Gray

***In downtown New York City, in 1979, painter JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT and performance artist MICHAEL HOLMAN founded their industrial-sound band, GRAY (along with NICHOLAS TAYLOR, JUSTIN THYME and VINCENT GALLO). Jean named the band after Gray's Anatomy (the human anatomy textbook), an important reference source for his paintings and the perfect name to capture the haunting, machine-like ambient music the band wrote and performed. In the Whitney Museum's catalog for Basquiat's 1991 Retrospective, Robert Farris Thompson, professor of Anthropology at Yale, wrote this about Gray: "They worked the Mudd Club, CBGB's, and Hurrah's in New York, where Blondie and the Talking Heads were at that time emerging. They performed, in other words, at the epicenter of New Wave. Here they contended for space and recognition with a style that, in Basquiat's own words, was 'incomplete, abrasive, and oddly beautiful.'" In an Interview magazine review (Jan. 1981) Glenn O'Brien wrote: "Gray became an industrial sound effects band. They played on scaffolds... Lately, they've really developed their own groove... it's sort of an easy listening bebop industrial sound effects lounge ensemble." Limited edition of 1,000 copies signed by Holman and Taylor.