At the same time, various configurations of the band members took part in art performances around Manhattan at venues such as Pyramid Club and PS 122.

Carnival Crash gigged around town and recorded an album's worth of material at Noise New York with Frank Eaton engineering.

The band, as Tension, made their live debut on May 5, 1983 at the Speed Trials music festival at White Columns.

In summer 1985, Ivan Nahem played drums during Swans recording sessions; the resulting tracks were later issued on that band's 1986 albums Greed and Holy Money.

It featured an eight-minute cover of the title song by the Eagles, a wry deconstruction and a salute to their roots by the Nahem brothers, who grew up in the Bay Area.

In 2017, Ivan Nahem began working on a project with Pittsburgh Noise music artist Gregg Bielski that came to be called ex->tension.

The resulting album, The Kiss, by ex->tension, was released on RORER 714 Records (and subsequently re-issued in Japan by the Meditation label of Ichiro Tsuji of the band Dissecting Table).

On August 19, 2023 Ivan (vocals, percussion) and Marc (bass, vocals) played Ritual Tension songs at the End of Summer Event at the International Fusion Museum in Easton, PA.[8] Ritual Tension, consisting of Ivan, Marc and Michael, played at the Downtown Music Gallery in Manhattan on October 3, 2023.

"Impossible to categorize, oblivious to convention, at points it approaches being a rock record, although from a hitherto unexplored direction... probably the best rhythm [section] in New York City.

Surprisingly, this parochial approach is good for music a lot more intense and universal than, to choose the relevant example, the Bush Tetras' 'Too Many Creeps'."

Following their development is going to her a pleasure... [Ritual Tension's] rhythm section is fluid but packs a punch, and Andrew Nahem's guitar work is distinctive and full of energy."

- Robert Palmer in The New York Times[11] "Ritual Tension is a sparse dose of appropriately named energy...

- Option "Rarely has any band tortured and twisted a 70s rock standard to such extremes... String-strangler Andrew Nahem stretches bizarre sounds up and down that neck, like bugs crawling over naked bodies.

Ritual tension has reached that same plane of compositional brilliance that inspired Trout mask replica or drove the birthday party to produce something as twisted as prayers on fire.

- Reflex "Ritual Tension share a kinship with Live Skull and Sonic Youth, but they’re more precise and the effect is more immediate.

- Suburban Voice "It’s hot, children it’s Beefheart, Beethoven, Wire, The Birthday Party and Charles Ives rolled together.

Rich Quinlan of Jersey Beat wrote: "Ritual Tension is a band with its roots firmly planted in the punk, no-wave, and noise scenes of the very late 1970s in San Francisco before moving to NYC in the early 1980s… Now, thirty years after their final performance, Ritual Tension has returned, this time sans Andrew, as a trio on the experimental and wonderfully noisy It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End.

Ritual Tension never abandoned their artistic interpretation of what punk rock can be, and It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End is a free-flowing and fearless display of confidence from a collection of players who have refused, thankfully, to surrender to any expectations other than their own.

The remembered high-treble bass, big tom drums, and high pitched guitar (see “Tightrope”) return in “Come Back, Come Back” and “Monsters Are Real.” Likewise, Nahem growls, shouts, and spews like Tom Waits and ex-Radio Birdman Deniz Tek, expressing the malicious, McDonalds-slogan mocking “I’m Loving It” and the desperately-seeking-free-alcohol “I Can’t Find the Party”… Wild!” [14] The German writer Matze Van Bauseneick wrote in Krautnick Magazine: “Almost out of the blue, the experimental New York no-wave trio Ritual Tension has gotten together again to make a new statement about time and the world: It's Just The Apocalypse, It's Not The End is the title of the first album since the Eighties.

And it sounds as if neither time nor the world has passed: dirty fuzz rock… sweeping energy, unique structures with the songs catchy at the same time - so fat!” [15] Marc Sloan played extensively with many collaborators, including Elliott Sharp's Carbon, Rhys Chatham, False Prophets and Reed Ghazala.

Andrew Nahem has contributed music to various film projects, such as Elevator Moods,[18] Miru Kim and Isidore Roussel's Blind Door,[19] and as the fictional band Infra Dig.

His album Crawling Through Grass by Ivan Nahem + ex->tension, featuring Andrew Nahem on guitar, with contributions by Mark C. of Live Skull, Norman Westberg of Swans, and Jon Fried of The Cucumbers, was released May 13, 2022 by Arguably Records, subsequent to which Ivan did a number of podcast and print interviews.