RITUAL TENSION [1982 - present]
Ritual Tension is an American experimental rock ‘no wave’ band that formed in 1983 in New York City. They released two studio albums and an EP, all recorded at Martin Bisi's BC Studio in Brooklyn, and a live album taken from shows at CBGB, on the Celluloid/CBGB label. At the same time, various configurations of the band members took part in art performances around Manhattan at venues such as Pyramid Club and PS 122. The band dissolved in 1990, releasing Past Tense, a ‘best of’ collection, in 1996. In the late teens of this century Ivan began working on some experimental spoken word pieces and recruited former band members for an album called The Kiss, which led to a revival of Ritual Tension, and the band toured in the northeast before the pandemic and released It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End in July, 2020. Wikipedia
I would note as well that I joined Swans and worked on the Greed album in the studio.
“Ritual Tension is a band with its roots firmly planted in the punk, no-wave, and noise scenes of the very late 1970s in San Francisco before moving to NYC in the early 1980s. The brothers Ivan and Andrew Nahem led the band and Ritual Tension remained an adorned East Village staple of musical daring and individuality, including their deconstructed version of ‘Hotel California’, until 1990. Now, thirty years after their final performance, Ritual Tension has returned, this time sans Andrew, as a trio on the experimental and wonderfully noisy It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End. Without the presence of Andrew on guitar, Marc Sloan’s bass dominates the record, particularly on the rattling ‘Come Back, Come Back’ and the claustrophobic ‘DanceMF’. Woven within the seven originals are two bold and extravagant covers, ‘Manic Depression’ from Jimi Hendrix and MC5’s ‘Shake City’. The former may make some discomfited with its disentangling of the original, while the guys slow the tempo and intensify the density of the latter. The concluding ‘Her Big Night Out’ is a fascinating piece of rousing storytelling, as Nahem’s vocals paint a surrealistic tale of one woman’s search for individual deliverance (‘Cuts her middle finger-jeez it’s really bleedin’/Well she’s coming up the stairway, comin’ down the hallway/Openin’ it up as she leans against your door jamb’) while Sloan and drummer Michael Shockley create a supremely controlled wave of tumultuous beauty.
-Rich Quinlan, The Quinlan Chronicles, Jersey Beat, 2020
So, where can one find more Ritual Tension?