Queer Trash Presents: Brutal Measures (Lydia Lunch + Weasel Walter)

For their first program as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, Queer Trash is delighted to present Brutal Measures (Lydia Lunch + Weasel Walter), Keijaun Thomas, and Straight Panic. Queer Trash cruises in relentless pursuit of bodily disruptions and sonic deviance against avant-normativity; the collective promises an evening of unhinged sound, linguistic onslaught, and remorseless rupture of the structures of power and subjugation in which everyone is implicated.

Brutal Measures is a collaboration between Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter, two innovators of the most challenging, aggressive, and uncompromising nether regions of no wave, free jazz, electroacoustic composition, and spoken word. Lydia’s body of work has always been confrontational, from the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks formed in 1976 to the current group Retrovirus, her Cinema of Transgression collaborations with Richard Kern in the 1980’s, to her longstanding history of infamous spoken word performances. Lydia serves an acerbic and viciously uncompromising assault on patriarchy, sexuality, perversity, and the status quo.

Weasel Walter’s body of work is no less uncompromising, with over twenty years of dedication to the most extreme forms of sonic expression. Walter’s projects include the legendary skronk/punk/no-wave band The Flying Luttenbachers, Cellular Chaos, To Live and Shave in LA, and intense free jazz collaborations with Roscoe Mitchell, John Butcher, Peter Evans, and countless others.

Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature. Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, writer, musician, poet, spoken word artist and photographer, she has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books have published her anthology, Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. She performs in a variety of mediums, is a rabid collaborator and continues to release new music as well as reissuing classic material such as her spoken word indictment against patriarchal idiocy, The Conspiracy of Women through Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People.

Weasel Walter is a Brooklyn, New York based multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser best known for leading the seminal punk-jazz/no- wave/brutal-prog band The Flying Luttenbachers between 1991 and 2007 on 16 full-length releases. Seamlessly uniting the intensity and abstraction of improvised music with the nihilist aesthetics of extreme rock forms, Walter is committed to violent momentum, idiomatic unpredictability and rapid articulation.Expert in the underground music scene of the late 1970’s, Walter has lectured at various Universities including Bard, San Francisco Art Institute, University of Chicago in Paris, and penned the introduction for Marc Masters book NO WAVE, seen as the definitive history of the New York movement from which Lydia Lunch emerged in 1977 with her first group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In 2012, Weasel Walter began working with Lydia Lunch as musical coordinator and lead guitarist for RETROVIRUS, a retrospective, which spanned the spectrum of her musical legacy from No Wave Skronk to bludgeoning Hard Rock and sleazy Jazz Noir to propulsive Psychedlia. RETROVIRUS has just released their second full length LP URGE TO KILL in the USA, Europe and South America.