LAFMS

Founded in 1973 by Chip Chapman, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, and Tom Recchion, the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) was a loose collective rather than a band — a shared umbrella under which member groups including Le Forte Four, Airway, Smegma, Monitor, and Doo-Doettes self-released records, staged performances, and published the magazine Light Bulb, working outside any recognizable rock or jazz idiom. The group’s own Poobah Records pressed its early LPs in tiny runs, later gathered on the ten-CD retrospective The Lowest Form of Music (1996). John Duncan was closely associated with the collective from 1978, working with Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, and Joe Potts. LAFMS’s DIY irreverence — closer to Dada and Wildman Fischer than any noise orthodoxy — is widely cited as an influence on later American art-damage groups and on Japanese noise acts including Hijokaidan and Incapacitants; the collective’s work was the subject of a 2010 exhibition in London and a 2012 exhibition in Los Angeles.