Smegma

Formed by a group of untrained friends in Pasadena, California, on November 23, 1973, Smegma set out as a deliberate “band without musicians,” explicitly rejecting the hippie and rock currents of its day for what members call a “primitive suburban folk” — drawing instead on John Cage, Harry Partch, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, and Buckminster Fuller. One of the longest-running acts associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society, the group builds a body of collage-like, deliberately amateurish noise and free improvisation from a large, rotating cast performing under pseudonyms such as Ju Suk Reet Meate, Amazon Bambi, Oblivia, and Cheez-It-Ritz — a lineup that has also included LAFMS co-founder Dennis Duck and, from the 2000s, John Wiese. Most of the group relocated to Portland, Oregon, in 1975, cut an early single for Mute Records in the UK, and by the 1980s was being sought out by collaborators in Britain, Japan, Germany, and France for vinyl LPs and cassettes. The group’s work reached a wider noise and industrial audience through inclusion on the Nurse With Wound list and a 2006 cover feature in The Wire (Issue 270), and through Smegma Plays / Merzbow Plays Smegma (1996), a collaborative release trading material with Merzbow. Novelist Richard Meltzer joined as a vocalist in the late 1990s; the group performed alongside other LAFMS acts at the Getty Center in 2011, and has continued to record and tour Europe since 2005 despite the deaths of longtime members Ace Farren Ford (2023) and Bradford “Donkey Flybye” Hostetler (2026), remaining active after more than five decades.