Bklyn Sounds 11/8—11/14/2023 + Hitting a Wall, Getting Thru It

Lessons from a 3am dancefloor, as DJ Sprinkles plays a track that screams at your soul + Shows: "Durations Festival" / Arp / Steam Down / Shara Lunon / YHWH Nailgun + Fatboi Sharif + Din Ra / and more

Late this past Saturday night, long after daylight savings gave us all an extra hour on the clock, I was on a crowded dance-floor. It was the first time in weeks. 

As much as I’d been trying to make it out to the club, grief and sorrow was overwhelming my small world, its broader presence permanently outside my window, its global cloud, exacerbated by unchecked genocide and proliferation of mutually assured self-destruction, all over my feed — which a few friends were also quitting, taking a break from their own nightlife activities. All of this kept my wings grounded, pushing me deeper into a pit of depression. It’s a hole I’m overly familiar with, and lengthy stays tend to be psychologically catastrophic. (I know: not news!) I’ve pulled myself to a few evening events whose sound reflected the noise of the world, but a dance-floor seemed like the wrong headspace under the circumstances. 

Until the witching hour at Public Records, when DJ Sprinkles played a record whose “hook,” if you can call it that, a blood-curdling scream, basically snapped me back into presence, a reminder to not fall into emotional nor cultural cliches, that “no shit!!! the world really is an awful place,” and the dance-floor isn’t merely the site of escapist joy, but a space for inviting this worst of the world into, in order to maybe work out WTF to do with its poison.   

There may be no better place and time to have such a discussion than Public Records in Gowanus on a Saturday night. The club has unmistakable highs: one of the city’s best soundsystems in its “Sound Room,” a truly adventurous booking policy of leftfield, often-improvised live and electronic sounds during the week and some of the best DJs in the city/world on weekends. These are matched by one depressing low: a largely moneyed bridge-and-Uber weekend crowd, attracted by notoriety and globally pleasing design elements (trendy minimalist decor, expensive cocktails, vegan menu), who treat it as a venue for pick-up and bachelor(ette) party lines. I have colleagues who refuse to go there. In New York nightlife, one hand has always washed the other, and no current club makes the weird choreography between culture and commerce more apparent than Public Records’ weekend late-nights. 

Add to this mix Terre Thaemlitz, a veteran electronic producer and sonic educator (with a major artsy dance-music following), a non-essentialist transgender AMAB (with a major queer-techno following), who under his/her DJ Sprinkles guise is an immensely interesting experimental DJ (with a major record-geek following). The result was a packed, intoxicated evening and a dance-floor with multiple sociological storylines. 

Which is maybe as it should be. I believe in clubs as safe spaces and melting pots, where I learn and teach, actively participate and remain invisible, lose notions and find ideas (of myself, quite often), where if things always go as planned, shit is kind of boring and mundane — so maybe a little hassle does go a long way. I like for DJs to mix that way too. Sonic safety last. On Saturday, DJ Aakmael’s wonderfully smooth opening set of deep house music provided a runway for the club’s basic bodies (throwing their hands up in the air when the bass returns, like they learned on Boiler Room). But Sprinkles, full of swaggy swinging dubby drum machines, psychedelic swirls, echo-washed lo-fi recordings of gospel singers and preachers, and military-precision placement of bassline throbs into one of the club's wooden bass-bins, was an instrument of chaos. And doing so on a fully-operational-Death-Star of a soundystem, showed the narrative possibilities of what a club DJ set could do in the imaginative hands, presenting the breadth of the world, sound affecting emotion in non-obvious ways. 

I’d not seen DJ Sprinkles in over a decade. An ex-New Yorker living for the past two decades in Japan, Terre makes it to the States too rarely, and because of a longstanding relationship with Francis Harris of Public Records, the Sound Room has become Sprinkles’ local venue of choice. Prior to Saturday I was always late to tickets for his/her appearances, but also scared off by…well…read that second paragraph again. Yet numbness and depression are reasons enough to break the cycle, or try to. And here I was, remembering that the club too was an option for complicated feelings. 

By my count, Sprinkles was about two hours into the set when the scream began, but don’t quote me. It was long enough that some of the club’s weekend regulars had abandoned the dancefloor, either for their hook-ups or just escaping “the weird” onto the outdoor patio; the juncture at which the remaining dancers’ concentric circles widened, the motions became more interpretive. These are flashes of what I call “death disco” (after the PiL song with the hi-hat, the thousand-yard stare, and unclub-like pretensions), when the inner demons come up on the scene. When Sprinkles first played the scream, its sharpness cutting through the rounding rhythms of the mid-tempo dubby techno, I cackled by the back speaker. It could have been the kind of sound a DJ plays one time to announce something, a change in direction, a gentle shove, a desire for focused attention. The groove continued for a bit but then the whole record fell apart — in the mix or by design, I have no idea — like a motor succumbing, a series of noises in a dubbed-out echo chamber, the delayed remnants of primary sounds still stuck in the mixing board. Or like souls who remain trapped in our world. 

Then the scream returned, and it was obvious that we were inside of a story, one that Terre was narrating, but also one of our own. The round dubbed-out hi-hats were here again, and the dance began anew. I started moving with a fever that I had not felt in over a month. The images in my head…you don’t need to know the details, you’ve seen your own versions, played your own mixes — we may have different feeds, but the content and context seems to be the same. I was sweating deeply now too, as Sprinkles was working the board revving the rhythm machine back up. One more scream, a third, and the whole thing came to an almost complete stop. I would bet it was 8-10 mins from start to finish.   

Yet it also encompassed a lifetime of memory. What happens in those instances on the dancefloor? When the primordial roars back to primary, if even for a short time? When some strand in our DNA gets accessed, and the internal formula changes? In my grief, I’d hit a wall, a limit to what I could do to cope with it. The sorrow was still in my heart and in my feed when I woke up on Sunday morning. The world remained on fire and the people in charge of telling its story were no closer to conceding a set of truths apparent to so many. And yet, for the moment, the scream freed up something. I am still trying to understand how that works. 

This Week’s Shows:

Existing in a part of Bushwick where big clubs seem to rule everything around it, Jupiter Disco is the neighborhood gem: a small bar with a just-big-enough dance-floor, warm sound system, excellent door policy, and, from my experience, a proper party vibe. It’s ingratiated itself to some of the city’s best DJs (young and old) who play there regularly — many of whom will return the love at Wednesday’s 7 Years of Jupiter Disco anniversary party. A seriously crazy bill of b2b sets for free on a Wednesday evening. (Wed 11/8, 6p @ Jupiter Disco, Bushwick - FREE)

Melissa Almaguer is a young tap dancer from Monterey, Mexico who improvises beats with her feet alongside more traditional musicians. The combination of sound and movement is absolutely thrilling. "Angel of Air/ Angel of Water," the program she’s debuting at the Jazz Gallery alongside another tap-dancer, Christina Carminucci, backed by a crack quintet, is an improvised performance inspired by the Turiya Alice Coltrane/Devadip Carlos Santana album Illuminations. (Thurs 11/9, 7:30p & 9:30p @ Jazz Gallery, Manhattan - $15-30) 

The Thursday night “Present Sounds” series at the Light and Sound Design studio is of course where Dada Strain produces the occasional show. One reason I do so is that the space’s proprietors were already engaging old friends and colleagues. Like Alexis Georgopolous (aka Arp), who on Thursday will present his great new Longform Editions piece there. Contemporary pop minimalism at its finest. Joining Alexis is Bryce Hackford, another Bklyn-based multi-instrumentalist polymath exploring the broad lane between techno and classical music, playing music under the name CNS. (Thurs 11/9, 6p @ secret Greenpoint loft - $15-20 with RSVP)

After a few weeks touring the States, saxophonist Tim Berne returns to one of the city’s essential neighborhood residencies: his Thursday night gig at Lowlands in Gowanus. And what a homecoming. This week, Berne is once again flanked by guitarist David Torn and drummer Ches Smith, his partners in the deeply electronic, chamber-psychedelic trio, Sun of Goldfinger. The kind of gig that makes you happy to live in Bklyn. (Thurs 11/9, 8p @ Lowlands Bar, Gowanus - $20suggested)