Dr Nerve were an avant-garde ensemble formed in 1984 in New York by guitarist Nick Didkovsky, clarinetist Michael Lytle, saxophonist Yves Duboin, and drummer James Mussen.

Didkovsky had been a student of Christian Wolff, from whom he learned the techniques of electronic collage, and had already released the album Now I Do This (Punos Music, 1981).

Lytle had been part of a musical commune in Iowa, whose work from 1967 to 1976 is documented on disc by Iowa Ear Music (Cornpride), thirty-one short improvisations for minimal ensembles (with performers in separate rooms!) spanning from “creative” jazz in the style of Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell to naive Moog experiments. In 1979, after moving to Manhattan, Lytle recorded the daring Bright Bank Elewhale (Cornpride) with George Cartwright of Curlew, a collection of duets for winds (Lytle on clarinet, Cartwright on saxophones and flutes) and electronics (Lytle), and later recorded Arnold Bombs with Hans Anliker (trombone), Hans Burgener (violin), and Martin Schutz (cello).

The idea behind Dr Nerve, however, was to keep the group “open” to external collaborators. On their first album, Out To Bomb Fresh Kings (Punos Music, 1986), no fewer than sixteen musicians participated (including parts for violin, saxophones, clarinet, vibraphone, trombone). The principal composer and arranger proved to be Didkovsky, who overall applies the same compositional freedom learned in avant-garde circles to the rhythms and melodies of Black popular music (funk, rhythm and blues, soul, jazz). Ballable, for example, is Spy Boy, built around a brass fanfare half in descending notes and half in accent, with the drums always off-kilter; and ballable is Mink Shadows, a dry, edgy funk in the style of Material, though here the rhythmic fractures and absurd arrangements are what really matter.
The other facet of Didkovsky’s art is humorous, full of electronic, polyrhythmic, and orchestral gags à la Zappa, as in Unna, which could have come from Lumpy Gravy; even more clownish is Nothing You Can Do Can Hurt Me, a circus fanfare obsessively repeated in a minimalist fashion; and not to mention Souls Of The Rich, a surrealist pastiche of curious, comic, and useless noises. The same verve, the same crazy logic, and the same fluidity of Zappa’s symphonic scores can be found in their theme, a succession of variations for different orchestrations built around a common melodic line.
The two souls of Dr Nerve’s music merge here and there into a schizophrenic genre. Spy Pie is practically two songs superimposed: one is a jazz-funk driven by the syncopated cadence of the guitar, the other a lighthearted vibraphone theme; the horns act as “glue,” cannibalizing the first with free-jazz solos and comically counterpointing the second.
Perhaps the most complex track is A Hammer In His Hand, which starts as a “free funk” in the style of Ronald Shannon Jackson but gradually degenerates into a sequence of increasingly grotesque minimalisms and finally into a phantasmagoric horn chaos over tribal percussion.
Urban music, with cartoonish or soundtrack-like overtones, Dr Nerve’s work is by no means unaware of the harmonic achievements of Ayler and Coleman, and constitutes a valid alternative to John Zorn’s “post-modern” vein, which was more in vogue in New York avant-garde circles.

Armed Observation (Cuneiform, 1987), recorded by a nine-piece ensemble, is much more challenging. Dr Nerve emphasize the two more “serious” influences in their music: Zappa’s “total” music and minimalism. Both, however, are used in an even more personal way than before. Mister Still Fries A Dozen, one of their most comedic themes, elevates the first strand with a jazz-funk aggressiveness (at times almost punk). I Am Not Dumb Now vulgarizes the second strand with a good dose of humor (the opening pattern soon becomes a vaudeville step).
Overall, the album has a decidedly experimental feel. Among the boldest tracks, Not Everyone's As Rich As Your Parents stages a pair of horns and the percussion and sets them in motion like clockwork mechanisms in a series of interlocking scenes. It is a classic example of absurdist theater transposed into music. After all, absurdity reigns supreme everywhere: not even Lol Coxhill would have devised the Three Curiously Insubstantial Duets, and not even Frith would have ventured into the solo of Atypical Tiple. Don't Worry Do quickly becomes a chaotic jumble of random noises from guitar, saxophone, and drums. Yet, as always, even the most blatant irrationality seems to have its perfect logic, and certainly in Didkovsky’s musical algebra there exists an equation that explains everything.

The new 1990 studio album, Beta 14 Ok, for an eight-instrument ensemble (including four horns), is Didkovsky’s most experimental work, featuring laboratory-style tracks such as Fast Fourier Fugue, composed entirely by itself using recursive sampling, the Computer Generated Pieces, programmed by Didkovsky himself on the computer, and the 44 Nerve Events (total duration: under four minutes), which allow anyone to program a computer to generate music in the style of Dr Nerve!

It is precisely from this last track that the 1993 release Transforms originated, a collection of twenty-five pieces composed by various musicians using the “event-based” technique. The result is exactly what Didkovsky intended: a Dr Nerve album, even if it isn’t actually performed by Dr Nerve.

Didkovsky (who has taught at Mills College and Dartmouth College) represents an important bridge between progressive rock and avant-garde music. Nick Didkovsky, Steve Maclean, and Chuck Vrtacek collaborate on Flies In The Face Of Logic (Pogus, 1994), a glorious example of musical Dadaism (the album begins with the sound of a piano dropped from a 30-meter-high crane), alternating between computers, samplers, and prepared pianos in a semi-serious tribute to twentieth-century piano music.

With Skin (Cuneiform, 1995), Didkovsky arrives at the most extroverted formulation of his computer-based composition method. The most prominent sound is that of his electric guitar, tuned to the hardest heavy metal. The contrast between these titanic riffs and the cacophonous saxophone and clarinet solos (Plague), the piercing trumpet lines (Preaching To The Converted), or the orchestra’s staccato passages (Dead Silence) forms the backbone of the work. The Dr Nerve eight-piece orchestra retains a natural predisposition for Zappa-style humorous and jazz-influenced orchestral scores, showcased in Shameful Stain. A current of rigidly geometric figures, however, elevates fanfares like Little Johnny Stinkypants and evanescent pieces like Take Your Ears, as well as the piano sonata Our Soldiers Are Soft Pianos, to a more abstract level, where incompleteness reigns supreme and the specter of John Cage looms.

Didkovsky followed it up with another solo album, Binky Boy (Punos, 1997), in which, alongside short compositions for guitars, there is a long piece performed by him, Fred Frith, René Lussier, and Mark Howell—a natural continuation of the project begun in Fred Frith’s guitar quartet on Quartets (RecRec, 1994) and Ayaya Moses (Ambiances Magnetiques, 1997), and later culminating in Up Beat (Ambiances Magnetiques, 1998).

The academic prestige of Dr Nerve (or, more precisely, of Nick Didkovsky) has grown in recent years as their sound has become more erudite. The octet performing under this name for the live recordings from 1992, collected on Every Screaming Ear (Cuneiform, 1997), represents the supreme lineup of Dr Nerve. The twenty tracks selected for this collection are intended to serve as a compendium of Didkovsky’s career, though in reality the choices are somewhat arbitrary and include a few previously unreleased pieces.

Live, it is even more evident that Dr Nerve has moved beyond the Canterbury scene and progressive rock. Their structures are markedly more geometric and clinical. Completely absent are the heavy-metal ambitions of the previous album; the ensemble focuses on what it does best: a free-jazz rooted in the popular/clownish tradition of Albert Ayler, measured against John Cage’s aleatory methods. The most recent compositions (such as Nerveware No 8) indicate Didkovsky’s growing inclination toward the challenging avant-garde chamber works.

Ereia (Cuneiform, 2000) is a collaboration between Dr Nerve and the Sirius String Quartet. The three-movement suite, composed by Nick Didkovsky, is an intriguing mix of progressive-rock, classical music and jazz. The first movement draws from such varied sources as the medieval saltarello, Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Berg's violin concerto. The second movement opens with chaotic improvisation a` la Albert Ayler and then slides into Frank Zappa-esque chamber music. The third movement opens with subsonic droning but soars with a nervous, Miles Davis-ian trumpet solo and then delves into prog-rock acrobatics a` la Art Bears.

Bone is a power-trio formed by Nick Didkovsky, Hugh Hopper and John Roulat (Forever Einstein's drummer). They debuted with Uses Wrist Grab (Cuneiform, 2003). Their heavy-metal workouts are tempered by Didkovsky's computer processing and by Hopper's electronic effects.

Nick Didkovsky's Tube Mouth Bow String (Pogus, 2006) collects a few highbrow compositions that share the idea of using alternative forms of notation to compose them: She Closes Her Sister With Heavy Bones for electric guitar and string quartet, whose score is a set of rules; Machinecore for solo electric guitar and computer, which is improvised; Tube Mouth Bow String for string quartet, talkboxes, and harmonizer pedals, whose score is a very detail description of the behavior of the performers; What Sheep Herd for string quartet and computer, whose score is a set of rules; Just a Voice That Bothered Him for string quartet, composed by ear. The instruments range from the electric guitar to the tabletop guitar to a string quartet to software.

The double-disc $100 Guitar Project (2012) contains a suite composed by a number of guitarists, starting with Dr Nerve's Nick Didkovsky, each of which played the same guitar following what the previous guitarists had recorded.