Missing Foundation
Missing Foundation

The debut album of Missing Foundation rightfully falls within my personal catalog of "challenging" albums, along with various "Trout Mask Replica," "Twin Infinitives," "Metal Machine Music," and others that I will not list here. It is 1987, and New York is not yet the city we are accustomed to seeing today, "cleaned up" and tourist-friendly. Certainly, this is not the case for the Lower East Side, where the anarchist and post-punk collective named Missing Foundation is based, led by Peter Missing, whose sole objective is to set the city ablaze (literally). Their symbol, which we find on the cover, is an upside-down Martini glass, and their motto is "the party is over," which would soon be spray-painted on a good part of the walls of the Big Apple. Their concerts, mostly improvised, were true bacchanals where they unleashed their rage and that of the young attendees, burning and destroying everything with a backdrop of "industrial" delirium, enough to make Throbbing Gristle turn pale. The album in question bears the stigmata of this iconoclastic psychodrama and travels hand in hand with the unheard-of violence of those concerts, offering to those who listen the chaos and rage with apocalyptic riffs, psychotic screams, and all sorts of distortions. More than an album, I would call it an affront, a punch in the face to that society that wants to sweep its crap under the rug, that tries to suppress discontent and frustration with the billy club. Every sound is primitive, torn, unpleasant, rugged, a hellish nightmare in a straitjacket. Its message is not just nihilistic but also political, yet with a distorted, end-of-the-world ethic.

The following year they will replicate with "1933," perhaps even more complex than this album; soon after, trouble starts with the police and FBI due to rumors of torture and imaginative connections with satanic cults circulated by the press to get rid of this band of political agitators. In reality, the straw that broke the camel's back was their concert in Tompkins Square Park (protesting the park's closure) in August '88, which turned into an actual battle between the police and the young attendees. It is no coincidence that the following year the "Cop Shoot Cop" would debut, who, in my opinion, owe a lot (especially for their debut) to Missing Foundation.