Boris Policeband


Boris Policeband was a no wave performer who used an electrified viola and police walkie-talkies to make music. Boris Pearlman was a classically trained violist from New York City.

Career

Boris Pearlman joined early no wave band Jack Ruby in 1973 playing viola "electrified...by running it through an FM transmitter and a bunch police walkie-talkies that he strapped around his waist." Randy Cohen was also in the group as well as George Scott III who later played with Lydia Lunch, James Chance and John Cale. Jack Ruby broke up in 1977 with no studio releases.
He became known as Boris Policeband after a live performance in 1976 during which he monitored, on headphones, police communications from a scanner and recited their chatter while he accompanied himself on electric violin. Boris was fascinated by cop culture and the often prosaic and sometimes poetic reality of law enforcement chatter.
In 1979 Boris Policeband released a 7" recording called: Policeband: Stereo / Mono that was produced by artist Dike Blair. He also appears with two tracks on the no wave recording New York Noise Vol. 3 that was released in 2006.
Boris, a self-proclaimed materialistic-socialist who practiced antidisestablishmentarianism, was a downtown post-punk club fixture. His days were spent combing through SoHo art galleries, as he was fascinated with conceptual art, and Lower East Side pawnshops for material to add to his collection of used books, sunglasses, and wristwatches. Every night he was in no wave clubs, like CBGBs, Tier 3 and the Mudd Club, where he leaned against a wall while listening to classical music with an ear plug on his transistor radio while engaging in snappy repartee and/or swapping insults with other club goers.

Discography

EP

  • ''Stereo / Mono''

    Legacy

He appears in the film that Coleen Fitzgibbon and Alan W. Moore created in 1978 of a no wave concert to benefit Colab called X Magazine Benefit that documents a performance of Boris Policeband, along with those of DNA and James Chance and the Contortions. Shot in black and white super-8 the film captures the gritty look and sound of the music scene during that era. In 2013 it was exhibited at Salon 94, an art gallery in New York City.
In 1978 Sylvère Lotringer conducted a one-page interview with Policeband in Columbia University's philosophy department publication of Semiotext called Schizo-Culture: The Event, The Book.
Perelman ended the Policeband project in the mid-80s to pursue classical viola.