Love Injection 10 x Dada Strain, Saturday, March 1st @ Public Records

INVITE: Helping celebrate the 10th anniversary of Barbie Bertisch & Paul Raffaele's party-label-'zine-radio show, curating a night with Quinnette & Will Shore, plus Joi Cardwell & Occupy the Disco

Dada Strain is beyond proud to participate in the 10th anniversary celebration of Love Injection, Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele’s great New York music & culture fanzine/record label/party/radio show. The celebration will take place on Saturday, March 1st, at Public Records, 233 Butler Street, Gowanus, with doors opening at 11p.

The mighty “Team Love Injection,” Paul Raffaele & Barbie Bertisch, will be DJing all night long in the Sound Room. They will be joined by Joi Cardwell, singer of numerous NYC club classics and Billboard dance hits, as both a solo artist and on tracks by the inimitable Lil Louis. Public Records Atrium will be taken over by Occupy The Disco, the DJ duo of Tad Haes and RuBot, who’ve been promoting and producing nightlife events for New York’s queer community since 2011.

Dada Strain was given the honor of curating the Upstairs lounge with a night-long program of rhythm, improvisation and community. That space will feature a live set by the electronic producer and improvising vibraphonist Will Shore, and an all-vinyl DJ set by the mighty Quinnette, of the great Soul Purpose monthly. Some records will be played before/between/after by yours truly, Piotr Dada Strain, and there will potentially be another special guest. Stay tuned! (Note: capacity Upstairs is limited to 75-80 people.)

The door at Public Records on this evening will be overseen by Richard Alvarez, a fixture in the Downtown art, fashion and club scene since moving to Manhattan as a teenager in the 1980s. In short, this will be a great night in the spirit of the continuum of NYC’s nightlife culture which Love Injection and Dada Strain have always championed.

Tickets are $35-$38 (from RA and DICE). But paid Dada Strain subscribers can scroll down to the bottom of this post to a link of a limited amount of discount tickets reserved exclusively for Dada Strain readers. These are around $25 after service charges, and are on a first come-first served basis.

That’s the party info, but let me take an opportunity to tell you why this second official collaboration between Love Injection and Dada Strain—the first being last summer’s BRIC-Celebrate Brooklyn program, Travels Over Feeling: Celebrating Arthur Russell—means so much to me. Or more importantly, why collaborating with Love Injection does, and the influence they’ve had on Dada Strain.

I met Paul & Barbie in 2016 around a confluence of circumstances: I'd started seeing the Love Injection ‘zine at various shops and newspaper boxes. I noted a wonderful Saturday morning show of the same name on The Lot Radio, a then-new Internet station out of Greenpoint I’d soon start doing my own show on. And I saw them lost in music on the dance-floor of The Loft, which is where we prolly shook hands for the first time. Seeing them at David Mancuso’s memorial service that November also made me realize the multitude of our shared one-degrees.

Around then, Paul told me that the ‘zine was partly inspired by a project I helmed, the Red Bull Music Academy’s Daily Note newspaper. This shook me a bit. I’d never heard a person whose work I admired reveal it as a reaction to mine; and the shock wasn’t simply unexpected ego-gratification. It was a recognition of the intention and care of our project. The Daily Note may have been a piece of “branded content,” but it was a labor of love by myself and a few folks who cared A LOT about New York culture, some of whom became friends, allies and colleagues for life. Paul’s acknowledgement that the ideas we put into the world were taking hold as social fabric. Our connection was sealed.

And that connection grew. I contributed to Barbie and Paul’s work, writing for Love Injection, and they contributed to mine. As their ideas for imagining Love Injection grew to include a label, featuring artists who are some of the city’s great young talents; to their Universal Love parties, which, along with the radio show, showcased an expansive love for old and new music; to a publishing project inspired by David Mancuso’s ideas of social sound, I reveled in their guile and their energy. It was inspiring to see people envision a new world built on the best ideas of the old one, ethically-minded rather than profit-driven. And most importantly, as we introduced each other to musicians and musickers we admired for their art and their ethics—often, working alongside them—Paul and Barbie’s focused attention on community-building was obvious.

That word: Community! There are a few people/projects whom I regard as instrumental to my developing the ideals of Dada Strain. Love Injection, Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele are at the top of that list. There is an alliance between what they do and what I do, a connection in our love for New York City (it helps that both Paul and I grew up here); for the deep lived-in significance of the city’s diverse, equitable and inclusionary culture; and for the importance of knowing your history but always pushing for a better tomorrow. Paul & Barbie’s work guided me towards my own, and they did so simply by being themselves, believing what they believed, walking it like they were talking it hanging with folks who did likewise, and slowly continuing to build.

L-R: Piotr, Paul and Barbie

Love Injection is a young version of an independent institution I keep wanting to see more of. If you’re reading this, hopefully you do too. Join us at Public Records on Saturday March 1st to salute the 10th anniversary of Paul and Barbie’s great project, and to take strength from each other, as we try to push forward though the cruel morass of our current moment.