A big "NO" to everything. No Record, the 1968 debut of London, Ontario's Nihilist Spasm Band, is among the foundational documents of the entire noise tradition - widely cited as the first record by a band that called itself, without irony or hindsight, a noise band. Formed in 1965 around the studio of painter Greg Curnoe, the group gathered eight visual artists and friends - Bill Exley, Murray Favro, Art Pratten, John Boyle, John Clement, Hugh McIntyre and others - who refused to learn conventional instruments and instead built their own. Kazoos, modified guitars, drums assembled from a decade of junk, and Pratten's home-made violin, the Pratt-a-various. Nothing tuned to a common scale, no predetermined grammar, no agreed tempo, yet they play together - a logic of collective improvisation arrived at by intuition rather than theory.

What unfolds is electric, anarchic, and unexpectedly funny. Exley, a schoolteacher, bellows about stupidity, destruction and Canada over a roiling mass that lurches between collapse and a strange communal swing. Recorded live and meant to be played LOUD, it remains indispensable to anyone following the line that runs from the LAFMS to Sonic Youth to the Japanese underground. Reissued by Alchemy Records, the Osaka label run by Hijokaidan's Jojo Hiroshige, who has spent decades championing the band that taught noise it had ancestors.

"In 1965, eight guys from London, Ontario, decided to start a free-improv group — 'free' to the point of building their own instruments, which they decided couldn't be set up to produce specific pitches... Their vocalist, schoolteacher Bill Exley, banged on a cooking pot and bellowed hilariously about stupidity and destruction and Canada. They didn't treat what they were doing as an advanced, visionary form of experimental music, but as a big, stupid, fun, ecstatic noise. By the '90s, noise artists finally recognized NSB as their ancestors — and, almost 50 years after they started, the surviving members of the Nihilist Spasm Band still play every Monday night while their children haunt loft spaces the world over." —Spin

"The record you’re holding is one of the masterworks of that big gray area of noise/weirdo/freak-out music. It’ still hard to believe that No Record was released in 1968. This was a time when popular music was still growing up, and these outsider guys from Canada came out of nowhere and made this mindfuck of record that was years ahead of itself. And as with albums like Trout Mask Replica, and The Faust Tapes, it still sounds fresh today. No Record is mandatory listening.  —Lasse Marhaug.

A proto-dada assault, 'No Record' heralds a do it yourself punk aesthetic with unrestrained humor and noise performed on largely home-made instruments. Electric charged and indispensable to anyone interested in Sonic Youth, the LAFMS, Japanese Noise, and anarchistic music in general