What is Skronk?

During the early 1990s, I was program director of WUVT-FM in Blacksburg, VA. We were all very into the stuff that was happening in the Downtown scene -- the Knitting Factory, CRI's Emergency Music series, John Zorn's Naked City -- as well as classic free jazz, everything ECM (http://www.ecmrecords.com/) was doing, Edgard Varese, Steve Reich, John Cage, and so-called minimalist classical music, hardcore noise, and other serious avant garde musical styles. Most of this seems to have been catalyzed for us in the 1980s with bands like Last Exit and other improvised noise; it was a lot grittier than early 70s fusion, but had some of the same ideas ... but it was really coming into its own in the late 80s/early 90s, especially with Naked City. We found there was some aesthetic in common between this music that was sometimes called jazz, sometimes classical, sometimes rock -- yet blended the sensibilities of all these into something else altogether. It was very "anti-easy-listening" but there was something more than that.

While trying to find a term for this "generalized alternative avant art music aestethic", the term "skronk" came up (I think Bob Holub http://www.bobholub.blogspot.com/ coined it). None of us were familiar with the term, though others may have simultaneously coined it ... being rather onomatopoeic ... and the term stuck. "Skronk" then became immortalized (at least to its handful of faithful readers) in 1992 or so through the publication of a gnarly fanzine dedicated to this mostly college radio phenomon by hipsters Brent Burton and Tom Baxter. I wrote a few articles for Skronk, which are still available on my original website (http://www.gaylordconsulting.com/clark/Music/), but I'm not familiar with any other online presence of the zine.

Today there are still keepers of the skronk flame as a musical aesthetic. The Knitting Factory (http://www.knittingfactory.com) is still strong, and there are periodically embers in the college radio scene that get stoked. The "classical tradition" skronk is probably best seen in the continuation of the Emergency Music series: Bang on a Can (http://www.bangonacan.org/) and Cantaloupe Music (http://www.cantaloupemusic.com/) and, of course, ECM; it is still largely unnoticed by the vast majority of college radio stations. Skronk's improvised noise tradition lives on in numerous electronic artists and run-down college-town bungalos.

Related to skronk is the 70s NY loft scene of avant jazz. Most skronkers you find will have their fair share of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and early David Murray albums. I would also trace skronk back to the modernism of the 50s and 60s avant garde, which in turn was taking the lead from serialism of Anton Webern (especially), Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg. It was Schoenberg who developed the modern idea of the "new aesthetic". Anyway, the "Live at the Knitting Factory" shows were a standby for our jazz programming, just as New World (http://www.newworldrecords.org/) and Composer Recordings were an inseparable part of our classical programming.