Primitive Hiss: The Hazardous World of Bag People

The history of music will always spring a surprise. For those who claim omniscience, their egos, humbled at best, obliterated at worst. The memory hole cult bands; the outliers; the underdogs. More and more each day, acts of the past emerge, afforded a new opportunity in this fetid pit in the circle we call life.

It’s largely thanks to the internet. For all its sins and grave despair, the world wide web has offered the same opportunity for outliers and underdogs on the other side of the studio glass to piece together the past. Years of Wikipedia and Discogs deep dives, those with claws sharp enough to penetrate the surface will eventually find the treasure. And, like always, there’s more of it.

For every Dennis Wilson there’s a Jimmy Campbell. The casual listeners of slowcore may find an Ida to go alongside their perennial champion, Low. Similar stories can be told of listeners drawing lines from Unwound to Grain and backtracking from Mogwai to Labradford. No matter how many names are thrown out there, the curious ear of you, dear reader, will be Googling furiously (I can sense you typing “Grain band” right now as you pore over these haphazard ramblings).

And speaking of poring, it’d be remiss to ignore New York’s no-wave epoch. Sonic Youth were there, of course. So too Swans, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks and several others. One of which included Bag People. Like all celebrated acts from the deepest pockets of the underground, Bag People have a story: one that began in 1977 in the western suburbs of Chicago, where vocalist, Diane Wlezien, and guitarist, Carolyn Master, met in high school.

Sharing a love for punk, the pair put out an S.O.S. for another guitarist to join their ranks; the call, met by Gaylene Goudreau, and shortly after the trio moved from Chicago to Los Angeles where they would spend 12 months as the short-lived Lois Lain.

Returning to Chicago for their next quest, it would arrive through Goudreau in 1979, who joined local post-punks, DA!. After opening for Arto Lindsay’s DNA, it proved to be a circuit breaker that led to Goudreau, Wlezien and Master making music again, and in 1981 they regrouped as Bag People.

Enlisting Algis Kizys (Swans) and drummer Pete Elwyn (The Pedestrians), the band were on the move again, this time east to New York, where in late 1982 Bag People would land in Swans’ Brooklyn practice space. It was here where some of Bag People’s recordings (many of which were long-lost until recently) would feature on their excellent self-titled compilation.

12 songs that tell the Bag People story, Bag People is a savage descent into the maelstrom. Like their no-wave counterparts, Bag People framed moments. Fraught with urgency and anxiety, the recordings on Bag People encapsulate a danger that was indicative of New York at the time.

In the case of no-wave, locality isn’t something referenced enough, but Bag People managed to capture the city’s dark underbelly and nervous energy as good as any of their adversaries. Master and Goudreau’s feral guitar interchanges, exploding through the speakers like shrapnel and backed by Kizys’ tenuous bass lines and Elwyn’s cannonball drums, it formed a blast zone for Wlezien to navigate with little concern for the consequences.

Take the opening blitzkrieg of Fire God. A salvos of guard-railing scraping noise that saw Bag People reaching new extremities. Wlezion’s delivery is blistering. All verve and vigour, while Master and Goudreau’s razor wire guitar interplay forms a menacing sound that suffocates you into submission. Perhaps only Swan’s would better it with their 1984 landmark, Cop.

Recorded in the same session as Fire God at New York’s Hi Fi Studio, Dead Meat is just as sweltering; Wlezion confessing that “The whole world is in danger”. It’s not the only time where she exposes a frightening prescience. On Underneath Pretty Songs, she reaches the core of what Riot Grrrl would become years later (“They say smile and write pretty songs”), and intersecting feminism with politics and capitalism (“Go to work / Feel good about your job / No worries / Invest”), Wlezion would take the baton from Bag People’s transatlantic cousins X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Raincoats with tales that remain all too familiar today.

Recording to boombox was a method that added visceral elements to no-wave, and Bag People utilised it to an effect likened to a crumbling edifice. The band reached their destructive best on Lark’s Vomit and Instrumental – guttural punk cloaked in renegade spirit, it was here where Bag People reached into the grimiest corners of their soul.

Three more songs were recorded in the same sessions at New York’s Studio 6B in December 1983. Sweet Roughness Blues, Long Way Back and the lost punk anthem, What’s What. These moments reveal another side to Bag People. A band deeper in the groove, where cranial befuddlement is overshadowed by a morose aesthetic. The darkest tracks the band had written, it was also indicative of what was the beginning of the end.

As the compilation ends with Don’t Make Me, a live recording captured a month prior during a show at CBGB’s, Wlezion parts with more eerie foresight (“It goes on like a big mess / It goes on we try to play our best.”). It’s not just her outward forecast, but closer to home, too; the aforementioned session at Studio 6B one of the band’s last.

From here, Bag People would fade into obscurity. Almost literally in the case of Elwyn, who went MIA after the Christmas of 1983, taking a large chunk of these recordings with him before the band dissolved in July of 1984. Master, Kizys and Wlezien would return to Chicago, and in 1985 they would form noise-rock assault unit, Of Cabbages and Kings. Also founded by Ted Parsons, it was the former Bag People members who featured on all three of Of Cabbages and Kings’ albums, Face (1988), Basic Pain Basic Pleasure (1990), and Hunter’s Moon (1992).

Bag People’s demise underlined the fact that all bands have a window. ‘Glory days’ to optimists out there, except there was no glory in no-wave. There was no glory in the underground, and there still isn’t. Bands either reach more ears and start making business decisions that erodes their art, or they just quit. And while perhaps not by design, that’s what Bag People did. But not before emitting an acerbic racket that crystalised the danger of their immediate surroundings.

Like Swans, Bag People’s dissonance and messaging was befouled in nihilism. It went beyond the shock value of punk – most of which was watered down and bottled up to the highest bidder by this point. It was no-wave, hardcore and noise-rock that harnessed a new spiritual resonance. In the case of Bag People, their brand of noise was deeply malevolent, presented through a lens that suggested there was no future. Sound familiar? That’s why Bag People is a compilation quite fitting for these times.

Bag People is out now via Drag City. Purchased from Bandcamp.