When Anna Domino moved to New York City in 1977, she thought she was witnessing its death. “It was the summer of the garbage strike, transit strike, Son of Sam serial killer and the blackout and riots that followed,” she told PopMatters in 2013. “The city was bankrupt and half in ruin … The streets were empty at night except for stray dogs. It was a wilderness and we all found each other and huddled together for warmth and food, which was scarce and not very good. We all wanted to do everything and of course we did.”
Domino was shy and she was a hustler. The apartment buildings were dank and distressed—many were targeted for arson by landlords in search of insurance payments—so she learned how to fix wiring and install boilers. She found work in the dingy sweatshops that had cropped up in the city in the preceding years, fixed up old apartments for cash in her free time and, at night, went to the Mudd Club and Max’s Kansas City, rubbed shoulders with “bored and self-conscious” painters, dated Basquiat for a little while.
She renovated a storefront on East 10th Street and lived in it for a period, then charged the next tenants a fee for the repairs she’d made. She used the money to buy a cassette recorder, with which she made demos for East and West, her debut album. Her songs—staunch, curious, seemingly drawn from the luminous zone between dreams—made loneliness sound like an art form, perhaps tapping into memories of a childhood spent moving from place to place with her family. Domino’s music might as well have been recorded by the last woman on Earth: She’s the queen of a scene of one, strutting through a Manhattan “lit by small fires, stuffed with urgent clues” to a stark, potent pop soundtrack.
Released in 1984, East and West is the Velvet Underground & Nico of avant-pop: Not every aspiring It Girl heard it, but every one who did was inspired to pick up a TEAC cassette deck and a microphone. Domino’s resolute, searching voice is the clearest antecedent to the sound of musicians like Astrid Sonne, Carla dal Forno, Molly Nilsson, and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish, whose intimate transmissions feel both dissociated and liberated. Now, Domino’s voice is all over NTS Radio, literally and spiritually: Her plainspoken vocals and blend of post-punk, programmed drums, and louche jazz are an enduring archetype for artists whose interest in pop starts and ends with its immediacy.
The five songs on the original East and West are spacious, cosmopolitan, a little standoffish—when a lone saxophone saunters through “With the Day Comes the Dawn,” it becomes clear that you are not necessarily a welcome entrant into Domino’s world. But the record satisfies the golden rule of divadom: You can really walk to it. When a writer for Reflex magazine—one of the many downtown NYC papers that anointed the comparatively unsuccessful Domino an underground icon—tried to interview her as she walked from her apartment to a dinner date nearby, she said: “This is the way I write my songs half the time, walking along. That’s why, maybe, they aren’t dance songs. They have a walking rhythm.” She termed this “something pop” or “Domino pop”—fitting, given the way that East and West seems to take place entirely in her own world.
Domino was an army brat, of sorts: Born Anna Virginia Taylor in Japan, where her father was stationed in the military, she was raised in Ottawa, Canada; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Florence, Italy—although a press clipping from the 1980s mentions some time in California, too. Most of her childhood moves were in service of her mother’s career as a celebrated curator and scholar. Domino’s father later trained as an urban planner, before dedicating his life to stewarding the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive, a public theatre archive.
Domino initially sought to follow in her arts-patron parents’ footsteps, enrolling at the Ontario College of Art & Design University. During a university-sponsored trip to New York in 1976, she fell in love with the city, spending four days wandering around without, she claimed, ever going back to the hotel where she was staying; on the final night of her trip, she stumbled upon a jazz club on lower Broadway, likely the Jazz Forum, and a year later, she met a man—depending on the interview, a friend of her uncle’s—who happened to live beneath it. He invited her to come visit, and she never left.
But maybe all of the above is bullshit: Sometimes Domino said she moved to New York from Arkansas, not Ontario; sometimes she said she attended college for sound engineering, not art. At times she claimed that she took her stage name from the neon sign of the Domino Sugar factory across the East River from her window, at others because she saw a box of the stuff on the shelf. In some interviews, it was also because the phrase “Anno Domini” was carved on buildings all over the city, and “I always wanted to have a building or two named after me.” A 1986 piece in Calgary radio station CJSW’s newsletter opens with, “Anna Domino is a woman. I know this to be a fact and it is one of the few things concerning Anna Domino that I can confidently say to be a fact.” There is basically one verifiable piece of information about Domino, the same certainty that applies to most everyone in her milieu: At some point in her life, she moved to New York, found the avant-garde, and made herself a myth.
In New York, Domino frequented the Mudd Club, where “looking like a young boy worked in my favor” when it came to bypassing the elitists who ran the door. She saw Nico and the B-52’s perform there, and befriended Brian Eno, who lived across the street, but she recoiled at the idea of joining a band, because she “couldn’t dress up as a cute girl or mumble backing vocals on the side.” “It was a continual problem being a girl in a band,” she said in a press bio for her 1986 self-titled album. “After Talking Heads you were allowed to play bass, of course, but I never did play the bass very well.”
Domino’s relationship with femininity is slippery, beyond the sharp, androgynous haircut she sported at the time. Downtown New York in the ’80s offered liberation from most ideas of how women were expected to act in the rest of North America—unless, as mentioned, you wanted to start a no-wave band—and Domino relished the scene’s outright rejection of the feminine ideal. Listening to Joni Mitchell as a teenager had revealed everything she didn’t want to be. “Joni’s words meant a great deal, they described a grown-up world I knew I’d never be part of,” she told the blog Ban Ban Ton Ton in 2019. “My world was grubbier, grittier and distrustful of the femininity that Joni embodied. The fatal feminine that began every sentence with the word ‘I,’ gave everything away for ‘love,’ and remained powerless.”
East and West, naturally, prizes not just autonomy, but aloneness. “With the Day Comes the Dawn” is a paean to spending time in one’s own head—even a lament to the fact that we can’t live in our dreams forever. “With the day comes the dawn/I know that my dreams aren’t true,” she sings, her deadpan a little wavery and atonal, as if she’s fearful of the waking world. “I sit and spin, and I can’t begin/To recover and count the cost, and get lost.” Domino leads her band into a dreamworld: Jan Parmentier’s tabla is the track’s only constant, a soft, lulling rhythm that refuses to gel with the tinny drum machine rhythm. Watery bells chime out of nowhere, and Domino’s guitar keeps shifting shape ever so slightly, sauntering back and forth through the fog.
Like much of East and West, it feels like it takes place in three different time zones. The song establishes the physics of Domino’s world: Here, herky-jerky rhythms are somnambulant and beats arhythmic; a five-minute song, performed with laconic ease, stretches into years; disappointment is a constant, expressed like Domino is reading the weather forecast, and the words “I belong here with my dreams” are a comfort.
If Domino’s world on East and West feels topsy-turvy, maybe it’s because the album was made in a state of intense, nearly paralytic anxiety. In 1983, she met the owner of the small indie label Les Disques du Crépuscule during a night out in New York—or did someone send her demo tape to their office in Brussels?—and the label flew her to Belgium to record with a band of local musicians at an unfinished studio, where Domino realized she was “unprepared, shy and inarticulate with no real way to convey what I heard in my head.” She “mimed, stumbled, and crammed everything I could” into her 10-day session, and returned to New York convinced that the label would deem her a lost cause. A few months later, a test pressing of East and West appeared in her mailbox.
You can’t hear any of that drama in the serene and stoic final product. Her elegiac cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Land of Dreams” saps the original of its desperation and desire; Domino sings that “I imagine you oh so close,” but you get the sense she’s more interested in exploring the “land of this wonderful dream.” On “Review,” Domino’s disaffected take on a breakup banger, the frustration of lyrics like, “I’ve taken all of my time/And spent it on you” is quickly supplanted by thoughts of moving out of their shared apartment: “Busy with my inventory/And the pictures and chairs/Picking up what’s left lying on the stairs.” Halfway through, co-producer Blaine L. Reininger’s mewling violin skates into view and becomes the track’s focus, as if Domino got bored of pretending that she gave a damn about the ex anymore. She’s not one to waste time being didactic, but if there’s a lesson to be taken from these five songs, it’s that one is company. Far from some hard-won realization or proto-men-are-trash platitude, it seems to exist at the core of Domino’s being, like it’s never even crossed her mind that other people might actually prefer the company of others.
This idea isn’t always explicit, and, in fact, I suspect Domino would laugh at the attempt to wring such blunt meaning from songs that are so expansive and explorable. A quiet no-wave hymnal like “Everyday, I Don’t” probably only really makes sense to her; it begins mid-thought, with the curious line “And I don’t,” and ends when another figure enters the frame: “12:44, there’s a knock on my door/You want more.”
In 1986, Domino told Record Mirror that “there is a kind of despair that comes into my music. It’s not like I’m afraid of death or anything… it’s just when you know about something and you’re not able to do something about it.” It’s a typically vague statement that seems to allude to an aspect of dramatic irony Domino sees in her own work. There is a performed, hermetically sealed quality to some of these songs; when she exclaims “Look out!” on “Trust, in Love,” it does feel a little like she’s playing Greek chorus to herself, and in my mind’s eye, she strolls a version of New York that looks more like the set Kubrick made for Eyes Wide Shut. Perhaps Domino was simply describing the twitch of anxiety that follows an especially vivid dream—waking to the suggestion that those rotted teeth and naked speaking engagements hold some deeper meaning that you can’t access.
I don’t hear any despair in Domino’s music, especially not in “Everyday, I Don’t.” To me, “Everyday, I say that I won’t, and I don’t” represents the exact opposite of powerlessness. It’s an ultraquotidian mantra, the perfect encapsulation of the freedom Domino found in New York City: the power to step away from the party, slip into bed, and explore the endless universes inside your head.
