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Formed in 1982, Live Skull is considered by many aficionados to be the quintessential New York noise band. Together with Sonic Youth and Swans, Live Skull defined the term "noise rock" in the 1980s, spearheading the post-No Wave underground music scene in NYC with a series of legendary live performances and eight groundbreaking records released over the course of that decade. Often brutal and yet strangely seductive, each of these classic records creates hooks out of the most unlikely, seemingly disruptive elements, subverting traditional rock forms in previously unheard ways that became an undeniable (albeit often unacknowledged) influence on many of their contemporaries.

Press Quotes

'Live Skull's music is sinister in atmosphere, brutal in execution... The most startlingly original array of guitar sounds and approaches since Jimi Hendrix

     —Robert Palmer, New Look Magazine

'Live Skull's music - a high-wire act played for keeps, without a net - is as challenging, as spiritually corrosive, and ultimately as transcendent as Albert Ayler's mid-60's free jazz or the implacable drone-dance of the early Velvet Underground.

     —Robert Palmer, New York Times

'At their peak they are making the most forbidding rock since the early Banshees or Joy Division.'

     —Simon Reynlods, Melody Maker

'a free form jazznoise quartet mangling guitar necks with a love of their own power, a post-apocalyptic din ...'

     —NME

''Positraction' drills deeper than anything before, a record where pleasure and pain become inextricably entwined. Live Skull manage to hurt so good.'

     —Edwin Pouncey, NME

It's a festering, appropriately black-colored slab of grinding, slash'n'drone (stop me if you've heard these adjectives before) East Village-trash-shit-noisecluster rock.

     —Adam Quest, Spin

'The timelessness of Live Skull's sound fits right into the current scene and still sounds awesome!'

     —Big Takeover Magazine