Ann Arbor group Destroy All Monsters are probably best known for their punk rock edition that came about in 1977 and included both Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis of the MC5. Fronted by charismatic artist Niagara, they represented the Motor City - as much as Dead Boys did Cleveland, The Ramones NYC, or The Avengers San Francisco - in the front lines of hard rockin' punk. However, the origins of the band in 1973 were as an 'anti-rock' collective that were anything but. playing their first gig at a comic book convention - where they were asked to leave after ten minutes - using prepared guitars, a drum machine, tape loops, and various other instruments to create a collage of "dystopian pychotronic" noise.
The media maelstrom thus commenced didn't restrict itself to music but, over the years that followed, engaged all forms of hippie and trash subculture, much published in a eponymous periodical. After the punk band expired around 1985 the group returned to it's experimental culture-mashing roots and continues to this day. In 1995 Thurston Moore put out a 3-CD comp and, with the recent rise of noise-culture, these other phases of the band's existence have come to be recognized as seminal and pioneering. The new 'Hungry for Death' exhibit, at the Printed Matter bookstore in NYC, is about those same early and late phases, and culls material widely from the collective's archive, not only of their own work, but of the ephemera that inspired them. The video is of John Sinclair speaking, and C.Spencer Yeh playing, at the exhibit's opening.
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