Beth Anderson - I Can't Stand It

Private press sound poet and Text–Sound pillar Beth Anderson brings drummy tantrum raps and yoga punk to the 1970’S New York art/loft scene with a tight-knit ensemble that counts Phill Niblock, John Cage, Sonic Youth, Suzanne Ciani and Ear Magazine among its gallery guestlist.

The music of Beth Anderson has successfully evaded the pressing plant for most of her creative career and it has taken decades to successfully collect and contextualise these early recordings - expanding her elusive discography beyond the rare and mysterious solo single entry in the process.

Carving an unlikely and elaborate niche in the stoney academic landscape which she once shared with the likes of Phill Niblock, John Cage and Sorel Hayes, the excitable proto-punk poèmes sonores of the linguistic loose cannon known as Beth Anderson first rolled through New York in the mid-1970s (from Kentucky via San Francisco) like a jumbled tumbleweed of lost Letterism, face paint and threadbare drummy funk to astonish gallery floors, lecture theatres and loft apartment stages. 

One thousand leagues under the radar of the commercial music industry, with a sense of humour that elevated way above her highbrow peer group, the music of Beth Anderson has successfully evaded the pressing plant for most of her creative career, and not unlike fellow New York gallery actionist Suzanne Ciani, it has taken decades to successfully collect and contextualise these early recordings - expanding her elusive discography beyond the rare and mysterious solo single entry in the process.

When uttered amongst the type of vinyl vampires that haplessly gravitate between both art school vintage vanity pressings and family funded plunder funk, there’s an outside chance that the name Beth Anderson might muster some vague recognition on account of her one and only solo wax sojourn into the expansive DIY market.

In 1980 the 45rpm single I Can’t Stand It combusted into the consciousness of adventurous participants with its deep rhythmic backbeat (courtesy of future Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr producer Wharton Tiers, member of the new wave band Theoretical Girls), climaxing with two colourful and commanding linguistic tantrums before disappearing in a puff of smoke leaving would-be fans dumbstruck without so much as a label name or distribution contact to explain what they had just heard.

For those who have spent the subsequent years on the edge of that same seat, it might come as some comfort knowing that somewhere out there (on the OTHER side) there is also a contrasting world of gallery patrons and experimental sound poetry enthusiasts that similarly didn’t know that their regular performance poet Beth Anderson even made the ambitious pop record.

For the uninitiated, the enigmatic Beth Anderson has straddled both sides of the art/rock fence placed between two equally niche pastures. Hopefully this first-ever vinyl compendium will succeed in joining the dots, loops, yelps, squeaks, beats and repeats!

Let us follow Beth’s lineage, along her magnetic tape highways crossing multiple boundaries in a hope to bridge unlikely anti-genres like “yoga punk”, “ramble rap”, “combustion pop” and “form room funk”... all of which were officially neatly bracketed under the curious TextSound movement where Beth garnered utmost respect as a key practitioner.