Pulsallama

In contrast to the more serious, sociopolitically-minded outlook of many acts of the post-punk era, Pulsallama fully embraced camp and kitsch, presenting as bizarro-world housewives in retro cocktail dresses and delivering lyrics with a darkly funny, tongue-in-cheek theatricality where no topic was off limits.

While the group was relatively short-lived, Pulsallama has remained an enduring presence in narratives of the downtown Manhattan music scene of the 1980s, from appearances on several compilation albums of punk-funk and mutant disco classics of the era that have been released in the decades that followed, to their inclusion in the major Club 57 retrospective exhibit that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2017, to the echoes of their untamed, anarchic clamor that can be heard in any number of contemporary femme-centered bands inspired by early post-punk and No Wave. The recordings on this album, recorded in a New York studio but previously only ever heard on a French radio broadcast in 1983, are a small glimpse into the unbounded possibilities that were being charted by those women fighting over a cowbell.