Mark Cunningham - Archives and Blogspace

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Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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MARC HURTADO | MARK CUNNINGHAM - Uni (Official Music Video)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:15:00 +0900

MARC HURTADO | MARK CUNNINGHAM - Uni (Official Music Video)

Blue Mystery out now

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 19:56:00 +0900

Blue Mystery, my latest solo work, is available now, as digital download and on CD paired with Odd Songs, my 2020 album. You can find all at my bandcamp site https://markcunningham1.bandcamp.com/ In the last couple of months I’ve presented it as The Blue Mystery Show, in France, Italy and Barcelona, with visuals by Silvia Mestres. I’ll be announcing fall dates soon.

Blue Mystery by Mark Cunningham

First musings

Tue, 05 May 2020 17:14:00 +0900

My friend and web guru Aya suggested this forum and I haven’t been too sure how to get it started. It’s been 42 years now since we recorded No New York and the No Wave scene has been discussed often and quite thoroughly, but at the same time a lot of storytelling has been added and now with distance and some reflection maybe a more accurate picture could be put together, or maybe it’s a question of deconstructing the “myth” and just treating it as a moment in time where quite a few things were happening that in some way were connected. Anybody who feels like it should contribute with their thoughts or questions, and I’ll be adding my own as I work them out.

Odd Songs

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:22:00 +0900

My new solo album - Odd Songs - Just released on Bandcamp and cassette (humanhoodrecordings). I started recording this several years ago as a follow up to Blood River Dusk, from 1997, and with various stops and starts finally got something together that I feel happy about. and coming out now in lockdown and the new solitary life feels right too as these are solitary moments and moods, mostly recorded in my little home studio. You can listen, download and follow link to cassette order at: https://markcunningham1.bandcamp.com/releases

New Blood Quartet

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 19:51:00 +0900

The new Blood Quartet LP - Until My Darkness Goes - is out now, in all formats - Vinyl LP on Feeding Tube in Massachusetts and Gandula in Barcelona, a CD on Moorworks in Tokyo, a cassette on Zona Watusi in Barcelona and online at our bandcamp site:
https://bloodquartet.bandcamp.com/

Until My Darkness Goes by Blood Quartet

We’re really excited about this one! It’s quite different from our first LP - Deep Red - more variety, nuance and detail, but more Blood Quartet than ever. We had a great time recording it with Jens Neumaier at Maikmaier studios in Barcelona, and got another great cover from our house photographer and designer - Frederic Navarro. No English press on this yet but here’s an interview/article in Spanish from El Periodico:

Blood Quartet vs Thurston Moore Group (2017)

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 04:17:00 +0900

More hot news - Blood Quartet will be opening for Thurston Moore Group at Apolo2 in Barcelona on November 21st. Showtime 830 pm sharp! We all love Thurston but no holds barred for the big match. it will be blow for blow at the Apolo!

Blood Quartet - Live Red

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 03:55:00 +0900

Hot off the digital press - we’ve just released, on Bandcamp, a fabulous sounding live album from our UK tour last Spring. Almost all the songs from Deep Red plus two new ones. You can download here (name your own price):

Live Red by Blood Quartet

Bandcamp page:
https://bloodquartet.bandcamp.com/album/live-red

Summer shows (2017)

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 03:01:00 +0900

Blood Quartet is finishing the season with some July shows around Barcelona. We’re also continuing our residency at Fabra i Coats Arts Lab and we’ll be working there all summer and into the fall on the songs for our next LP. Visitors welcome so let us know if you’re in town and would like to stop by!

July 8th - El Pumarejo de Barcelona - in Gracia, c/Gomis 42. 9pm

Upcoming shows - Blood Quartet (2017)

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:50:00 +0900

Upcoming shows - Blood Quartet

This is the first batch of shows for what is shaping up to be a busy year for us, including a short but potent UK tour, which will be my first appearance there. Looking forward to it!!

Saturday 01 April 2017 - Shake Bilbao! - Bilbao, Spain (+Magmadam)
Thursday 13 April 2017 - The Exchange, Bristol, UK
Friday 14 April 2017- The Rising Sun Arts Centre - Reading, UK
Saturday 15 April 2017 - I K L E C T I K- London, UK
Friday 19 May 2017 - La Faena II - Madrid, Spain (+Les Rauchen Verboten + Sagrados Corazones)
Saturday 20 May 2017 - Cul de Sac 2017 - Sa Possessió, Palma De Mallorca, Spain

With the help of Màgia Roja, The Good Good, Shook Down Underzine, Fabuloso Combo Espectro, Hang The Dj! Records, JoanCabot, PepToni

Opening news

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 19:37:00 +0900

February 7th, 2017 marks 40 years of my onstage career, starting with the first Mars show at CBGB’s on that date in 1977. The first 14 years I spent in New York City and the last 26 in Barcelona. We have set up this site and blog to house archives of all my past projects and ongoing documentation of my current ones.

We are still in process and will be adding archive material and updating regularly. As I’ve chosen a .cat domain, for Catalonia, I’m going to make an effort to get things translated into Catalan, but this will take some time. Special thanks to my blog angel in this adventure, Aya Yoshida, an old friend who convinced me to do it in the first place, and has done all the design and setup so I could concentrate on organising the material and writing.

Raeo

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:30:00 +0900

The first line-up of Raeo, in 1989, Gat Castaño, Anton Ignorant, Pepe Sarto and myself, came about on a Spanish tour I made with Gat’s Barcelona-based Buildings, which we all were a part of. Gat and I had been speaking for a while about forming our own band, to be very different from the Barcelona rock of buildings. In fact Buildings itself on that tour were becoming more and more outsider with every show, to the point where we almost ended up getting lynched by a rowdy club crowd in a provincial town down south.

Convolution

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:16:00 +0900

a rolled up or coiled condition.
a rolling or coiling together.
a turn of anything coiled; whorl; sinuosity.
anat. one of the sinuous folds or ridges of the surface of the brain.
an operation performed on two signals which involves multiplying one signal by a delayed version of another signal, integrating or averaging the product, and repeating the process for different delays.
the artistic partnership of Silvia Mestres and Mark Cunningham, embodying all of the above.

Press comments

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 15:43:00 +0900

…like Herb Alpert waking up in a spaceship… When he improvises, alternating between long, sonorous proclamations and agitated tonguing and smears, Cunningham sounds close to Don Cherry…

Wire 225

Convolution’s noirer-than-noir trumpet, voice and effects thing is loaded with subtle menace. Cunningham and partner Silvia Mestres are on to something darkly magical.

Time Out New York

…deeply distorted guitar, breathy vocals, trumpet, synth. Sounds like: balloon animals mid-contortion, Latin Jazz, rainy island nights locked inside of a haunted house, and the hot & cold soundtrack to an ever-morphing poetry book.

Autobiography

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 06:00:00 +0900

I grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, a residential suburb across the river from Manhattan. Started playing trumpet in the school band as a kid, marching at football games or parades in fall and spring, and playing classical greatest hits in school auditoriums in the winter. But it was in my early teens that I really discovered music, listening on a small transistor radio to mid sixties pop hits and on an old tube short wave set to all the strange sounds between stations that seemed from outer space. I took up guitar then and learned enough to play covers in a garage band that never got out of the garage, and for awhile lost interest in the horn. Things really went to another level when I got old enough to go into the city on my own, from ‘68 to ‘70 going to as many as concerts as I could afford at the Fillmore East or hallucinating on light shows at the Electric Circus. Naively I thought I’d opened my head up about as far as I could at the time.

Don King

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 06:36:00 +0900

Don King was formed as a result of a phone call from Thurston Moore asking me if I could put something together to play at the Noisefest he was organizing at the White Columns gallery in 1981. I enlisted China Burg from Mars, then known as Lucy Hamilton, and Duncan Lindsay (Arto’s brother), and we did the show as a trio, with me alternating trumpet and bass, Lucy guitar and bass clarinet and Duncan on drums. It worked well and we decided to continue under the name Don King which was actually the pseudonym Lucy used for that first show. As a trio we played the club scene in NY for awhile, which then included the lofts and basements of the improv scene, did a short tour of Italy, and released a cassette on Hyrax, the second and last release on my own label after the John Gavanti LP.

Observer Interview - Jan19, 2017

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 07:02:00 +0900

How Mark Cunningham Blitzed the Bowery With No Wave Icons Mars
http://observer.com/2017/01/mark-cunningham-blitzed-bowery-with-no-wave-icons-mars/

Liner notes to 3-cassette box - 'Mars Rehearsal Tapes' (Anomia 2012)

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 16:40:00 +0900

Connie Burg and I met Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen in late 1975, and quickly decided to start a band. Sumner had been playing piano since he was a kid and I trumpet, guitar and more recently bass, but we were for the most part self taught. Connie decided to pick up a guitar and we started jamming in Nancy’s loft on Broadway and Duane St. where Sumner lived downstairs. For the first few months it was just piano, bass and acoustic guitar, with some paper bag percussion from Nancy. Our biggest rock influence at the time was Velvet Underground so we started jamming on some of their songs till we found our own. Tape one begins with Sumner alone playing over a Sweet Jane riff with his own blues styled fills, then goes onto Pale Blue Eyes, the first song Connie would sing. Our first original song with Sumner’s lyrics was Cry, also the only song to make the transition from our acoustic to electric lineup. The set ends with a blues jam with Sumner improvising a story about a leather jacket. Here we’re joined by Jody Harris on guitar, who had been playing with us in the loft for a couple months until Sumner, for practical reasons – given that no clubs had pianos – decided to switch to guitar, at which time Jody gracefully bowed out. Jody: “Yeah, dim memory, being in Sumner’s loft for the first time – maybe hadn’t met him yet. It would have been with Nancy. He was in a back room, hunched over the piano like a spider, playing great rolling two-handed blues and muttering away in the most sinister voice I ever heard. It was like something creeping up on you. So I thought, ok, Toto, this is the real thing”.

Blood Quartet

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 16:21:00 +0900

Blood Quartet was formed in early 2015 in Barcelona, after I was asked to collaborate with Catalan underground rock band Murnau B. to play at a party for Shookdown magazine to celebrate a special issue about No Wave. The encounter went so well that we decided to keep it going. The name, our own sound and a set of songs followed quite naturally.

In May 2015, after our first concerts as Blood Quartet, we released an EP, Dark Energy, on cassette and online on Bandcamp.

Discography

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 12:40:00 +0900

CASSETTE ONLY:

1983 DON KING (HYRAX)

1986 DON KING ‘ON THE MEDITERRANEAN’ (4 SELLOS)

2012 MARS REHEARSAL TAPES (ANOMIA)

VINYL:

1977 MARS ‘3E’ (REBEL 7", ZE 12")

1978 MARS ON ‘NO NEW YORK’ (ANTILLES LP) PRODUCED BY ENO

1979 MARS ‘EP’ (LUST-UNLUST)

1980 ‘JOHN GAVANTI’ (HYRAX LP)

1985 DON KING ‘ONE TWO PUNCH’ (DOUBLEVISON)

1987 ‘MARS 78’ (WIDOWSPEAK)

2005 Mars LP - Complete Studio Recordings - (IMPORTANT RECORDS)