apartment buildings, was torn down and itself became scrap metal. Briefly there was Gas Station 2B, another performance space and lot which sculpture began again to overtake. Scrap Metal Music in it’s varying forms performed there. Without a cage this time, “Demo Moe” again played, brought the Police and were shut down almost immediately. It was as if the slightly more “civilized” location 2 blocks above Houston street warranted that much more of a response from the swift heel of authority to appease the wishes of developers wishing to “improve” the neighborhood. Before Williamsburg became the next destination of Artists no longer able to afford the rising rents of the Lower East Side, Zwicky had moved to Brooklyn in the late 80’s while Hagglund remained on the Lower East Side. Another group was formed w/ Zwicky & Hagglund called Bad Spys. They would rehearse in the dark, musty basement of a shithole house in Jersey City, New Jersey at the end of the main drag. There, at the beginning of where New Jersey turns into a landscape of oil refineries, gray highway overpasses and run-down factories, + or – members of Bad Spys would bang metal outside in the shadow of the overpasses or in the basement of the dilapidated house. “Demo Moe” in it’s original configuration had broken up and reformed with different members. A core group of drums, bass, guitar, sax, scrap metal & vocals there were many variations and permutations. Bad Spys included members of Demo Moe, a Jersey punk band named Psycho Sin, The Crucifucks, on the Alternative Tentacles label & of course, Zwicky/Hagglund + or – various metal thrashers & bangers. A gig that opitimized this confligration of players and events culminated in a performance at The Crystal Palace on Bowery in NYC. Kind of a swan song for the Rivington School Scrap Metal scene, emblematic of the neighborhood’s impending decline and it’s thriving 80’s art scene’s ultimate demise.

The effect of gentrification not only affected the Rivington School as an art scene and a movement but of course affected it’s artists as well. The process tends to decimate and scatter the creative cohesion of groups coalescing around a particular geographical location, one that is affordable to artists in the first place. However as an art scene develops, people gravitate towards it, rents go up and soon the artists can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods they helped attract people (with money) to. Luckily the process tends to repeat itself, wherever the artists scatter to and new creative scenes develop. Such is the case with Williamsburg in the 1990s. Zwicky had moved to Brooklyn had been in Brooklyn since 1987 but moved to Williamsburg in early 1989 and his connections with Manhattan & The Lower East Side were waning. “Demo Moe” had broken up at this time and Zwicky/ Hagglund were no longer collaborating. Zwicky became involved with a group of artists the core of which were to become the progenitors of the Brooklyn Immersionist Movement. The Brooklyn waterfront along the East River in Williamsburg in the 80s & 90s was a landscape of abandoned warehouses and vacant lots, stretching for blocks. The buildings were covered inside and out with vibrant graffiti and their spaces of the remains of an industrial environment that had long since been operational. The area was rife with opportunity for artists to take advantage of in terms of pure space and (free) materials for the creation of art. Metal objects (obviously used in industrial applications) were everywhere especially advantageous for the continuation of Scrap Metal Music and it’s subsequent derivatives.

A series of large scale events took place along the Brooklyn waterfront in the early 90s. The first of these was the Cat’s Head Event I at which Zwicky created a Scrap Metal Music installation that was truly monumental in scale and audience presence. At one end of a 10,000 sq ft. abandoned warehouse there Zwicky created his most ambitious creation to date. Here is Zwicky’s description of the event on the evening of July 14th, 1990. (The event included the work of over 300 artists and was attended by at least 1500 people.)

“…This Scrap Metal Music Installation was the largest sculptural/sound project I’ve ever created. At this time I was good friends with the core group of artists & musicians at the Lizard’s Tail in Williamsburg and was invited to do a piece at the 1st Cat’s Head Gig. The sheer size of the abandoned warehouse where the event was to take place enabled me to create an installation on a monumental scale. In a space of roughly 30′ x 50′ at one end of the huge warehouse (10,000 sq ft) I was able to assemble the largest scale Scrap Metal Music work I had ever created. Over the course of the week prior to the show I was able to gather metal components from the detritus and remains of years of general industrial decay that was to be found along the waterfront there. Among the items I found and dragged to the space was a huge metal tank that must have been used for some type of liquid, gas or oil would be my guess. It took four of us or so to drag it into the zone and it became the lowest bass tone of the “instrument”. I found other hunks of metal big and small, filling out the tonal range from the big bass to tiny tinkly pieces at the high end. Conveniently there were steel cables hanging down in the area at that end of the space from which I hung some larger pieces that could be swung into others. The cowling from a rolling storefront gate, the inside of a washing machine, gas tanks from cars, oil drums, hubcaps, lengths of pipe of various diameters for beaters… all found within a hundred yards or so from the site. It was a scavenger’s dream. I finished assembling the piece literally as the sun was setting that evening, the night of the show. The color photographs in this post were taken at that time. Though they don’t really give an idea of the scale of the piece, they are the only record I have except for the sepia photos taken by Anna West of the piece being played that night, (thank you Anna). I heaped a big pile of beaters there in the piece and left it up to the attendees to begin the banging as I knew they would. When I returned around 9pm or so it was well underway with every type of banger swinging away. Over the course of the evening little kids, other artists, musicians, friends, punks, crusties, hipsters, ladies dressed to the nines, all united as equals jamming in the “Pit” as I liked to call it. The rhythm there was huge. A definite beat that was constantly changing, dynamically organic. When I, myself was banging there I would try to go against the group’s unison throb, but would ultimately get sucked back into the overall groove. Somehow what each one was playing made the thing keep changing. It was bliss for me. This activity continued all that night until dawn when there was yet one naked person covered with the grime of the warehouse floor still pounding the crap out of one of the stations…”

Zwicky was involved in the subsequent Cat’s Head II event and at the following event called the FlyTrap. The Cat’s Head I&II events and FlyTrap were held at the same warehouse location on the waterfront. The band Fi-Hi-Ma-Fi-Hi performed at Flytrap and consisted of Zwicky on drums & scrap metal; KJ on bass guitar and Mathew Seidman on alto saxophone. Another scrap metal project Zwicky was involved with in Brooklyn was called “D.I.N.” (acronym for Disruptive Interference Network). The project was the brainchild of KJ, the bassist from Fi-Hi-Ma-Fi-Hi. After gathering a number of metal pieces (oil drums & sheet metal mostly) a series of loosely organized rehearsals were held and recorded. Using a generator D.I.N. was able to incorporate electric instruments (bass & guitar) as well. This took place at the same locale although in a much smaller warehouse than the aforementioned events.

Michael J. Zwicky

Notes:

1. Scrap Metal Music at Cat’s Head Event, Williamsburg 1990 (photo: Anna West) ↩︎
2. Performance at Nada Gallery (top R.- Michael J. Zwicky, L. S.- Gustav Hagglund / bot R.- S Gustav Hagglund, L.- Michael J. Zwicky) ↩︎
3. Poster for NADA Gallery Performance, 1985 (Poster by Michael J. Zwicky) ↩︎
4. Installation Views, El Purgatorio Show W/Plexus International at CUANDO Bldg. (photo: Michael J. Zwicky) ↩︎
5. S. Gustav Hagglund at Xenon Disco demolition site (photo: Michael J. Zwicky) ↩︎
6. Installation Views from Cat’s Head Event, Williamsburg 1990 (photo: Michael J. Zwicky) ↩︎
7. Scrap Metal/Demo Moe Performance at Rivington Sculpture Garden, NYC 1986 (photo: Toyo) ↩︎