INTRO

So if you don’t know me, here’s an introduction. First things first.

I was born in NYC, lived there till I was 5, and then we moved to the Bay Area. I went to Berkeley High and graduated with a BA in English from UC Berkeley.

I considered myself music impaired, although I loved music. I concentrated on writing. At 22 I published a book of poetry called Raw Scorpions, and in my twenties did many poetry readings and performance art events.

In the late 70s punk rock blossomed, one might say, drily. I was living off Haight in San Francisco. I thought maybe I could play drums. I bought a trap set and was onstage at the Mab within three weeks with The Situations. This was Janet and Theresa Soder, Myke Reilly and go-go dancers Eric and Schnitt. We had a good run, quite popular in the scene.

Then I formed Crop with my brother Andrew, and we added Tom Paine and Mark C. We played several gigs, also playing under the name Blaisé Decay.

Mark, Tom and I moved to New York in 1980. After a time I left the band and formed Carnival Crash with my friend John Griffin, and Norman Westberg, who’d auditioned with Crop. We lasted about a year or so, played a bunch of gigs and twice went into the studio. Since I was writing much of the lyric content, and was gaining confidence as a singer, I moved to the mic and James Lo took over the drum throne.

Meanwhile Andrew had moved to New York and we lived together for some years, and when Carnival Crash was done, Andrew and I began rehearsing, and debuted as Tension at one of the White Columns gigs. Our first bass player was Claire Lawrence-Slater, when she left we found Marc Sloan. The drummer on our first album was Michael Jio, eventually replaced by Michael Shockley. As Ritual Tension we released two studio albums, one EP, and one live at CBGB album, The Blood of the Kid. Generally we got a sweet, positive reaction from many critics, and would regularly headline Saturday nights at CBGB.

Let me interject here that if you go on the streaming services and play any of the songs from I Live Here LP/Hotel California EP, the track names are listed erroneously. I’ve been trying to get this fixed for some time, no joy so far.

I must also mention that around this time Norman and Michael asked me to join Swans as a drummer. I spent about half a year in the band, and loved working on the songs that became Greed, but I had a miserable time in the studio and left the band.

After the final Ritual Tension LP from this period, Expelled, 1990, I dissolved the band to concentrate on writing and being a parent.

I still wrote songs, played and recorded, but I wasn’t in any outfit. I started teaching, English as a second language, and then yoga. One thing I must interject here is that my son Jesse, who was a fine musician himself, died in 2013, so that was shock. Then in around 2016 Gregg Bielski, a musician and fan, asked me to read some poetry to some soundscape tracks he’d done. Of course it became more complex than that, and resulted in The Kiss by ex->tension (which name came from the idea that my collaborators on the album, with the exception of Gregg, were former members of Ritual Tension). My collaborators and myself played a handful of gigs, which finally led to a re-formation of Ritual Tension, this time without Andrew on guitar, hence very bass heavy.

Around this time I sent the Carnival Crash master tapes to be converted to digital, and along with Tony Maimone, Michael Jung and my brother, we re-engineered and remastered the tracks and nearly forty years later, JIm Reynolds’ Obelisk Records released It Is a Happy Man.

Ritual Tension played a handful of gigs and went into Mark C’s Hoboken studio, Deepsea, and recorded It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End, released on Arguably Records in 2020. Record release party plans had to be scrapped in the pandemic.

April 2022 saw the release of Crawling Through Grass by Ivan Nahem + ex->tension. This grew from an idea Bielski had that we should do an album merging my postpunk and yoga sensibilities. Besides Gregg, collaborators on these pieces included Andrew Nahem, Norman Westberg, Mark C, Jon Fried, Jadwiga Taba, and Helen Nulty. There was a gig at Century in Philly, and a record release party show at Trans-Pecos in Queens.

Please bear in mind that in the minds of some Buddhists and other thinkers, there is no self, therefore none of this really happened.

NEWS

This past year I did several decent print interviews and a slew of podcasts. Some of these are listed in the links page.

"Rainy Day Whispers" performed by Ivan Nahem accompanied by Gregg Bielski at Trans-Pecos club in Queens, NY on November 16, 2022: https://youtu.be/DM0k0cOeBDg

I’m working on a Soundcloud playlist of my best work in music; I’ll announce when it’s available in the newsletter, and I have plans to do more videos and clean up the old RT vids.

But maybe none of this will ever happen. Like David Byrne sang, heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

Crawling Through Grass was released May 13, 2022. The album features some collage work but also eruptions of tuneful song. Collaborators include Gregg Bielski [Easy Bake Oven], Andrew Nahem [Ritual Tension], Jon Fried [The Cucumbers], Norman Westberg [Swans], Jadwiga Taba [Nac/Hut Report], and Mark C [Live Skull], with vocal additions by Helen Nulty. Some of it was mixed and recorded at Deepsea studio in Hoboken with Mark C. Cover art by Jane Bauman, back cover photo by Richard Dweck, and graphic design by Andrew Nahem.