NYC DIY: Past, Present, Future | Bklyn Sounds 10/16/2024—10/22/2024

What can the musicking underground's refusal to stop dreaming, conjure next? This Week's Show include Sessa / Nicole Misha / Loboko / 'BRIC Jazz Fest' / 'Ragas Live Festival' / much more

Two recent big features about the local New York City music community hit two very different kinds of “newsstands” over the past week or so. In the Times’ most consistently readable section (Metropolitan), the redoubtable John Leland wrote a short history of the Lower East Side’s classic squat-meets-punk-house, ABC No Rio [Gift Link] and its imminent return as a city-supported neighborhood institution. Meanwhile, in the first issue of Is Not Music, a print-only arts & culture ‘zine you can find at indie book and record stores, select cafes and other establishments with counter-space for flyers and printed-matter, Jesse Rifkin, dives into the state of New York’s artist-run performance spaces. Both are worth seeking if you want to find some good local-culture news amidst the Adams meltdown.  

Though full-hearted optimism may require reading between lines. Leland’s piece is about the evolution of urban policy and city mores, written through a bird’s-eye historical point of view of a famous punk venue in in the midst of gentrification. Rifkin’s article is a long on-the-ground report (full disclosure: I’m among the interviewees) on today’s house-shows culture in Manhattan and Bklyn, and how it’s fighting the dire economics surrounding the post-lockdown state of small non-DJ venues. 

walkonthewildsidenyc

A post shared by @walkonthewildsidenyc

The articles deal with different psoitions of an evolution as old as the modern city—ABC No Rio repping underground institutions that go “pro,” but hope to continue the werk; the underdog venues and musickers Rifkin cites, punching-up in a climate of permanent impermanence—but both are clear that, despite the doom-scrolling and the hardships, NYC underground music culture is not receding. If anything, the way that select older individual and institutional musickers have embraced their roles in its civic continuity, just as new-gen musickers have recognized survival requiring emergent strategies (comfort with fluidity and improvised thinking), all while the ongoing deification of the city’s DIY-music story continues unabated, points to a new kind of moment for New York musicking. (If We Want It.)

I think about the health of this musically fluid DIY whenever I am at Abasement at Artists Space, which takes over a 50-year-old Manhattan art-institution’s basement and uses their money to throw an occasional multimedia/music gathering that runs the sonic gamut, and has fills up the room with an old-school critical-culture crowd. What began at Max Fish in 2015, is now part of downtown’s continuous history. I also think about it during gigs at Light and Sound.Design Studio, which continues to scrape by in Greenpoint with brilliant sound and atmosphere, and whose current second life seems more about electronic sound-design and deep listening, and less about raving. Or at one of the house shows put on by Please Y.S. in Crown Heights, or by Still/Moving in Ki Smith Gallery’s basement, or the ones at Red Hook’s sainted 360 Record Shop, all places where old-school punk/rap house-shows values are embraced by musicians that don’t categorize the music they play, but are fluent in subcultural signifiers and adapting them as needed. I recognize its health when I check in on the mostly “jazz” house series run by Jonathan Moritz (Prospect Series) and Andrew Drury (Soup & Sound), recognize it at all the shows that take place quietly but knowingly in the back-room of Sisters on Fulton Street, and at Lowlands Bar on Third Avenue, Gowanus. And let’s not even start with the unofficial spaces that host dance- and DJ parties. There are many examples—and even more that I do not know of. 

With the exception of a passing mention of Please Y.S., none of these were in Rifkin’s piece, and it’s understandable. First, that article is focused on “artist-run” spaces, Second, the ideas around DIY remain codified to the culture of punk-rock, or at least to the culture of “song.” Whereas much of what happens at the above shows is not about guitars or singers, or recent song traditions, but more expressionist and spontaneous. They’re performances of less clearly defined music. What began as the death (or at least, the reconsideration) of genre, has become an embrace of this musical fluidity. And of reimagining the public-private spaces where expressions about such thinking can take place. The record store, the back of a bar or restaurant, the basement of a gallery, these have always been an important part of the DIY ecosystem. Of course they’re not all equal, or the equivalents to the over-romanticized $5/door BYOB show at the punk-house; but we are adrift in new times.   

It’s a time when the cultural institutions that have thrived or survived with their original values intact, step up to support the countercultures that birthed them. The goings-on at Artists Space—and, if Leland’s piece is to be believed, ABC No Rio—can be a beacon for those who are imagining DIY musicking spaces on their own right now. They can be places where that music can grow—and the musickers along with it. It should be no surprise that Exhibit A in Rifkin’s article is the great 49 Shade series, co-founded and -curated by the mighty Taja Cheek, who is also now the artistic director at Performance Space, and curated the music in this year’s Whitney Biennial. That’s exactly how DIY is supposed to inform broader culture, through trial, error and growth. The glassy new real-estate-meets-art mausoleums bearing names of billionaires can’t afford to comprehend that interplay at work; and the out-of-touch old-money institutions refuse to learn this lesson, thinking that it’s quicker to buy their programming. Which they’ll always afford to do.

Yet we all know that the DIY dream has no price, right? (Right?) Because at its heart, this dream is nothing more than a promise that you’ll always have choices. Money can assist in making that dream come true, but ownership of it is impossible. Reading the story of ABC No Rio’s sell-out/no-sell-out past-to-present, and following Rifkin’s map of today’s nomadic underground, one can recognize this dream is still healthy, still clearing the obstacles thrown in its way, still imagining the choices yet to be made.            

This Week’s Shows:

The late Conrad Schnitzler was a Krautrock pioneer, most famously the co-founder of Tangerine Dream and Kluster; and, as with many players of his generation, also a rule-breaking prankster. Among Schnitzler’s later career innovations were the Cassette Concerts, wherein a group of people with boomboxes simultaneously play a series of tapes that together form a composition. (The Flaming Lips did this a bunch in the ‘90s, to great effect.) They’re rare occasions, these Cassette Con-Certs. Tonight, Ergot Records is staging one: Gen Ken Montgomery CONducts a Conrad Schnitzler’s Cassette Concert. Montgomery has been writing about these for a while, so trust that he knows how the song goes. (Wed 10/16, 8p @ Ergot Records, East Village - $10)

The excellent Bklyn disco label Razor-N-Tape brings back its always-invigorating DJs+live-band A Joyful Noise night back to Public Records. The label’s all-star house band will perform and expand on the music of DJ/producer/record-store-guru Tom Noble’s “House of Spirits” project. Noble will also DJ, as will the mighty Duane Harriott. (Thurs 10/17, 8p @ Public Records, Gowanus - $20)

Local Legends Tag-Team Alert. Lauren Flax & Mike Simonetti are two of Bklyn’s longest suffering, hardest-working, consistently crowd-pleasing club DJs, and they’ve been doing occasional tag-teams for a while now. (I think…a reader tells me that it’s more rare and recent, so maybe it’s just my aging mind playing tricks. Regardless…) This night is nothing fancy: two friends with really good records, and the ability to play the sh*t out of them. If there are dancers at the neighborhood techno club, it might get lit! (Thurs 10/17, 10p @ Bossa Nova Civic Club, Bushwick - FREE til 11p/$10)

If you’re in Bklyn and tuned into community news, you've probably heard that, in late September, Kareem Bunton’s glorious watering hole, Bunton’s World Famous, suffered a fire. Tonight, the nearby Paragon is hosting a benefit, Bunton’s Rebuild and Recovery Initiative, featuring a host of excellent NYC DJs (Eli Escobar, Duane Harriot, Mekdot of 2 Dope Boyz, and many others) with food by 2 Girls & a Cookshop, and hopefully many friends and supporters on hand. It’s spendy but with purpose. (Thurs 10/17, 10p @ Paragon, Broadway & Myrtle - $50 on Eventbrite/$60door)