The Los Angeles Free Music Society · the art-damage collective that ran parallel to the city's deathrock and industrial-noise strand, an early-1970s free-improvisation movement built around Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena · founded around 1973 by Chip Chapman, Joe Potts, Rick Potts and Tom Recchion · Smegma, Le Forte Four, the Doo-Dooettes and Airway as the constituent groups · the second Los Angeles tradition, filed alongside the deathrock-and-industrial city entry
The LAFMS was never one group. It was a loose collective of like-minded artist-musicians who found commercial rock too slick and set out to reinvent sound experiment together, and it took in a shifting set of bands and offshoots with shared membership. The founding figures were Chip Chapman, Joe Potts, Rick Potts and Tom Recchion, and the society grew out of two converging scenes: the Potts brothers' tape experiments and the after-hours improvisation at Poo-Bah Records in Pasadena, where Recchion drew in Dennis Duck, Fredrik Nilsen, Juan Gomez and others.
The constituent groups carried the movement. Le Forte Four released the LP whose sleeve coined the name, Bikini Tennis Shoes (1974); Recchion's circle formed the Doo-Dooettes out of an earlier duo; and Smegma, already going since 1973 on the principle of "No Musicians," developed out of the same Poo-Bah scene before moving to Portland in 1975. Airway, Ace & Duce and the later Extended Organ rounded out the roster, and John Duncan and Ace Farren Ford were among the affiliates who passed through.
The society also built its own infrastructure. Joe Potts's I.D. Art compilations ran on an open invitation, selling space on the record at two dollars per fifteen minutes so that anyone who could not afford a release of their own could still get heard; the Blorp Esette compilation (1977) drew in the Residents; the Light Bulb magazine documented the scene; and the Solid Eye label issued members' work between 1982 and 1984.
The case for filing the LAFMS as its own Los Angeles entry rests on how different it is from the city's other tradition. Where the deathrock-and-industrial strand is a catalogue anchored to single figures and venues, the LAFMS is a collective with no centre, a movement that the participants themselves struggle to date precisely and that produced its meaning through volume and openness rather than through a defining record. It is the American free-improvisation and art-damage tradition at its source, a lightning rod, in its own phrase, for weird-music lovers everywhere.
Its influence ran a long way downstream. The records, made and traded through an underground network in tiny editions, fed directly into the punk of the late 1970s, the cassette-trading culture of the 1980s, and the cut-and-paste methods that this archive files under plunderphonics. The much later revival concerts drew in Hijokaidan and the Incapacitants, a sign of how completely the Japanese noise tradition came to recognise the LAFMS as kin.
The Bureau files the LAFMS as the second Los Angeles occupation: the free-improvisation strand that ran parallel to the deathrock-and-industrial one, connected to the rest of the archive through Smegma and John Duncan, and standing as one of the founding movements of American experimental sound. No account of the American underground that reaches back before punk can leave it out.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene