Dark Days The ominous sounDs of nyc

fiLLmore easT / L.i.e.s. / LiQuiD LiQuiD

DaiLy noTe2221 of

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2013

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THE DAILY NOTE LAST NIGHT

Editor in Chief Piotr OrlovCopy Chief Jane LernerSenior Editor Sam Hockley-SmithSenior Writer/Editor Vivian HostContributing Editors Todd L. Burns Shawn ReynaldoStaff Writer Olivia GrahamEditorial Coordinator Alex Naidus

Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay for Doubleday & CartwrightArt Director Christopher SabatiniProduction Designer Suzan ChoyPhoto Editor Lorenna Gomez-SanchezStaff Photographer Anthony Blasko

Contributors

Cover Photo Nikki Sneakers Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth performing at Wierd at Home Sweet home, NYC 2010

All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt

Top: Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory

at West Park Church. Photo by Anthony Blasko

Bottom: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto in conversation at the

Red Bull Music Academy lecture hall. Photo by

Dan Wilton

We’re careening toward the end of Daily Note’s run and this issue is totally on the edge. We’ve done a lot of dancing with the past and now we jump into the present. our cover story travels from dark and foggy Les basements to dirty Bushwick warehouses to explore the dark- music varietals that have been flourishing in new york city for the past five years. along the way, we explore the effect that living in the city has on the types of art people make. it’s an ongoing conversation—a feedback loop, if you will. and speaking of feedback loops... We look deeper into the analog fetishists of upstart house label L.i.e.s. and offer a primer on the dub-reggae purveyors—both modern and classic—who will be echoing inside Le Poisson rouge tonight. Dancehall producer Dre skull gets inspired by his visual-artist friends, while gear columnist nick sylvester sings the praises of soldering your own synths. We’re 21 today, so here’s a toast to the young and the young at heart. To all the mavericks, misbehavers, and madmen keeping the city going through its darkest hours… cheers! now drink up.

Sue ApfelbaumAdrienne DayVivian HostSal PrincipatoChris Protopapas

Nikki SneakersNick SylvesterFrancesca Tamse

The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates creative pioneers and presents fearless new talent. Now we’re in New York City.

The Red Bull Music Academy is a world-traveling series of music workshops and festivals: a platform for those who make a difference in today’s musical landscape. This year we’re bringing together two groups of selected participants — producers, vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and musical mavericks from around the world — in New York City. For two weeks, each group will hear lectures by musical luminaries, work together on tracks, and perform in the city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine

a place that’s equal parts science lab, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board, and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re halfway there.

The Academy began back in 1998 and has been traversing the globe since, traveling to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona, London, Toronto, and many other places.

Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red Bull Music Academy open early next year.

ABOUT ReD BUll MUSic AcADeMYMASTHeAD

The content of Daily Note does not necessarily represent the opinions of Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.

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FROM THE ACADEMY

“I am very classically trained, but my curiosity is huge. I always want to forget what I have learned...

but I’m good at that.” — Ryuichi Sakamoto, May 28, 2013uPfronT

skuLL snaPsDre Skull on his favorite visual artists.

may

31L.i.e.s.kerri chanDLermaTheW Jonsonmoscamore

ouTPuT

uPcominGeVenTs

recorDeD LiVeFOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIOTUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM

may

26may

27

oneohTrix PoinT neVereVian chrisTBiLL kouLiGasmore

a TaLk WiTh James murPhy

sainT ViTus

nyu skirBaLL cenTer

may

27BenJi BfaLTyDLDorian concePTmore

DeViaTion @ suLLiVan room

ToniGhT

may

30nyc in DuBLee ‘scraTch’ PerryThe conGosPeakinG LiGhTssun araWaDrian sherWooD

(Le) Poisson rouGe

may

28uno nyc

Le Baron

may

28PanTha Du Prince & The BeLL LaBoraTory

WesT Park church

may

29aLVa noTo + ryuichi sakamoTo

meTroPoLiTan museum of arT

sun araW

LA-based one-man psychedelic noodle party. Collaborated with the Congos in 2012 for a release on New York label

RVNG Intl.

fuTure Times

D.C.-based crew mak-ing warm, analog

dance music. Not re-ally dub. Maybe they didn’t get the memo?

With their vast musical knowledge, they should be able to bluff their way through just fine.

The conGos

One of the best Jamaican reggae vocal groups ever.

Formed in the 1970s, reformed in the ’90s,

and still at it.

aDrian sherWooD

British reggae producer, label head,

and remixer. Has dubbed every-

thing from Sinead O’Connor to Skinny

Puppy. Bald.

PeakinG LiGhTs

LA husband-and-wife duo playing kaleido-scopic, lo-fi dub-in-fluenced weirdness.

Lee ‘scraTch’

Perry

Legendary Jamaican dub innovator with a celebrated wacky

streak.

Super Ape (1976). An untouchable dub

touchstone.

After creating, pro-ducing, and remixing approximately elev-enty billion records, he’s worked with ev-eryone from Andrew W.K. to David Lynch. Not many places left to go. Maybe some-thing with Curiosity

the Mars rover?

Yes—see the excellent Augustus Pablo col-laboration “Vibrate

On.”

936 (2011). Honorable mention for the dub mix they

cooked up for dummymag.com.

They’ve already collaborated with

their own infant, so they might as well continue down the artistic-baby collab-oration path. What are the Look Who’s

Talking babies up to? Are they still babies?

They have a song called “Cosmic

Tides.” Close enough.

There isn’t really one record—it’s more about his whole universe. Go and

find pretty much any compilation from his

On-U Sound label.

Would do well to help shape Kanye

West’s current goth-industrial

phase.

Nope. Too classy for vibes.

Heart of the Congos (1977). A Perry-pro-duced classic with incredible harmo-

nies. A near-perfect reggae record.

Now that they’ve worked with a tall

white dude that lives in California (Sun Araw), maybe they could track down

Sublime cover band Badfish and/or the

Sublime dog Lou-Dog.

Their 1997 reunion album Natty Dread Rise Again includes

the track “Vibra-tion.” Scratch didn’t produce it, but still, technically “vibes.”

Vibe 2 (2011). A great overview of the eclectic label’s deep

catalogue.

Future. Times New Viking.

Yes—note the aforementioned Vibe

compilations.

Ancient Romans (2011). The dank-est nug in a career packed with dank

nugs.

Now that he’s worked with a roots-reggae

group, he can branch out to the real

authentic stuff like Leftover Salmon.

Yes—was in a “super-group” called Vibes.

(Really.)

echo chamBerTonight, dub lovers and creators old and new converge on Le Poisson Rouge as part of Red Bull Music Academy 2013. Legends (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Congos) and upstarts (Peaking Lights, Sun Araw) will be performing, live remixing, and collaboratively tweaking the

sounds of reggae into a massive, refracted dub melange. We put together a quick guide to this evening’s heady hosts.

Red Bull Music Academy Presents Pass the Gates:

NYC in Dub feat. Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry w/ Subatomic Sound System vs. Adrian Sherwood; the Congos vs. Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras and the Raw Power Band; Peaking Lights In A Dub Style vs. Future

Times, Julien LoveThursday, May 30, 9 PM to 1 AM

at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., Manhattan

WHO’S THAT?

KeY RecORD

cOllABORATiONS We’D liKe TO See

GOT ViBeS?

eLecTric aVenue

Five local names representing of-the-moment house label L.I.E.S.

ron morelli managed a lot of warehouses and DJed a lot of dive bars be-fore he landed his perfect career as the curmudgeon behind the counter at the famed A-1 Records in the East Village. While peddling gently worn Prelude sin-gles and long-lost soul LPs, Morelli got the impetus to start his L.I.E.S. label. The name stands for Long Island Electrical Systems—a nod to his background as a Long Island hardcore kid who ended up loving house and techno—and the ethos is raw and distorted DIY analog electronic goodness that sounds super fresh in this overly digital age. The Red Bull Music Academy closes tomorrow night with a L.I.E.S. party at Brooklyn club Output—though Morelli won’t be there (he’s on tour in Europe), we wanted to spotlight a few of his local labelmates, some of who will be turning up behind the decks.

sTeVe summersJason Lietkiewicz is the most prolific of the L.I.E.S. bunch, with pseudonyms for days (Malvoeaux, Sensual Beings, Confused House). Deeply inspired by late-’80s and early’90s Chicago house, acid, and electro-funk, his tracks have a sexual swagger and a loose-limbed elec-tronic jack that owes a great deal to the 909 drum machine.

BookWormsAfter years spent qui-etly producing hazy, tribal-infused house and techno in San Francisco, Nik Dawson relocated to Brooklyn in 2012, hooked up with L.I.E.S., start-ed regularly collaborat-ing with Steve Sum-mers, and saw “African Rhythms”— a track first released in 2009 — become one of the year’s most celebrated tunes.

Professor GeniusNew Jersey’s Jorge Velez dropped 12-inches on Italians Do It Better and Thisisnotanexit before appearing on L.I.E.S. with Hassan, a startling full-length based around layered, Arabic-style synths. The results are enigmatic and dramatic, less post-punk than his other work but no less captivating.

TerekkeBy day, Terekke (pro-nounced ta-reek) works at a Manhattan synth repair shop called the Analog Lab; at night, he produces fuzzy and nar-cotic analog house emis-sions using the Roland SH-101 and TR-707, then records them to cassette tape, giving them a uniquely smudged, gauzy feel. “Astral projection house,” if you will.

shaWn o’suLLiVanWhen he’s not moving keys as part of the min-imal synth outfit Led Er Est, O’Sullivan issues dark, snarling, and trippy techno that lays bare his interest in goth/industrial sounds and the Detroit forefa-thers. He’s known for recording tracks in one take, which bestows upon his work a wild flavor and the occasional crazy mistake.

brooklyn producer dre skull (aka Andrew Hershey) has quite the résumé, which is why we’re looking forward to his lecture today at Red Bull Music Academy. Apart from running his own Mixpak label, the bearded studio wizard was behind the boards for the last Vybz Kartel record and also flew to Jamaica to work with Major Lazer on the Snoop Lion LP. Though he’s argu-ably most influential in the dancehall realm, his tastes go well beyond Jamaican rid-dims. Mixpak dabbles in hip-hop, house, techno, soca, and a variety of tropical sounds, and Dre Skull’s own aesthetic roots trace back (in part) to New York’s experimental and visual-art scenes. We asked Hershey to take off his pro-ducer’s cap for a spell and tell us about a few of his favorite NYC visual artists.

Brian BLomerTh“Brian is a man of many talents. He’s a great vi-sual artist, he’s obsessed with dogs (especially Pomer-anians), and he’s best known for his comics, but you also may have seen him on one of the greatest episodes of Judge Judy, where he proud-ly exclaimed, ‘We don’t smash stuff inside. But we love smashing stuff.’ It’s also possible that you’ve seen him on tour perform-ing as Narwhalz (of Sound) doing crazy power-electronics noise madness. He can also be found designing cover art, t-shirts, and flyers for Mixpak.”

DeVin fLynn“This might be one of the most accom-plished people in America without a Wikipedia entry. He’s an in-demand video director (he’s done videos for the Alchemist, Yelawolf, Flying Lotus, and many others), he created the animated show Y’all So Stupid for Adult Swim, was the bassist in DFA band Pixeltan, and he’s a video artist who back in the day curated shows at De-itch Projects. For true OG status, the man also designed the original logo for the legend-ary Loud Records. Flynn did the cover art for Sticky’s Jumeirah Riddim re-lease on Mixpak.”

JacoB ciocci“Jacob is a contem-porary renaissance man who self-de-scribes as a ‘cul-tural producer’ and ‘cultural consum-er.’ He’s well known as an artist who performs, paints, and makes videos and he’s well versed in all things new media. He came up in the game as a founding member of the Paper Rad crew. Also, check his band Extreme Animals — a collaboration with composer David Wightman.”

Red Bull Music Academy Presents the Closing Party with L.I.E.S.

feat. Legowelt, Beautiful Swimmers, Marcos Cabral, Willie Burns, Bookworms,

Professor Genius, Jahiliyya Fields, Shawn O’Sullivan,

Kerri Chandler, Mathew Jonson (Live), Mosca, and Red Bull

Music Academy AllstarsFriday, May 31, 8 PM to 4 AM at Output, 74 Wythe Avenue,

Brooklyn

PHOTO BY FRANCESCA TAMSE

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

You’re a saxophonist and a bluesman. You’ve played with Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, McCoy Tyner, and Chaka Khan. Who else have you played with? Well, I moved to New York in 1958. Living in New York you end up working with most people that come through, so I can’t even remember everybody.

People have told me that you are very uncomfortable with the term “jazz,” despite being known as a jazz musician. The word jazz has no meaning—it is a made-up word. It is not even a real word, and the origins of the word are from the whorehouses in New Orleans where you would go to find women. Certainly it is a negative word and most of the musicians I have been fortunate to be around hate that word. I hate that word too.

What about the term “blues.” Why is that any better a term? I think blues is the essence of the folk music that comes from the United States; all of the dif-ferent forms, whatever you want to call them, stem from the blues. That is how I started playing the blues, listening to the blues, working with it, and playing dances. I’m more comfortable with that term.

I heard you say that musicians often don’t label their sound. They don’t get the chance to, right? Somebody else does it for them. For all these years I have read quotes from Duke Ellington, and in his book he says, “That music that they want to call jazz, they keep insisting.” But he never called it that. It’s a hard thing because I don’t even know whether you can fight it. It goes in the magazine, it is all over, and everybody sees it. We say, “That is not who I am,” but who hears that? That is an individual thing. I don’t know, I call it music. What innovation!

It seems like every 20 years in music there is a cyclical regurgitation of what was here before. In the past, it seemed like music was a for-ward movement, like swing going into bebop and that going into for-ward-thinking jazz. How was it to you? You have to move forward—that is the future. An artistic period does go back, but you can’t just go back—you have to maintain what is going on at this time and maybe bring back some of the older styles. I was just reading this book about Miles Davis’ music. I worked with Miles for two years. His thing was always to go back, but he would always say, “Play what you know and then, more than that, play what you don’t know.”

The idea that you focus on what you don’t know rather than what you do know, or what is perhaps comfortable, is really interesting. On one of [Miles’] recordings, actually it was Bitches Brew, he must have given [John McLaughlin] this melody… So he was playing this melody and Miles comes over and says, “I want you to play this melody as if you don’t know how to play the guitar.” So he’s messing around trying to figure out how to play the guitar as if he didn’t know it, and that is what ended up on the record. He had no idea

he was being recorded—that is what Miles wanted. He had a certain way of getting things out of musicians.

When you’re listening to a piece of music, how do you listen to it? I listen to it in lots of different ways. Sometimes I’m listening to it in one way, some-times I’m listening to something else, sometimes I’m listening to the whole. When I moved to New York I didn’t know any harmony or any theory but I could hear, and I realized that hearing comes before anything else. All the books and everything that is written about music, somebody heard it before it was ever put down on a page. Beethoven was hearing things that nobody else was hearing—flat fifths and dominant sevenths and dominant ninths, nobody had heard these things before. Everyone thought he was going deaf as a result of his lack of hearing. My students always ask me, “What can I do? How can I hear?” It is a funny thing because for me it’s the musicians who learned by ear first—which is the natural way, because that’s the way it happens. I’ll say we are going to learn a song a day and they start to get their books out and I’ll say, “No, no.” They are lost if they can’t read it but I want them to hear it—that is what they have to get back. Everything is backwards nowadays.

When you are recording, do you have the sense that you are trying to take things in a new direction? I love all forms of music. I don’t want to be in a box. That is what happens: you have all these jazz musicians in their jazz box and they can’t get out and it is all too much. Everything is music, sounds. I used to practice with Eric Dolphy and he would go out in the woods and listen to the birds and take his flute and try to mimic the birds and things. Pharoah Sanders, Reggie Workman, Stanley Cowell, Freddie Waits, that is who was on it. With Pharoah, we used to go out into the park and play horns. We would go out and practice in the park and see how loud we could play, just beside the West Side Highway in New York City where the cars were. We would try and play so loud the drivers would turn and say, “What is that?”… which they never did. We couldn’t play that loud.

Is there something useful in taking your instrument out of its normal envi-ronment and playing it in a way that you wouldn’t normally? A lot of times if there is a nice brick wall, I sit on my chair in the corner because the sound comes right back at me and I can hear it so clearly. Sometimes you play in the bathroom and you hear the echo. It’s nice to play in different places and see what it sounds like. What made me recognize that is that I would go and see Sonny Rollins and he was always walking. He would walk across the stage, he would walk around, and I would ask why he was walking—he was listening to the way the horn sounded on different parts of the stage and in different parts of the room, so I became cognizant of it.

Interviewed by Om’mas Keith at Red Bull Music Academy Barcelona 2008.

For the full Q&A, head to redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.

Gary BarTZA sax legend learns from Miles Davis,

Sonny Rollins, and Beethoven.

Q&a

PHOTO PeRe MASRAMON

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feature feature

it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Living in New York is never easy, but 2008 was particularly gnarly. In the midst of possibly the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, people were losing jobs left and right. The rent, as mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan reminded everyone, was too damn high. (It still is.) There was a mass exo-dus of artists, musicians, and writers—anyone in a creative profession, really—and real-estate moguls literally wandered the streets of Wil-liamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick looking for buildings to buy and lots to loft. And the music wasn’t that hot either. Rock was dom-inated by half-baked garage and a horde of happy, jangly indie bands that were nearly in-distinguishable from one another. Dance mu-sic—still reeling from the hangover of mash-ups and blog house—was a pit of electro-house excess, classic disco rip-offs, and bad bar DJs aping Diplo. Hip-hop was saying… well, next to nothing new. By the time the apocalypse movie 2012 was released in November 2009, pound-ing $8 PBRs to the sounds of Kanye and Hot Chip had started to feel pretty empty indeed.

But seeds of musical unrest had already been sown and were germinating in bedrooms and practice spaces, in dimly lit basements and dank Brooklyn warehouses, many so filthy and fire-hazardous they seemed purpose-built for listening to music on the edge. Bands like Light Asylum, Cult of Youth, Xeno & Oaklander, and Led Er Est were revisiting their old Cure, Coil, and Cabaret Voltaire records and getting in-spired to create fresh dynamics of darkness and shade. Labels like Dais, Sacred Bones, and Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave had be-gun creating connections between the goth/industrial, minimal synth, and experimental punk of the past and the darkly hued under-ground of the present day. Meanwhile, events like the Brooklyn techno party the Bunker, the Pendu label’s Pendu Disco, and Wierd Re-cords’ Wednesday weekly became sanctuaries for those looking to dance to sounds that were dark, psychedelic, cold, melancholy, occult, or simply different.

“I moved here at a really crazy time and people weren’t really going out,” recalls Shan-non Funchess, frontwoman of the modern in-dustrial duo Light Asylum, who arrived in New York in 2001 from Seattle. “The nightlife had basically been halted with Giuliani shutting every nightclub. I moved here three days after the World Trade Center bombing and everyone had the fear of going out and breathing toxic air. It wasn’t the New York I had planned to move to. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to survive and not turn around and run home with my tail between my legs.”

After turns lending the powerful, an-drogynous boom of her vocals to bands like Telepathe and !!!, Funchess began writing songs on the side, inspired by a lifelong obses-sion with goth and industrial bands like Sioux-sie and the Banshees and Front 242. Teaming up with synth enthusiast Bruno Coviello, they launched Light Asylum in 2009, at a time when many other similarly minded bands were also beginning to surface. “It might have been the bleakness of the eight years of the Bush admin-istration,” she says, musing on the collective consciousness fading to black. “And there was the downturn in the music industry, as far as record sales and artist signings and the Inter-net age. Whereas before I think people were trying to be the next Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the next indie thing out of Brooklyn, I think people realized they should be making the music they should have been making all along, and that included electronic music on the darker side.”

“In terms of dark music being a trend in New York, you could see it really happening around about 2007 and 2008,” explains Patrik North.

LiGhTs ouT

New York artists explore colors from bleak to black.

WORDS ViViAN HOSTPHOTOGRAPHY NiKKi SNeAKeRS

Mike Sniper of Blank Dogs at

Wierd.

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feature feature

“People were like, ‘Oh shit, this candy stuff, this totally bright stuff, is not really meshing with my financial situation,’ because of course the recession had really started to kick into gear then.” North is a Canadian transplant and the label owner of Acéphale Records, currently home to Pitchfork favorites like How to Dress Well and Korallreven. In 2008, though, he was either a demon or a saint (depending on who you asked) for discovering and releasing Salem, a trio of drug-fried Midwestern art-school kids who mixed goth, chopped ’n’ screwed Southern rap, and Chicago juke with an at-times terrify-ingly dark and demented aesthetic. (Acephale’s first release was Salem’s Yes, I Smoke Crack EP in July 2008.)

“I was living in Montreal when I first found Salem, who were in New York at that point,” recalls North. “Salem, to me, was the sound of the coming economic crash. Gas prices were going crazy; it was a really apocalyptic time. The fact that they were originally from Michi-gan was perfect, because it was like the sound of the Rust Belt and American decay and all this stuff.” Salem eventually got burned at the stake for being the poster children of “witch house”—a nu-goth niche that became more about a fashion for upside-down crosses and Zapf Dingbats-level occult symbology than musical longevity—but for a brief, incandes-cent moment, they were a portal into an oth-erwordly space that sounded like Passion Pit’s worst nightmares.

Things only got darker in the coming months. “Nothing is fun right now,” DJ Venus X would opine to the Opening Ceremony blog in October 2011, as crepuscular fashion and musical vibes had begun infiltrating the main-stream. “Everything is really evil and dark. There’s a recession, the world is coming to an end, and people are kinda scared. So the music should be the same.” The mastermind behind the GHE20G0TH1K parties—which marry a gothic aesthetic with raw forms of bass mu-sic—Venus is ultimately one of the few who has openly copped to purposely doing some-thing “goth,” perhaps because she and the oth-er GHE20G0TH1K residents do not originate from that subculture to begin with.

“Goth” is the elephant in the room in this conversation—nearly no one wants to use the word, though the one thing 90% of the peo-ple in this article have in common is being inspired by bands like Bauhaus, Psychic TV, and Clock DVA, alongside classic dark New York acts such as Suicide and Swans. No one wants to claim membership in a scene, es-pecially not one whose modern incarnation brings to mind terrible trance bands, hot-ironed hair, and Hot Topic. “We don’t use the term goth,” Pieter Schoolwerth of Wierd ex-plained to Vice in 2007. “It has a derogatory connotation. It’s degenerated into some kind of ironic B-horror-film thing. It’s lost its ele-gance, sophistication, and most importantly, its pretentiousness.”

“I still love Bauhaus and all the stuff I learned about in my formative years,” says Sacred Bones label manager Taylor Brode. “I think Caleb [Braaten, Sacred Bones’ owner] feels the same way. At the same time, I think that goth has reached this apex in Brooklyn and London and some other places, where the resurgence of it is a bit off-putting to both of us. We’re not interested in putting out your goth band. It’s too… base and obvious. We don’t want to be that stereotype.”

“We don’t go, ‘Alright, we’re gonna find the scariest shit,’” concurs Braaten. “It’s just what we’re into. Townes Van Zandt is darker than anything that we’ve ever put out, and he’s a folk singer.” Though their biggest success story so far has been releasing Wisconsin’s ethereal diva Zola Jesus, Sacred Bones has also reissued

lock Silent Servant (a frequent Bunker guest who also runs a post-punk label called Down-wards) with minimal synth band Xeno & Oak-lander and noise artist Carlos Giffoni, while the Bunker’s ten-year anniversary this January was headlined by Vatican Shadow, the melancholy techno project from noise/power-electronics demigod Dominick Fernow (whose cassettes Kasenic initially discovered while shopping at Fernow’s esoteric and now-defunct Hospital

Productions record shop in the East Village). “I’m always trying to make a statement with the lineups for the Bun-ker,” says Kasenic. “I never throw together a random line-up or book some DJ only be-cause I think they’re going to bring out a lot of people. But I think it has pretty consis-tently leaned toward the more psychedelic, strange side of electronic music. There’s defi-nitely a dark streak that goes

through as well, always. In my own mind any-way.”

While dark sounds will never truly go out of style, some are predicting that 2013 will bring more light into the picture. “There’s a lot of positive stuff and people uniting who wouldn’t usually,” says Gadi Mizrahi of Wolf + Lamb, a DJ crew and record label once known for moody sounds and druggy all-night tech-no parties but has recently switched almost entirely to poppier and more positive strains of house music. “It just feels like we’ve passed some kind of energy crisis or something, and now it’s a brand-new palette.” “I don’t want to spend my energy pushing a dark feeling in this world,” concurs his Wolf + Lamb partner Zev Eisenberg. “I want to push positivity on every level we can.”

Roi believes the dark aesthetic trends of the last couple years—with Satanic and occult imagery appearing on everything from record covers to t-shirts at Urban Outfitters—will fade, but not before predicating an actual shift in culture. “People are just so intrigued by those symbols, but what they’re really intrigued by is a deeper meaning. It’s like, ‘The world didn’t end, what happens now?’ The whole dark thing is just a safe way for a lot of people to experi-ment with God, or experiment with spirituality in a safe way where their friends aren’t gonna be like, ‘You’re a freak because you believe in something.’ That is actually going to fade and people are going to be spiritual in a real sense instead of just dillydallying with it. I think the nihilism is going to fade.”

“‘Pre-millennium tension’ is the key to time-lines for when darker music is absorbed by a larger audience. It’s all about tension and re-lease,” concludes Todd Pendu. From January 2010 through December 2011, he ran Pendu Disco—a series of “horror disco” parties that mixed up various strands of the scene; he con-tinues to run the record label Pendu Sound, a cauldron of dark arts that includes artists Chelsea Wolfe, Mater Suspiria Vision, and aTelecine. “A friend of mine and I joked back in 2009 that dark music was doing well because of all the hype around the apocalypse of 2012 but that, starting in 2013, we would probably have to start looking for other jobs since the apocalypse isn’t going to happen and people are going to want music that’s just fun and ridiculous,” he recounts. “We were somewhat right, I guess. I could also say that hyper-col-orful movements of late have been pushing against the darker edge; even some who used to be a part of the ‘All Black Everything’ are now championing a return to ’90s rave aesthet-ics and such. But everything is in flux. Nothing stays the same, right? I’m okay with that.”

probably create a certain type of sound be-cause everybody’s just terrified of the fact that they’re always teetering on the edge of failure. But I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live, and I don’t think that’s a good environment for homo sapiens. I think it’s terrifying and bad and I do not recommend it.”

Ragon—who, in addition to Heaven Street, also runs the Blind Prophet record label—has a comfortable relationship with the melan-choly and despair that he channels into Cult of Youth, a project whose intense look and enigmatic music—dark yet oddly hopeful—is inspired by martial industrial sounds and Death in June–style neo-folk. “New York is a night culture and it’s a club culture, but part of that is because nobody has any space,” he says. “In other places where creative endeavors ar-en’t regulated to either an art gallery environ-ment, which is just centered around money, or a bar environment, which is centered around alcohol, I think they can express themselves in different ways. It does make things a little bit more nihilistic here because behind every cre-ative endeavor is something inherently evil—either the financial aspect of the art world or the self-destructive reality of nightlife.”

“I find that New York is the perfect place to get into some ‘dark’ stuff and not just music,” concurs Bonnie Baxter, who makes haunted, spacey beats as Shadowbox. “It may not be as gritty as NYC in the ’70s through the ’90s, but it’s still got some grit. Nowadays you have to hustle to live here,” she continues. “Not every-one is sad or depressed here, but many are, and you can see it in their expressions—they are tired, hungry, talking to themselves, crying

trict and Autechre to local punk 7-inches at his Heaven Street record store in Bushwick, which makes him sort of an accidental ambassador for this scene-not-scene.

“In a way, I think [the atmosphere of New York City] makes some people work harder with their creative endeavors. They have so lit-tle just to give to it and have to fight so hard for a resource of any sort—like to have a prac-tice space that maybe they can only go in for a few hours a week, and they share with ten other bands—that they put a lot into it. I think there is a sense of desperation. In a way, it does

openly. These people aren’t crazy, there are just so many people around they don’t think any-one is looking. New York is an amazing place to live but it’s not an easy place to live. It can create some angst in music for sure.”

Though she doesn’t feel connected to any particular scene, Baxter recalls being inspired by the dark energy of events at renegade un-derground spaces, many promoted by Todd P. “When I first moved here, DIY shows at places like Silent Barn, Market Ho-tel, Death by Audio, or just someone’s random basement were crazy and the grimiest shit I’ve ever stumbled upon: blood, puke, PCP episodes, people lighting themselves on fire. So it’s not like some ‘dark movement’ just started hap-pening.”

As far as events go, few have done more in the last few years to foster a scene around dark and experimen-tal music than Pieter Schoolwerth. In 2003, Schoolwerth began brewing a cabal under the umbrella of Wierd, a weekly party and record label. Originally launched at a dive bar in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Wierd party moved to Home Sweet Home on the edge of Chinatown in late 2006, and became a live-ly weekly meeting place for bands, fans, and freaks of the minimal synth, goth/industrial, noise, and punk persuasion. “There is less pub-lic space where one can feel as free as old, tri-umphantly seedy and dangerous NYC,” School-werth told Bomblog last year. “I hope Wierd

Clockwise from top: Pop.1280 at Public Assembly; Cult of Youth plays at Wierd; Røsenkøpf live; Liz Wendelbo of Xeno and

Oaklander at Wierd.

can be one of these safe havens in the night.” In a long, skinny basement under a blanket of thick fog, Wierd hosted and inspired a dizzying array of DJs and bands —including Light Asy-lum, Zola Jesus, Psychic TV, the Chameleons, and the Soft Moon—before shuttering its doors this February.

“Home Sweet Home, as a venue, grew to fit Wierd and Wierd grew to fit Home Sweet Home,” explains Soren Roi, a bartender at the

club and a member of Røsenkøpf, who released their hypnotically drummy debut on Wierd Records last year. “Pieter finessed it all. Every little detail mattered to him so much. If one light bulb wasn’t working, he was not happy. His main thing was showcasing bands with integrity. He was trying to prove points about live performance—what a live performance is, who is actually playing ‘live’ as opposed to who has got everything backtracked or just pressing play on a laptop.”

Soren—along with photographer/bartender Nikki Sneakers—is behind Home Sweet Home’s new Wednesday night party Nothing Changes, which picks up the torch from Wierd but ex-pands the palette. “What I think is interesting now is a lot of people that were raised in the punk scene are starting to do more electronic stuff, more hardware-based techno stuff. That’s what I would like to foster. In the scene I’m in, techno is the word that’s on everybody’s tongue. People are intrigued by it or they’re not intrigued by it, but having that polarity is important. Like with witch house: people were really into it or they fucking hated it. To a lot of people, to even say that you enjoyed a Salem song was like… they would pretty much slap you in the face. They were offended by it. But it’s always gonna be shifting and as a promoter it’s your job to allow those changes to happen, and to help them happen. Otherwise, you’re just going to have the same bands playing the same shit.”

If techno is currently on many people’s minds, Bryan Kasenic’s the Bunker parties have been connecting the genre back to its roots in synth-punk, experimental electron-ics, and EBM. Kasenic has run the party since 2003, when techno was scarce in New York. Bunker started in a basement below Tonic, a Lower East Side venue that was a hub for avant-garde downtown musicians like John Zorn and Bill Laswell. “We were trying to force the people who were coming to the dance party downstairs and the people who were coming for the more experimental music upstairs to intersect, but we really struggled,” remembers Kasenic. “We’d have a great crowd upstairs for Gang Gang Dance or Animal Collective or something and a great crowd downstairs for Daniel Bell and we would literally stand at the top of the stairs when the rock show was over and be like, ‘Everybody come downstairs! We’re not even going to charge you!’ And they’d be like, ‘Eh, techno…’”

Since moving to Public Assembly in 2007, the Bunker has continued to mix up what “techno party” means, perhaps now more than ever. A 2011 show with No Fun and Wierd paired Sandwell District’s moody techno war-

the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, worked with Foetus’ JG Thirlwell and film-maker Jim Jarmusch, and released a series of brooding and enigmatic recordings from the local bands like Blank Dogs, Led Er Est, and Pop.1280.

Sacred Bones may currently share a sun-ny office space in Greenpoint with the labels Mexican Summer and Captured Tracks (owned by Blank Dogs’ Mike Sniper), but it wasn’t al-ways this idyllic. For the first four years of the label’s existence, it operated out of the dank, dusty basement of Academy Records on North 6th Street in Williamsburg. In many ways, the sound of early Sacred Bones releases evokes the dark corners of this cramped underbelly.

“You would walk down these rickety old stairs and as soon as you got to the bottom, there would be piles of discarded children’s toys and broken baby carriages and cribs and stuff,” explains Braaten, who could pass for a sepia-toned photo of a turn-of-the-century undertaker. “Ultimately, it was very harmless but it looked very frightening.” “It looked like a pedophile hang spot,” concurs label manager Taylor Brode with a wry smile. “It was cool to bring people down there and [they’d] be like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ but it wasn’t always great to be there. It was cold all year round. No win-dows. It was an old meatpacking place so it was a big freezer at one time. There may have been a rat or two.”

“Everything is based on the fact that no-body can really afford to be here,” says Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth, a punk from Boston who moved to New York in 2001 because he wanted more from life than his “shitty pizza job.” Cult of Youth has released records on Dais and Sacred Bones and played at Wierd, and Ragon stocks everything from Sandwell Dis-

“The WhoLe Dark ThinG is JusT a safe Way for a LoT of PeoPLe

To exPerimenT WiTh GoD, or exPerimenT WiTh sPiriTuaLiTy

in a safe Way.”—soren roi

1312

COLUMNS COLUMNS

gear acquisition syndrome, or GAS, is a real snag for work flow. Even if you’ve scratched the itch for new gear, there are now just as many ways to fetishize (and bankrupt yourself over) the old stuff. In speaking with many artists for this column, I’ve come to realize that some are more susceptible to GAS than others. GAS peo-ple—many of them extremely productive, talented, and highly focused world-tour-ing musicians—live in a permanent state of longing. They want to get closer to the sound they imagine in their head, and are willing to pick up any piece of tech (also called “kit”) to try and make it real. There is no cure for GAS.

That said, there is at least one way to slow down GAS: build your own gear. Places like Music from Outer Space, Group DIY, Seventh Circle Audio, CustomAPI, Drip Electronics, and New York’s Small Bear Electronics offer a number of ready-to-sol-der kits and circuit boards for everything from synthesizers and stompboxes to 500 series preamps and thoughtful remakes of vintage outboard gear like the LA-2A com-pressor. These are not “just for fun” proj-ects, but well-developed and often extreme-ly sturdy builds for top-notch equipment.

It takes time to build anything—the usual rule of thumb is three times longer than you think—and in the process you learn about the actual physical relationship between the components and the ways they affect the signal. Building even a simple distortion pedal is a great way to learn about the dif-ferent kinds of distortion and overdrive, if only to guide future GAS-induced purchases. And because no two components are exactly alike, building your own piece means yours will sound like no one else’s.

There’s a zen that sets in when you have the guts of a machine spread out on your kitchen table. Time seems to disappear, though maybe that’s just the fumes from the soldering iron talking. (Pro tip: always solder in a well-ventilated room.) Attempt-ing an analog delay build on protoboard straight from a schematic, I developed a reverence for the fact that anything elec-tronic and audio ever works at all. Which is to say, building your own gear is a kind of rock bottom—the most literal way to get lost in tech and forget about making actual music. But there’s something about hitting that gear rock bottom (“GRB”), and expe-riencing the ultimate frustration that just makes you want to get back to work. -nick syLVesTer

A column on the gear and

processes that inform the music we make.

one bright spring day in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tickets went on sale at the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village. Back then the Internet wasn’t an option for concertgoers, so fans did it the old-fash-ioned way: they waited in line. By noon of the day tick-ets went on sale for CSNY’s weeklong string of shows in early June, a crowd of thousands had gathered around the Fillmore on Second Avenue and 6th Street, sprawl-ing around the venue in every direction and disrupting pedestrians and traffic alike.

Evidence of this event is enshrined not only in fans’ memory but in photographs that hang in the venue’s current incarnation—an Emigrant Savings Bank. (The original entryway to the Fillmore is the current entrance to the bank, while the 2,600-capacity venue sits further back on the lot, and is currently an apartment building.)

The Fillmore East was only open from 1968 to 1971, but during that brief period legendary rock promoter Bill Graham booked everyone from the Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa, and John and Yoko to Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin (who opened for the more popular Iron Butterfly). CSNY, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, and Miles Davis all recorded live albums there, with the Joshua Light Show’s psychedelic “liquid light” displays getting everyone in a trippy frame of mind.

What’s not on display in these photos on the walls is just as important from a cultural perspective: there are no references to the Saint nightclub, which opened in the old Fillmore space in 1980. For eight years, the Saint functioned as a dance club with a largely gay clientele. It was opened by Bruce Mailman, a local entrepreneur who also owned the New St. Marks Baths, a nearby gay bathhouse. Both the Saint and the New St. Marks Baths were closed by the city as sites of “high risk” sexual ac-tivity in the midst of the burgeoning AIDS crisis, so it’s not exactly a surprise that the history of the Saint is ab-sent from the sterile confines of the bank’s lobby. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel like a piece of the story isn’t being told. -aDrienne Day

fiLLmore easT/

The sainT

the world at large first witnessed Public Enemy when the Beastie Boys took them on their 1987 Licensed to Ill tour, introducing thousands of suburban kids (your author included) to the activist flip side of the Beasties’ rambunctious party rap. While the headliner’s stage act included writhing girls in cages, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and DJ Terminator X came off dead serious, flanked by footmen in military garb and backed by a banner bearing the image of a silhouetted figure locked in the sights of a rifle’s crosshairs. PE’s entire presentation served as a wake-up call.

That disquieting graphic identity, paired with an Army-inspired stencil logotype, was designed by PE mastermind Chuck D. Born Carlton Douglas Ridenhour in Queens, he had earned his bachelor’s in graphic design from Adelphi College in 1984 with the goal of working in the art department of a record company. He did not see himself becoming a successful recording artist—Rick Rubin hounded him relentlessly until he signed with Def Jam—

let alone an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

As Chuck D told the Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona in 2008, “I always liked to see the rock ’n’ roll guys; they had logos, so why couldn’t it be the same in rap? I wanted to make the music legitimate, as much as other genres.” Chuck came up with the concept, cutting and pasting a mock-up by hand. The model for the godfather hat–wearing figure has been mistaken for a state trooper, but it was in fact E-Love, LL Cool J’s producer and sidekick. “I cut E-Love’s picture from a magazine, blackened it in, pasted on crosshairs, and put it through a copying machine,” Chuck explains via email. That rough image was then refined and rendered for use by “clean-up man” Eric Haze, who art directed the cover of their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. “When the time came to create his artwork, [Chuck] knew exactly what he wanted,” recalls Def Jam art director Cey Adams. “His idea was that the black man is a target in America.” -sue aPfeLBaum

The origins of iconic images from

NYC's musical history explained.

Lo G os

ToP 5…summer

cycLinG sonGs

For a few weeks each year, the lingering spring chill and the muggy summer swamp are interrupted

by a meteorological moment of absolute glo-ry. It’s a time when fair-weather cyclists dust off the cobwebs and hit the streets with reck-

less abandon. To celebrate, Ken Farmer, creative director of Nuit Blanche New York and curator of the Kairos exhibition at Red Bull Music Academy, suggests some of his favorite headphone classics

for summer cycling.

PReSeNTeD BY

1nina simone,

“feeLinG GooD” Birds flying high you

know how I feel/ Sun in the sky you know how I feel/

Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel.

Nina Simone is eternal.

2nicoLas Jaar, BBc

essenTiaL mix Long rides to Red Hook require long

mixes. The young gun killed it on this

one. Opening with An-gelo Badalamenti’s

recollection of David Lynch’s musings on

the Twin Peaks score, Jaar orchestrates a journey from Jonny Greenwood to Igor Wakhevitch to Mr.

Marvin Gaye.

3Grace Jones, “LiBerTanGo” 

Batman probably lis-tens to this track, off duty, biking

around Greenwood Cem-etery. Batman would probably be scared of Grace Jones, for good

reason.

4GiorGio moroDer, LiVe aT DeeP sPaceCathartic bop from the electronic disco pi-oneer. Moroder’s set was a highlight of the Academy. Catch it on RBMA Radio if you missed it.

5Tom WaiTs, “The Piano has Been

DrinkinG”It seems that daytime drinking becomes an occupational mandate in the summer. Tom Waits makes it feel like it’s okay to

sing/scream out loud. 

Queens

The Bronx

sTaTen isLanDBrookLyn

1

2

6

3

4

10

11

19

13

1220

17

12

5

5

manhaTTan

5

8

7

7

8

89

14

18

15

L a n D m a r k s

The places, spaces, and monuments of

NYC's musical past, present, and future.

PAST FEATuRED LANDMARkS

1 MAx NEuHAuS’ “TIMES SquARE”

2 THE THING SECONDHAND STORE

3 THE LOFT

4 MARCY HOTEL

5 ANDY WARHOL’S FACTORY

6 quEENSBRIDGE HOuSES

7 RECORD MART

8 DEITCH PROJECTS

9 AREA/SHELTER/VINYL

10 STuDIO B

11 MARKET HOTEL

12 DAPTONE RECORDS

13 THE VILLAGE GATE/LIFE/LE POISSON ROuGE

14 THE ANCHORAGE

15 ELECTRIC LADY STuDIOS

16 CROTONA PARK JAMS

17 FAT BEATS

18 MuDD CLuB

19 MANDOLIN BROTHERS

20 ADDISLEIGH PARK

16

WHAT: FILLMORE EAST/THE SAINT

WHERE: EAST VILLAGEWHY: GROuNDBREAkING

MuSIC VENuE; LEGENDARY GAY

NIGHTCLuBWHEN: 1968-1971;

1980-1988

1514

NEw york story NEw york story

The band (Scott Hartley, Richard McGuire, and Dennis Young) had an apartment that people would move in and out of near the American Muse-um of Natural History. When I returned to the East Coast from San Francisco [in 1980], Scotty and Richard had graduated from Rutgers and moved into this place, and I came back to visit. I was writing music, but they were ac-tually playing around town. I came back for a two-week vacation and it was like, “We have songs—before you go back let’s get a gig at CBGB.” So we go to CBGB with our little cassette tape and give it to Hilly Kristal, and he gave us a gig. We were the fifth band on a three-band bill. It was so much fun [that] I never went back [to San Francisco], and that was the beginning of the band. It’s funny because when I came from the airport to 80th and Columbus, I’m like, “Oh damn, where are they living?” Because up there it used to be block to block—one block would be upscale and upper-middle class, and one block would be a drug block. There was a leather bar across the street [where] they made that Al Pacino film, Cruising. There were families and dealers [in the building] who had been there forever on the first two floors, and we were on the fifth floor, and we would practice there. We practiced there even when there were people living in the building, but then we started squatting and taking electricity from the hallway. Now just the thought of practicing in an apartment in the Upper West Side and not paying rent is mind-blowing.

In late 1982, we started working on our third EP, Op-timo. We were primed to really make a definitive artis-tic statement. We were not particularly scenesters, [yet we were] aware of what was bubbling up around us. We were a self-contained entity looking outward for valida-tion. So when we were given the opportunity to record our next record on the top floor of Radio City Music Hall, at what was formerly the studio for NBC Radio broad-casts, the band felt it had met its match.

We first performed “Optimo” some time in late ’81 or early ’82. We definitely played it when we went to play in Paris at the Rex Club in 1982, which was the first time I had been out of the country, and it was amazing. Before we went, we were at our wits’ end as to where we fit in the scheme of things, and in Paris it just all kind of clicked and gave us this crazy confidence. [The club] was packed. We did two nights in a row, and then they asked us back. There’s a recording of it that was made and I know we were already doing “Optimo.”

We never wrote a song where someone sat in a room the night before and said “Hey! I wrote this song—you do this, you do that.” It happened in a slow, organic, arduous process. I’m not sure if I remember the specific way that we wrote “Optimo,” but there were a couple ways we would write music. Songs didn’t totally come together until we were in the studio. We would smoke a little weed and just play and play until we came together on something. Get a groove, expand on that groove, and then make a de-finitive arrangement out of it.

With “Optimo,” there were a bunch of spliced things. The whole thing with the opening drums, the cowbell coming in… I’m not sure that’s how it was originally played. It probably was more just a straightforward groove without the drop-ups and downs. I was probably hitting sticks or the cowbell, and Scotty was doing the rhythm on the cymbals, and I just followed it on cowbell. Same with Richard’s bass—he always puts in a sol-id bass line—and the marimba player just put colorings on it. One thing about our material: it’s like an empty vessel that we poured emotion and excitement into. The structures themselves and the songwriting weren’t necessarily sophisticated, but the way it’s presented and what we put into it makes it seem much more than it really is. So if you’re not catching the feel of it, it’s almost like there’s nothing there. It’s not like we have this great melody going on—I mean, occasionally we do, but it’s more the feel-ing behind it that made a difference.

We had to have a name for “Optimo,” in order to say, “Let’s do this”—es-pecially if we could come up with a good name. At the time, it seemed like every cigar and newspaper stand had the Optimo logo. Like the Gem Spa on the corner of St. Mark’s and Second Avenue—they had egg creams too. But it was also something that very few people consciously registered un-less you smoked cigars. It was a word that was almost hiding in plain sight.

The record was pretty much recorded live in the same room with por-table sound walls between us so that there was some separation in order to do a proper mix. And because it was a former radio-broadcast studio, there were various sound-effects elements that we took advantage of—in-cluding a door in a frame which we slammed at the end of the track “Out.”

One of the more memorable moments of that session was when Den-nis and I went out to pick up sandwiches for everybody. We took the Radio City freight elevator down to the street; at one point the elevator stopped and in comes a bevy of Rockettes in full regalia. I’m not the tallest man in the world, and it seemed I found myself in a forest of legs, as the dancers were all much taller and were wearing heels.

Before we were done recording, at the prompting of our producer and manager Ed Bahlman, we did some extended versions of tunes, especially

“Cavern,” which looms large in our discography. Ed iden-tified it as a dance track, so along with the other tracks on the EP it was edited by the engineer and finally mixed with everyone’s input.

I love every song on that EP. That was everything coming together, and “Optimo” seemed to sum it all up.

One other important thing to mention is that Richard created a really beautiful cover for Optimo. I don’t know if iconic is the right word, but that is an evocative, catchy visual, unlike anything else at the time. It really stuck out in a record bin. People have told me that they bought the record because of the cover.

We decided to release four songs from the session: “Optimo,” “Cavern,” “Scrapper,” and “Out.” Obviously, we thought “Opti-mo” was the main track, but as I mentioned Ed had different ideas. We made a mix of “Cavern” and he pressed an acetate of it. His brother Bill DJed at this bar called the Anvil and Ed would give him the latest versions to play to see what parts the boys responded to. Soon I was hearing it on the urban contemporary stations.

Nowadays, to play “Cavern” is very obvious—that’s probably one of the reasons contemporary DJs don’t play it. And “Optimo” was a great track. We named the record Optimo because we kind of thought that was the track.

The first time we met [Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes, aka JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, who run the Optimo Espacio party in Glasgow] is when they flew in for the reunion show Liquid Liquid played at the Knitting Factory in March of 2003. Liquid Liquid eventually played at the Optimo party in Glasgow. I do think it’s kind of a sweet thing they do, continuing the legacy, and not in a corny way that’s totally about us. Now it has a whole other meaning, and probably more people know about the Optimo party than actually know the song. Our impact is really hard to measure. I run into people in the music scene now who have never heard of Liquid Liquid. I’ll be at a dinner party in New York City, there are ten people there and we’re all chatting, and they ask, “Oh what do you do?” I say, “I used to play in this band.” “Oh, what was the name of the band?” I’ll say Liquid Liquid, and eight of the ten faces will be absolutely blank, and the other two people will be like “Holy shit!!!” and go all fanboy.

Salvatore Principato is best known as the vocalist/percussionist

for seminal minimalist-funk band Liquid Liquid. He is also an

impresario, DJ, producer, studio manager, podcaster, and vegan chef.

aBouT a sonGThe making of Liquid Liquid’s legacy.

WORDS SAl PRiNciPATO (AS TOlD TO PiOTR ORlOV)PHOTO cHRiS PROTOPAPAS

from 1980 to 1983, Liquid Liquid was a modern band. In retrospect, the group seems like a cultural myth that New York dreamt up just because it could. Three classic, genre-busting, scene-defining EPs; a career on the verge destroyed by a maelstrom of music-indus-try machinations (as documented by Mike Rubin in Daily Note #13, in the 99 Records story); subsequent legendary status; and miles upon miles of underground influence. We talked to Liquid Liquid’s singer Sal Principato, who remains a positive influence on New York’s post-disco dance scene, about his memories of that moment. His thoughts are presented here in an edited narrative format.

Liquid Liquid, Optimo (99 Records, 1983)

reD BuLL music acaDemy neW york 2013aPriL 28 – may 31236 arTisTs. 34 niGhTs. 8000 anThems. 1 ciTy.WWW.reDBuLLmusicacaDemy.com

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