UJ3RK5

UJ3RK5, "S/T EP," 1980.

The UJ3RK5 sounded like a typical post-punk group, the kind that in those years (1978-80) might have been carried by the British Rough Trade label. Lyrics predominate in their songs, and their fast, hectic drums never get “groovy,” but often in their nervousness they place a higher priority on the tautological doubling of the singer’s emphasis than on building an independent rhythm of their own. Songs produced by bands like these represent a number of hard-fought negations. By negating the playfulness and aimlessness of hippie culture on one hand and its commercial and bombastic variants on the other, punk had discovered a form that, in a certain sense, reconstructed the song as an authoritative form. An old, traditional form had suddenly become the goal of a movement that in every other respect consisted of fractures and leaps out of history. The futurism of punk and new wave, which UJ3RK5 also embodied, could only function by means of a purposeful and targeted reference to the past. Only by way of a break with the continuous lengthenings of hippie musical culture and its naïve relationship to seamless and continuous growth could there be a history – a past and a future – once again.

— Diedrich Diedrichsen, “How long, baby, how long…?”

See also: UJ3RK5 Then and Now, UJ3RK5 Rehearsal, UJ3RK5 EP