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Not since the early days of MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, circa 1968, had there been such an organic melding of sheer metalesque maelstrom and free jazz. These archival recordings from the legendary punk club CBGB's capture a moment in time when open-minded musicians from the 'downtown scene' were exploring the possibility of bringing Lou Reed's feedback-infested Metal Machine Music together with Albert Ayler's Love Cry.

Dissipated Face guitarist Kurt Ralkse and special guest saxophonist Daniel Carter provided that implausible link between punk rock and avant garde jazz on these 1986 live recordings. Fueled by the throbbing rhythms of Steve "X Dream" Popkin and Ben "Face" Munves, who alternated on bass and drums, Ralske's twisted, thrashing power chords and shrieking licks blend with Carter's cathartic alto sax wailing to make the perfect union of disparate worlds. And their shouts on the opening track of "Rock is dead, shithead!" is every bit as anthemic as MC5's "Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" 

Ralske would go on to attain a certain level of indie rock fame with Ultra Vivid Scene and subsequently make an impact as a producer-conceptualist-avant-popmeister and visual artist. Carter would become one of the most ubiquitous figures on New York's free jazz scene, recording with William Parker, David S. Ware, Billy Bang, Alan Silva and Matthew Shipp and the cooperative bands Test and Other Dimensions in Music. But for this one moment back in 1986, their paths crossed with bandmates Popkin and Munves, and the results were frighteningly intense.

Bill Milkowski (written over 500 sets of liner notes and contributes to Jazz Times, Jazziz, Absolute Sound, Down Beat, Guitar Player, Bass Player, Acoustic Guitar, Pulse!, MIX and Interview. Author of “JACO: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius,”)

The Dissipated Face Story
"Sometime in 1980, I met Kurt Ralske on line at a Fred Frith show at the Squat Theatre in NYC. Kurt was then in high school and played guitar & trumpet. I was about 10 years older and ran a series of jam sessions at my parents house in Linden, NJ whenever they went on vacation. Kurt & I had similar musical interests and became good friends. I invited him to jam with some jazz and rock musicians from the Linden area and some great times were had. Within a year, Kurt helped organize a trio with two friends of his from high school in Merrick, Long Island. This trio were called Dissipated Face and featured Kurt, on guitar,  Ben Face (Munves) on bass and Steve X. Dream (Popkin) on drums. Most of my local musician friends played mainly jazz but they had had rock, blues, folk & even punk influences as well. I remember when Dissipated Face showed up at my house on a Sunday afternoon during a week's worth of jams. They set up, played a one hour set and left quickly to return their borrowed car. They blew the minds of everyone in attendance that day as they would for many times in the future.

What was great about Dissipated Face was that their music was a unique blend of progressive & punk rock, reggae and avant/jazz. They wrote strong memorable songs and jammed. They were ambitious, crazy, fun, serious, talented and much younger than any musicians that I was friendly with. They came to many of the jam sessions at my house and learned from the older cats as well as having their own jams where they lived. I ended up managing them or at least getting them gigs whenever I could because they loved to play and would go anywhere to do their thing. 

Although both Ben Face & Steve X. Dream were talented musicians who often switched off on bass & drums & vocals, it was Kurt who was their secret weapon. Mr. Ralske had a scientific approach to playing guitar and using devices. He was able to control feedback, which is no easy feat, and often took incredible guitar solos. Another thing about Dissipated face that set them apart was they loved to experiment and take chances. I was honored to sit in with them on several occasions playing hubcaps and reciting poetry. 

Another free spirit was of course 
Daniel Carter also jammed with them on several dates. Mr. Carter's motto is, "have horns, will play!" Daniel Carter has always searched for and played with other like-minded musicians who don't care about categories or boundaries. I can recall when he sat in with my young pals some 25 years ago, as well as sitting in with punk/thrash/hardcore bands from NY around the same time! 

Dissipated Face were amazing in their day and were fearless in exploring the better parts of free music. Long live Dissipated Face and Daniel Carter!"

Bruce Lee Gallanter 
Downtown Music Gallery 

“I remember the downtown music scene when I moved into NYC in 1980. There was Rock, Punk, Jazz, Free Jazz, Loft Jazz, Blues, Country, Folk, Noise, experimental and all sorts of art and improvisation being mixed together in every way imaginable. I’d go to a club and see the Ramones, and then Don Cherry would play afterward while someone was painting on the same stage! That time really opened my mind as to the notion that anything was possible. It influenced me to call some of my old Rutgers friends from New Jersey a few years later and start my band, “Machine Gun”, (Based on the FMP record by Peter Brotzmann). Our first gig was at the Pyramid club when we were first called, “Sounds of the Apocalypse”. Half way through the set male dancers started undressing and dancing on the bar.

I met Steve and Ben and started playing with them around the same time, and was really impressed as to how tight they were playing together. Steve would play drums and percussion and Ben would play Bass and Keyboards. We’d get together whenever possible and ask our friends to join us. This included Bill Milkowski, Bruce Gallanter, Ted Goldberg, Daniel Carter, Jay Walk, Richie Rock and many others.
A few years later Steve, Ben, and Bruce would help me start my record company, MuWorks Records. I’m still in touch with all of them and try and jam with them whenever possible. It’s great to see this Dissipated Face album getting released. It’s a great document from a great time from great people!”

Bob Musso
(Daredevil guitarist for Machine Gun and main engineer, collaborator with producer Bill Laswell for nearly three decades) 

Kurt Ralske - the story of a Long Island boy discovering art school noise-pop and conceptual art practice in downtown NYC; the struggles, successes and failures of a pop music career; and finally, reinvention as a visual artist working with experimental film, installation art, and Borgesian invented worlds.

But earlier this year, history took another one of its interesting turns, with Ralske suddenly and unexpectedly reminded of his time playing scratchy, No Wave guitar noise in the Dissipated Face trio, back in the mid-‘80s...

I have always been interested in what happened for you before Ultra Vivid Scene, in bands like Dissipated Face, Crash and Nothing But Happiness. It must have been quite a strange thing for you to be reminded of Dissipated Face, out of the blue.

Kurt Ralske: So I get this email from the drummer of Dissipated Face, who’s been off my radar for over twenty years, and then the same week, two or three other things happen: I have this conversation with you, and then one of the touring guitarists from Ultra Vivid Scene, who I’m friendly with on Facebook, got in touch with me because he discovered this funny interview somebody posted on YouTube. It was really shocking to be reminded I was once that person. [laughs]

What do you remember of Dissipated Face?

KR: I started playing guitar when I was 15, and shortly after, I met two other high school outcasts who wanted to start a punk band. I didn’t really know what that was. I knew quite a lot about music, because my original instrument was the trumpet, and I had worked hard to figure out how to play jazz on the trumpet, so I knew quite a lot about harmony and theory. And I liked prog rock, so when I first picked up the guitar, I was trying to figure out how to [play] King Crimson. It wasn’t like, Okay, I want to be in The Ramones, it was, I want to be Robert Fripp. But my band members had a very strong interest in what was going on in New York, as I did too, but I was more interested in the avant-garde side.

The whole thing was a little bit hardcore, a little bit avant-garde, a little bit punk funk. I wasn’t able to imitate the way most punk rock players played guitar, because I didn’t know the basics, I only knew this weird advanced stuff. So it led to this odd mash-up of styles.

So how did it feel listening back to that recording [Dissipated Face With Daniel Carter, Live At CBGB 1986 (2013)]?

KR: Well, that recording is quite nice, because Daniel Carter is a pretty great musician! He wasn’t a regular member of the group, but he did play with us several times. I think we even rehearsed with him, he would just figure out what to do. When I heard the first track on the record recently, I was impressed, partly because I thought, Wow, there is a dialogue going on between the guitar and the saxophone: I wasn’t just this dumb kid making noise, I was listening a little bit too. So that was a pleasant surprise. I had completely forgotten that I ever played in that style.

A Quietus Interview
Joy & Futurism: Kurt Ralske Of Ultra Vivid Scene Interviewed 
Jon Dale , October 14th, 2013 
http://thequietus.com/articles/13367-ultra-vivid-scene-kurt-ralske-interview

Raymond Pettibon is the EP cover designer artist. Pettibon suggested the name Black Flag and also designed Black Flag's distinctive "four bars" logo. His artwork appeared on many album covers including the Foo Fighters and the 1991 Sonic Youth album, "Goo",  and is well known in the punk rock and art scenes. He has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art NY and LA Museum of Contemporary Art . He exhibited in the Whitney Biennial 4 times and, they presented his solo exhibition in 2005. In 2013, he created a billboard for the High Line displaying a drawing called No Title (Safe he called ...).

Roaratorio Records: 
James Lindbloom's belief in the album as a work of art is so strong that he makes packaging a major priority. Lindbloom's predilection for spectacular cover art has been a Roaratorio trademark since the label's start in 2000. His high standards have played a big role in ink already spilled about Roaratorio. His roster includes John Cage, Steve Lacy and other jazz and avant garde artists. 

Reviews:

Wire Magazine 

"Oddball discovery of a live meeting of an early group led by Ultra Vivid Scene’s Kurt Raiske with the always amazing Daniel Carter guesting. Carter’s on sax here, and the blend – right near the end of New York City’s post-SIN Club trajectory – is a very cool collision between free jazz and late period scum-rock readymades. Why was this not known of before?"
Byron Coley (Forced Exposure  NY Rocker, Spin. One of the first writers to have documented indie rock from its inception and author of No Wave, the first book to visually chronicle the collision of art and punk in the NY underground 

MaximumRockRoll 

"Frantic free punk, that reminds me of Easter Monkeys, then Flipper, then Pere Ubu... it's wound up post VU sounds from the streets of NYC when that still meant something, inflections of no wave spurting saxophone and weirdly HC-esque guitars, but the swagger and fuck-you take over and overpower the skronk...It's reminiscent of MC5's incursions into jazz, not jam Ginn band shit, but fucked up on PCP Les Dirtbags out for blood, armed with Sun Ra and the Dead Boys. Sick Pettibon cover art too. Eat it or beat it!"

Volcanic Tongue 

"Amazing archival unearthing of previously unreleased No Wave/free jazz live blats from this wild free rock group featuring saxophonist Daniel Carter: Dissipated Face was the trio of guitarist Kurt Ralske (later in Ultra Vivid Scene et al), bassist Ben Munves and drummer Stephen Popkin and the music was a mutant strain of hardcore with fast, up-tight rhythms over the kinda free guitar crank that would reconcile Rudolph Grey, Arto Lindsay and Keith Levene. Indeed, there’s a weird American hardcore take on Metal Box to some of the music here, colliding with classic No Wave refusal to make for some amazing Demo Moe-style freak. Great songs, with titles like “Rock Is Dead, Shithead”, “Streets Of New York” and “Nazi With A New Name” and when Carter comes in on saxophone the effect is like the MC5 eviscerating Jon Landau’s goddamn corpse live on stage and straight to bootleg. Comes with cool Raymond Pettibon artwork and liners. Too much, totally great and highly recommended."
David Keenan (Scottish critic and musician. Author of England's Hidden Reverse, a biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound)

Black to Comm:

"Don't let the Raymond Pettibon cover fool you---this ain't exactly some SST discard that cluttered up the amerindie record collections of the late-eighties! Dissipated Face, although they could have made it as a fringe signing to that infamous label, are a tad different'n the reams of collegeboy experimental bleats that were getting a whole lotta hosannas from cloistered clods like myself. As if you actually knew, Dissipated Face were a hot trio that was romping through the post-fun era of NYC rock back when they laid these sides down at CBGB on July 31st of 1986, and their mix of everything from free jazz and late-seventies avant-prog to punk rock made for some of the wildest mergings of the form since Red Transistor. Nothing as out-there as that group, but better'n many a similar-minded excursion into freedom aesthetics. What's best is that none other'n noted avant saxist himself Daniel Carter sat in giving a particularly Albert Ayler-ish air to these excursions, so if you were a fan of this guy's various endeavors on the stage of the CBGB Lounge during the final days of Hilly you'll be glad to know that he was in on the punk jazz game for a longer time'n you could've dreamed!"
the Classical

Yellow Green Red:

Dissipated Face with Daniel Carter Live At CBGB 1986 7″ (Roaratorio)
If you’re like me, and you got into standard rock music that had choruses and verses and bridges as a child, but always longed for something more extreme, you probably remember the moment you first heard Septic Death or Albert Ayler or Wolf Eyes or Mr. Bungle or whatever it was that destroyed the musical parameters previously established by your brain. I bet if I stumbled into CBGB’s in 1986, everyone probably would’ve been like “who the hell let a five year-old in here, where are his parents?”, but supposing I was a teenager or something, Dissipated Face probably would’ve cracked my skull open with their flailing, post-no-wave free-rock assault. They sound like one of those early ’80s downtown NY groups like Lounge Lizards or Material or Golden Palominos, had they crashed into Reagan Youth on the cab ride over with the few surviving members improvising live. It sounds dated as hell today; it’s almost quaint to imagine this ever sounded “crazy” to anyone, but if I strain hard enough I can definitely teleport my senses back to a time when every crazy record wasn’t available in two clicks and Glen Humplik was more famous than Glenn Branca. Check out “Streets Of New York” first, that’s my personal favorite, and see what Dissipated Face does to you!

Dusty Groove:

Mindblowing punk and free jazz collision from Dissipated Face – with alto sax behemoth Daniel Carter blowing fiercely out front – a fast, brutal, yet defiantly musical quartet of songs recorded live in 1986 at the legendary Bowery club! This great 7-inch, 33 1/3 RPM EP has four killer tracks – with fast, bashed out guitars, furious rhythms and angry, aggro vocals – really cool underground stuff just on that level, but Carter's brilliant sax truly blows it into on amazing level. Titles include "Rock Is Dead, S**thead", "Nazi With A New Name", "Streets Of New York" and "My Life Is Like An Alligator". (Picture sleeve designed by Raymond Pettibon.)

Midheaven:

Archival recordings from the punk club CBGB that captures the live fusion of punk rock and avant-garde jazz by the open-minded members of Dissipated Face with saxophonist Daniel Carter.

DISSIPATED FACE WITH DANIEL CARTER: Live at CBGB 1986: 7”
Four songs from back when punks were still doing some experimenting in their music, mostly trying to add jazz to the mix. It all comes off like Black Flag adding the most of no wave. As a relic it’s interesting –Rick Ecker Razorcake (roaratorio.com)

Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter

Dissipated Face were and are old friends of mine that I met when they were still in high school in the early eighties. Dissipated Face featured Kurt Hologram on lead guitar, Ben Face on bass & vocals and Steve X Dream on drums & vocals. They were the most ambitious young band I knew and they blended just about everything into their unique sound: punk/prog/jazz/noise/ psych/rock/dub/metal. They were part of scene with friends of mine from New Jersey that would jam whenever and wherever they could. I was glad to help them to get gigs and they never ceased to amaze audiences whenever they played live. They jammed with many members of the early Downtown scene like Steve Buchanan and Daniel Carter. Recently discovered was a set they did at CBGBs in 1986 with the amazing Daniel Carter sitting in. Four fantastic songs from that set are soon coming out as a 7" EP on the Roaratorio label. The cover art was done by the great Raymond Pettibon and the liner notes were written by Bill Milkowski and yours truly.
Bruce Lee Gallanter

The group’s members, guitarist Kurt Ralske, Ben “Face” Munves on bass, vocals and drums, and Steve “X Dream” Popkin, on drums, vocals and bass, met in High school. On November 5, 1981 they played they first gig. Dissipated Face made its debut at CBGB's 2 weeks later on November 21th. The group's name was inspired by a photo of rock legend Mick Jagger as well was their songs, Rock is Dead Shithead and Reagan is a Nazi. This EP was recorded at their very last gig together, 5 years later.  They played at CBGB at least a dozen times as well as 60+ gigs in NYC, LI and NJ. They were contemporaries of Sonic Youth and opened for the Meat Puppets and Shockabilly, Cheetah Crome, Anti-Nowhere League, TANK, and many others, but they never had an official release until now! 

Members:
Kurt  Ralske - guitar 
Influenced by : Fred Frith , Miles Davis 
Ben "Face" Munves - bass, vocals, drums (Streets of New York)
Influenced by David Bowie , Lou Reed
Steve "X. Dream" Popkin - drums , vocals, bass (Streets of New York)
Influenced by The Clash, The Ramones

Collectively they were influenced by the downtown improvisers and John Zorn, DNA, No Wave, Eno,
Bill Laswell, Dub Reggae, King Crimson and James Brown. 

The band broke up  5 years after that first basement gig. Steve and Ben continued as the Dissapated Improv Orchestra with Daniel Carter, Robert Musso, Ted Goldberg, Bill Milkowski, Bern Nix, Robert Quine and others as special guests for a couple of years. 

DISSIPATED FACE With DANIEL CARTER "Live at CBGB 1986" 5 song 33 1/3, 7-inch EP

Produced by Stephen Popkin and James Linderbloom for Roaratorio records. 

This tape was recorded off the board  by the sound man at CBGB. It was converted to digital by Will Dahl,  mastered for vinyl by Carl Saff. Cover by Raymond Pettibone, Photograph by Scott Hiller, Liner notes by Bruce Gallanter.

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