condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Obi included.

Ronald Shannon Jackson had played drums for Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman before he started the Decoding Society, which means he had absorbed just about every available approach to free playing and then decided to attach all of it to a backbeat. Nasty is harmolodic funk at full volume: two guitars, two basses, horn lines that lurch and double back, and Jackson underneath playing marching-band figures with a Texas blues undertow. Chaotic on the surface, ferociously organised underneath. There was nothing else remotely like this band in 1981 and there still is not.

Original German pressing on Moers Music, the label attached to the festival that kept documenting this music when nobody else would.