The Toy Killers: Is it Unlistenable?

To define No Wave is to kill it. The genre only properly functioned for a few years at the tail end of the seventies and briefly into the eighties. What seemingly wound up happening was that players associated with the scene branched out into other art practices or were enrapt in the downtown jazz scene. None of the meant an immediate end to the pseudo genre. And Sonic Youth can be figured as its highest profile practitioner at this point. For all of these reasons, though, the thought that there were lost recordings from groups working in this mold, never really occurred to me. Could there really have been that many ensembles capacious of working up a set, solidifying an approach to the music and recording a high quality product in such a short time without anyone knowing about it by now?

I guess so.

Weasel Walter, the man behind the Flying Luttenbachers in addition to a spate of other collaborations and a slew of recordings under his own name, though, has become a scholar on par with Byron Coley on this genre of music. And somehow Weasel was able to hunt down some lost tapes by a group called the Toy Killers.

Before getting into the music, though, it’s worth mentioning that everyone from John Zorn to Bill Laswell made appearances with this group either live or for recordings – or both.

None of that’s too important, but does point to the talent both Charles K. Noyes and M.E. Miller possessed. It was apparently evident to some of those top tier downtown jazzbos as well. But the fact that the Toy Killers disappeared after just about a four year period reasserts the idea that No Wave was just a flash in the pan. This stuff, though, is at times on par with Sonic Youth’s first EP. And that’s incredible.

There’s no concerted musical style set forth over the course of The Unlistenable Years, the compilation Weasel assembled. It moves from mutant dance music to stuff that seems like it would have counted as performance art. There’s a slew of improvisations tacked on to the tail of the disc – not the best part. But some of the earlier proper compositions – namely “Smoky Raindrops” and its aural brethren – are hard to deny as some of the most engaging and rhythmically interesting No Wave stuff out there.

The Toy Killers aren’t for a general audience. But No New York fans should snatch this right quick.