1. art and entertainment
2. music

DAILY NOTE
FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013
11 22
of
ART + MUSIC = NYC
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
The other day, when Brian Eno lectured at Red
Bull Music Academy, one of the participants asked
him how he finished his pieces. In the process of
answering, Eno admitted to having upwards of 2500
half-completed tracks on his hard drive and that he
often rediscovers older tracks he once thought of as
fragments, only to find that they are actually done.
Today being the end of the 2013 Academy’s Term One,
we’re immersed in the idea of being simultaneously
finished and halfway there, and exploring the
gray areas in-between. Art in fluctuating states
of completion is on display every day, from the
Academy studios to Chelsea galleries to YouTube—
and this weekend, it will be all over the Frieze Art
Fair too. They’re there in Mike Rubin’s feature about
the endless dance of inspiration between New
York’s musicians and its fine-art community, and in
pianist Vijay Iyer’s conceptual essay on the sound of
urban living. Because even as we recognize that the
Academy’s Term One participants are closing out their
amazing journey, neither they nor we are even close
to being done. See you in a week for Term Two—and
don’t forget to wish your mom a happy Mother’s Day!
Photos from Wednesday
night’s show at Webster
Hall. Clockwise from
top: Four Tet playing
live; Koreless’ opening
set; the “dancing”
audience. Photos by
Dan Wilton
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Contributors
Daniel Arnold
Adrienne Day
Laura Forde
Timothy Goodman
Vijay Iyer
Jaci Kessler
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Cover Photo Grace Jones, 1986, Andy Warhol
Image and Artwork © 2013, The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./
Licensed by ARS.
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
Mike Rubin
Nick Sylvester
Bok Bok speaking
with Emma Warren at
the Academy. Photo
by Dan Wilton
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
ABOUT Red bull music academy
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 worldtraveling 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
2
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.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“Music — it’s the underpinning of the human race. It’s
what makes us different from the other animals.”
— Jazz bassist and synth pioneer
Malcolm Cecil, May 8, 2013
TONIGHT
Dark disco @ 88 palace
SLUG IT OUT
Mama
says
Night Slugs label head Bok Bok on his favorite places in NYC.
B
Modern parenting with
Erykah Badu.
Erykah Badu is all love. She is a magical performer, a professional doula, and an earth-mother
of three (son Seven is 16, and daughters Puma and
Mars are 8 and 4 respectively). So who better to talk
to for Mother’s Day weekend? At her sold-out talk
last week at Brooklyn Museum, she spoke eloquently about her rise to fame, collaborating with J Dilla
and Janelle Monáe, and why her life on the road
is more about connecting with reliable babysitters
than hot gentleman groupies. The native Texan and
occasional Brooklyn resident gave birth to her first
child the same month her first record, Baduizm, was
released; given all the recent cultural conversations
about the struggles of working mothers and the exhortation for female professionals to “lean in,” we
sat down with the singer to discuss raising cool kids
in Brooklyn and how to have it all.
erykah badu:
In 1997, when I first had my baby, I
was also becoming a recording artist. That same year
I’m pushing a baby stroller around Brooklyn and it
was such a fascinating thing—this was my toy, my
accessory. All the other mothers were pushing theirs
and I was pushing my baby, my own baby, in Brooklyn! It was just a fascinating thing to me, because
before, I would always see mothers and wonder what
they were feeling, what were they thinking, what’s
on their mind? Are they sad? Are they hurt? But once
it’s yours you don’t think about any of that, because
of this person you’re protecting. Nothing can ruin it.
What’s fulfilling to me is that I just have to [be
creative] every day. But it’s not easy. I can be walking around in the house, thinking about so many
things, and I am missing everything that’s happening. I’m missing Puma swinging, I’m missing Mars
drawing pictures, all this stuff. You have to pull
yourself out of this place and come outside—stay
out of your mind as much as possible. I try to do
that—it’s the only thing, the only answer.
My kids are sponges. They do things that I didn’t
even think they knew a lot of the time, and I try to
introduce my kids to diverse things. Each week we
put an album cover up on the wall and we’ll play that
music all week on the house system. Our last one was
Luke—Luke is a booty-shake rap artist. You know, “no
ass, bitch, no backstage pass.” [Laughs.] Naw, it was
Shuggie Otis, and the one before that was Bach. Each
of my kids gravitate toward different stuff.
In Brooklyn we have a one-bedroom apartment
and they have to be my captive audience. All of our
beds are in a triangle and we get to lie there and
talk until we go to bed. It’s small and close. That’s
the thing I love the most—that we’re all close. I prefer to do everything hands-on myself: I prefer to
cook, to be the teacher, the religion explainer, the
hair comber, the animal giver. I prefer a hands-on
mommy technique no matter how many people are
helping me. Because oh, I do need help. A smart girl
asks for help.
-Jane Lerner
4
Metro Area
Gerd Janson
Bok Bok
L-Vis 1990
ok Bok’s actual favorite place in New
York is a random barbershop on Union
Street in Brooklyn “run by a mad Russian.” True to form though, Bok Bok
(né Alex Sushon) is choosing to keep that secret
within the family. Night Slugs is not only a London-based record label, it’s also a tight-knit crew
of transatlantic DJs/producers and vocalists who
in the last four years have defined their own
brand of bass music, gluing together the shards
of house, grime, hip-hop, and techno into a music
so futuristic they’ve had to create fictitious computer environments to contain it.
Since Bok Bok plays at Dark Disco tonight,
we thought we would ask him about his favorite
places in our fair city.
MAY
10
UPCOMING
EVENTS
Invite Only
MISTER
Saturday
Night VS.
Dope Jams
MAY
19
Deep Space @ output
LOVE
THE THING
NICK HOOK’S STUDIO
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
179 MacDougal St.,
(now closed)
1001 Manhattan Ave.,
Brooklyn
I was lucky enough to play
there for the Trouble & Bass
crew the first time I ever
came to New York. That wall
of subs in the back of the
room was so intense, and
there was a weird grotto you
could hang out in. The decoration was kind of off, but
that’s what made it a little
bit cool. The couple times
I managed to go there it
sounded so raw. Gary Stewart,
a legendary sound designer,
did the system and it was
self-evident.
Even though it’s legendary,
I discovered the Thing by
accident. Me and my girlfriend at the time decided to
go in there as a joke. Within
the first minute of walking
in she had found ten of her
favorite freestyle records —
just like, pow! — and then
I found ten of my favorite
house records. It was blowing
my mind. You need to take
hand-sanitizer to that place
though, because it’s actually
damaging to the fiber of your
skin.
In London, we come from a
bedroom-studio culture —
everyone has a tiny studio
and uses whatever equipment
they can afford. Sometimes
that’s what makes our music
cool. But the ability to work
on some really high-end gear
is just beautiful. Our friend
Nick creates this welcoming
dynamic where people can come
and collaborate. Last time I
was there we fried a synth;
I still haven’t replaced it
and he hasn’t even gotten mad
at me.
STEEL DRUMS
35 Beadel St.,
Brooklyn
We had a really good party there a few months ago.
It was the first time we had
done a Night Slugs party by
ourselves in NYC with no other promoter. That also meant
that we got to shape the
space how we wanted. I just
remember this moment when the
lights came on — the party was
really dark — and it was like
sensory deprivation; there
was so much smoke in the room
that no one could see anything, just white smoke. I’m
definitely trying to repeat
that experience.
Giorgio
Moroder
First Ever
Live DJ Set
Brenmar
Nick Hook
Sinjin Hawke
More
MAY
21
Knitting Factory
DRUM MAJORS
with Metro Area (LIVE), Gerd Janson, Bok Bok b2b L-Vis 1990, DKDS
88 Palace at 88 East Broadway, Friday, May 10, 11 PM to 4 AM
For more info go to redbullmusicacademy.com
20
Tammany Hall
Mannie Fresh
Boi-1da
Young Chop
DJ Mustard
More
Dark Disco: A Red Bull Music Academy Special
MAY
MAY
22
Santos Party House
Top
ACADEMY
MOMENTS
Term One of Red Bull
Music Academy 2013 is
coming to a close, so
we asked a few of the
participants for their
favorite moments of the
last two weeks. Everyone
agreed it was hard to
narrow it down to one
highlight, but for our
benefit, these four gave
it a go.
United States
of Bass
Big Freedia
Afrika Bambaataa
Egyptian Lover
DJ Magic Mike
DJ Assault
DJ Funk + Many More!
MAY
23
SRB Brooklyn
Koreless
Glasgow, scotland
“Pete Swanson
[performing at
Drone Activity in
Progress]. Probably
the best show I’ve
ever been to, as
a whole — the venue
was amazing, the
sound was amazing.
There was a good
bunch of people
there.”
soundcloud.com/
koreless
Suzanne
Kraft
los angeles,
california
“Bernie Worrell
just doing his
thing, inches from
me. That’s still
vivid in my head.”
soundcloud.com/
suzannekraft
Rudi Zygadlo
London, england
“I really enjoyed
Stephen O’Malley’s
lecture. Stephen’s
was the most
interdisciplinary
and kind of wideranging in a
musical sense. He
talked a lot about
theater. It wasn’t
restricted to any
genre... he’s
eloquent and quite
intelligent.”
soundcloud.com/
rudizygadlo
Crazy Bitch
in a Cave
vienna, austria
“The Kim Gordon
lecture! But probably
I’m just star-struck.
I love her so much.
It was so much to
process. She’s just
so nice also and
funny and amazing.
And of course seeing
Bernie Worrell from
Parliament, who I
didn’t know before,
play live at his
lecture. He was
improvising on the B3
organ — that was crazy.”
twitter.com/cbiac
The Roots
of Dubstep
Skream
Mala
Plastician
Hatcha
MAY
24
Grand Prospect Hall
12 Years MAY
Of DFA
The whole
label family on
four stages
25
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
SLICK RICK
The perks of being a skinny British rapper.
PHOTO Olugbenro Ogunsemore
What does the Bronx mean to you? You weren’t
born there but it has been your home for some
time. The Bronx is the birthplace of hip-hop, it’s a
multicultural place—a lot of Latins mixed with blacks.
We just had fun! Breakdancing, doing our thing,
growing up. Hip-hop became a toy for us, instead
of graffiti and all that stuff. So we just worked it to
where it is now. I mean, it’s a cultural thing.
What are your first memories of encountering
hip-hop as a kid after moving here from England? I guess it was the big boomboxes, the older brothers that had the big boomboxes would be
playing breakbeat records—“Daisy Lady,” “Impeach
the President,” and whatever was happening before
mixing—on the back of the trains and stuff like that.
It was just very stimulating. Pretty much it was like
taking wack records and taking the meat and potatoes and then keeping it moving like that… then rapping on top of it. Everything was flavor, you know?
So if you’re in a small community, where you have
few options, you get to drawing on the walls, doing
little things with your body to make yourself different from everybody else, your raps, whatever’s clever.
So it was a fun time for us, yeah.
Where’d you grow up? I grew up around 233rd
Street, 241st Street. It’s a little further up, all the way
in the north.
Tell us a little bit about the Kangol crew. The
Kangol crew was basically a high-school group. Dana
Dane was one of the members. We didn’t have turntables and mixers, none of that stuff. We was poor.
So we just banged on the desk and made up cute
routines and vibed with the whole school with our
routines. We went to [the High School of ] Music &
Art, a multicultural school, you know? And then we
used to wear the hat because Kangol was part of the
fashion of the game. Anything to make you sexy, anything to sell yourself. So we had the Kangols and the
suit jackets and we used to just play around like that.
Then when we got famous we took it to the TVs.
What was the first reaction from folks when you
started rhyming back then, even before you had
put out records, with your voice sounding the
way it sounds? Before, I had a high-pitched voice
like a girl because my voice hadn’t changed yet. So
6
nobody was checking for a kid like that. It was like,
it’s cute. But as I grew, after high school and the accent… the maturity in the voice came out with the
English accent. It all worked together like that.
Around ’83, a more aggressive style became the
norm. But you were still able to find your place.
I think it was more stories and humor and knowing how to pick the right records to rap on. And
fashion. You gotta have the fashion mastered. Like
I said, the Kangols, the Clarks Wallabees. Before the
Clarks Wallabees and Kangols, it was Adidas and Pumas and Pro Keds; mock necks, silver medallions,
and stuff like that. And then the Bronx moved on—
Brooklyn too—with the Jamaican look: the Wallabees and the suit pants. It was just a more mature
look, so it looked good on a young person. ’Cause,
you know, you look better when you’re young trying
to look old than when you’re old trying to look old.
So it looked slick to see a young kid wearing shoes
and slacks and dress shirts with a little stylish piece
of jewelry here and there and a Kangol and glasses
to sell yourself.
How did you meet Doug E. Fresh? I met Doug
E. Fresh at 170th Street on Jerome Avenue, at this
rap battle they was having over there. They used
to have these rap contests in the Bronx where they
would get all the people together to see who was
the best, and whoever wins gets $1500 and a little recognition. Doug was already established, so
he was one of the judges. So me and this other kid
from my school named John Porterfield—he died,
God bless him—he was in the contest and I just
went to play around. He invited me on stage with
him and we did our thing and we got recognition,
and Doug E. said, “Yo, we should do something together.” I was impressed with him long before that,
but wasn’t paying no attention.
So about Get Fresh Crew. Can we talk about
how that came together, leading up to the single
you guys recorded? Well, Doug E. used to carry me
around with him when he was doing his shows, highlight me or something in the show. So I would just
come out and do my “La Di Da Di” or whatever, some
small routine that made the crowd… First they would
look at you like, “Whatever, skinny nerd trying to get
put on,” but then when you kicked the humor and
they got to laughing and enjoying themselves, it sold
itself. So I became an asset to Doug’s show.
How long was “La Di Da Di” the routine that became a signature thing for you guys? Was there
something else that you worked on? Yeah, we
did other little routines, but it was pretty much “La
Di Da Di” and “The Show.” So “La Di Da Di” went
around and it was all over the place, which surprised
both of us, because it wasn’t out yet but everybody
had it on a cassette from going to his shows.
Just from a live recording, right? Right. And then
I guess once his label saw the popularity of this cassette all over the streets, they decided to make it into
a record, which turned it global.
“The Show” and “La Di Da Di” are two classic
hip-hop singles. How was that experience for
you? You went basically from being a skinny kid
with people looking at you funny to all of a sudden being internationally known. Well, like I said,
back then it was a hard rock thing. You had to be able
to shake or move in the hood—you know, slim guys
don’t get much respect unless you’re packing. No disrespect or nothing. You know how that goes. I had a
job; I used to work at Lehman Brothers and places
like that downtown as a mail clerk. So once Doug E.
put me on, the difference in the finance—I used to
make like $520 a month! And that’s working every
day, too. Five days a week. After taxes, $260 every two
weeks, and my rent was $350. So you can figure out,
$520 minus $350 leaves not much for food and tokens
and floss and fun, Olde English or whatever.
Was there any overlap between when you were
still at Lehman Brothers and when the record
was out and the buzz was starting to grow? Yeah.
Well, I was still working when the record was taking
off, so it got to the point where it was like, “You gotta
leave now, kid.” At first I was getting like $300 just to
perform and eventually, when it just kept going and
going [on a] Madison Square Garden-type tip it was
like, doesn’t make sense to stay at your job.
Interviewed by Jeff ‘Chairman’ Mao at
Red Bull Music Academy World Tour in New
York, 2012. For the full Q&A, head to
redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
7
feature
MORE
SONGS
ABOUT
PAINTINGS
AND
FOOD
A half-century of art and music
commingling in New York City.
WORDS MIKE RUBIN
PHOTO illustration jaci kessler
earlier this year, on a March evening at
Tribeca’s Clocktower Gallery, about 70 people
stood around sipping complimentary glasses
of wine. Artwork—including black-and-white
photos by the singer Patti Smith—graced the
walls, but the main attraction was the local
premiere of “In Remembrance,” a performance
and video installation by artist and musician
Delia Gonzalez. Inspired by a Henry Miller
text, Gonzalez had composed an electronic
suite for herself and two keyboard collaborators. Projected on the wall behind the trio was
a 16mm film of leotard-wearing female ballet
dancers pirouetting; though the footage had
a washed-out, early-’80s video look, it actually
dated from 2010 and was directed and choreographed by Gonzalez herself. The installation
soundtrack will be released later this year as
a box set on DFA Records, the New York label
home to the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem,
the latest fruit of the fertile crossover between
New York’s art and music communities.
Integral components of the city’s cultural
landscape, New York’s art and music scenes are
often notoriously insular and balkanized. These
rival worlds nevertheless occasionally combine
in a synergistic, sometimes parasitic give-andtake that over the last half-century energized
and inspired both communities, all while gener-
8
ating no small degree of exploitation and hype.
“When you have a city that becomes the
center of vanguard culture,” explains longtime gallerist and curator Jeffrey Deitch, “you
have a convergence of innovation in visual art,
dance, music, film, literature, and that happened in New York from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s,
’80s, and is still going on today. You very rarely
have great achievement in visual art without
parallel achievement in the other arts, and
when the achievement is strongest there is a
lot of convergence.”
The modern relationship between New
York’s art and music circles began to flourish
in the 1950s. After World War II, the rise of
rhythm and blues, and then rock ’n’ roll, coupled with the rhythmic inscrutability of bebop,
began to push jazz out of the mainstream of
American music and toward the margins.
As jazz moved sharply toward abstraction,
like-minded artists in visual and verbal fields
seemed to follow suit. The Beat movement
rapidly became associated with jazz, as did abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, whose wife Lee Krasner once described
him as often listening to his jazz records “day
and night for three days running…. He thought
it was the only other really creative thing that
was happening in this country.”
9
feature
In the early 1960s, the Fluxus movement
fueled additional crossover. Arising out of
Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus emphasized the mixing of media and the merging of artistic disciplines, which proved a boon to both experimental music and performance art, while
Fluxus’ underlying principles of DIY, working
with found objects, and anti-commercialism
have remained present for decades in seemingly unrelated genres like punk, hip-hop,
and electronic music. When Welsh viola player John Cale first arrived in New York in the
early ’60s, he eventually found his way to the
Church Street loft of avant-garde composer
and Fluxus collaborator La Monte Young (who
had made a big splash locally by curating an
influential series of 1960 concerts in conceptual artist Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street apartment). Young’s headquarters were frequented
by minimalist sculptors Robert Morris and
Walter De Maria, as well as musicians like
Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise (a contributor to the Fluxus newspaper VTRE), who
would join with Cale and Young in what would
become the Theatre of Eternal Music. Young’s
experiments in discordant drone would also
become a crucial element of Cale’s next group,
the Velvet Underground.
Of course, no story of the Velvet Underground would be complete without mention of
Andy Warhol. Though Warhol had been designing album-cover art since 1949, it wasn’t until
around 1963 that he began to directly manifest his interest in music, occasionally singing
backup vocals along with artist Lucas Samaras in a band called the Druds that featured
Young on saxophone, De Maria on drums,
painter Larry Poons on guitar, and artist and
poet Patty Mucha (then married to sculptor
Claes Oldenburg) on lead vocals, singing lyrics
written by painter Jasper Johns. Warhol also
filmed the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders in 1965, before experimental filmmaker
Barbara Rubin turned him on to the Velvets in
December of that year. (Author J. Hoberman
described Rubin, who also introduced Warhol
to Edie Sedgwick, and Allen Ginsberg to Bob
Dylan, as “an aesthetic shadkhn”—Yiddish for
marriage broker.)
Warhol signed on as the Velvet Underground’s manager, added the German singer
and model Nico as eye candy, and placed them
at the center of a multimedia happening called
the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which featured
the band playing live alongside strobe lights, a
psychedelic slide show, film projections, and
dancers with whips. Inaugurated with a series
of April 1966 events, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable’s total derangement of the senses grew
out of the anarchic spirit of filmmakers like
Rubin, Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Piero Heliczer (whose 1965 film with the Velvets called
Venus in Furs is now lost to history). “Everybody and their mother was filming something
and projecting them on bed sheets and having
music played, dancing around it—it was really
a free for all,” says Cale. “It was kind of exciting
from that point of view, because it was a little
out of control, but a lot of work got done.”
True to its name, Warhol’s Factory was all
about artistic production, but its output struggled to reach beyond the art world. The Velvets’ debut album—now considered among
the most influential rock albums ever—was in
reality a commercial flop. The band spent 1966
and early 1967 playing museums and cultural
happenings, but all involved soon realized that
the sphere of pop culture still dwarfed that of
pop art. In Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets
to the Voidoids, Velvets’ drummer Moe Tucker
recalled playing at a Philadelphia art show: “I’d
be beating the shit out of those drums, and I’d
look up and see—urgh!—it was 50-year-olds,
people who came to see a soup can, and this is
what they got.”
The Velvets and Warhol parted ways in
spring 1967, but the Exploding Plastic Inevi-
10
feature
“We were all in
New York to make
interesting art and,
not compete with
each other, but just
kind of experiment
together.”
- Christian Marclay
The Canal Zone Party Crew. Left to right: Slave, Fab 5 Freddy, Roanne,
Stan Peskett, Michael Holman, 1979. Photo courtesy of Michael Holman
table’s multidisciplinary circus cast the blueprint for the fashionable and fabulous social
milieu of ’70s nightlife, as well as modern
club culture. Artists began looking to music
as a primary outlet for expression; one who
did so, and thus helped paved the way for
some of rock music’s most pioneering sonic
breakthroughs, was Alan Vega. After studying
painting in the late ’50s under Ad Reinhardt
at Brooklyn College, Vega (born Boroch Alan
Bermowitz) moved into light sculptures made
from electronic debris, using the name Alan
Suicide. At one point part of a socialist group
called the Art Workers’ Coalition, which once
barricaded the Museum of Modern Art, Vega
had his world rocked when he saw a 1969 gig
by the Stooges (whose debut album had been
produced by Cale). “It showed me you didn’t
have to do static artworks, you could create
situations, do something environmental,” Vega
told Simon Reynolds in 2002. “That’s what got
me moving more intensely in the direction of
doing music. Compared with Iggy, whatever I
was doing as an artist felt insignificant.”
Suicide began gigging as a duo in 1970, its
performances centered around the repetitive,
churning noise of Martin Rev’s primitive keyboard drones and Vega’s cathartic stage persona. The band moved from playing gigs at
galleries to venues like the Mercer Arts Center,
but their cacophonic electronics and confrontational theatrics antagonized audiences and
club owners alike—for years, violent reactions
to the band made steady local gigs scarce, and
they couldn’t find a label to release their debut
album until 1977—but they ultimately had a vital influence on punk, synth pop, and industrial music. “I first knew about Alan through his
sculpture, which was sort of the analog to what
he was doing in music,” says Deitch. “I followed
him over to Max’s Kansas City and CBGB to see
him perform because I knew his artwork.” (In
2002, Deitch would exhibit Collision Drive, Vega’s first gallery show in more than 20 years, at
his Deitch Projects.)
Patti Smith detailed her lengthy soul mate/
muse relationship with photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe (who took the iconic cover photos for Smith’s Cale-produced debut Horses and
Television’s Marquee Moon) in her best-selling
book Just Kids, but her oft-cited equation “art
plus electricity equals rock ’n’ roll” set the template for the mid- to late-’70s downtown explosion. Alums of New York’s School of Visual Arts
populated the CBGB scene, including Blondie’s
Chris Stein and Punk magazine founder John
Holmstrom. Talking Heads, fresh from the
Rhode Island School of Design, established the
enduring stereotype of the art-school student
matriculating to the New York music scene.
(Returning the favor, Talking Heads commissioned a 1987 book, What the Songs Look Like:
Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads
Songs, pairing Byrne’s lyrics with work by artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat,
and Robert Longo.)
By the late ’70s and early ’80s, it seemed as
if there was barely a distinction between the
art and music worlds in the scruffy downtown
post-punk and no wave scenes. Doing double duty in bands were filmmakers like Jim
Jarmusch (Del-Byzanteens) and James Nares
(Contortions), painters like George Condo (the
Girls and Hi Sheriffs of Blue) and Robert Longo (Menthol Wars and Rhys Chatham’s Guitar
Trio), sculptor Nancy Arlen (Mars), photographer Barbara Ess (Y Pants and Static, with her
boyfriend Glenn Branca), performance artist
Robin Crutchfield (DNA), and street artist Al
Diaz—half of the graffiti duo SAMO with Basquiat—who occasionally played percussion for
Liquid Liquid.
Then there was Basquiat himself. He was
still known primarily for his SAMO graffiti when he attended the Canal Zone party
in April 1979 that was organized by Michael
Holman, Stan Peskett, and Fab 5 Freddy, the
first meeting of downtown artists and uptown graffiti writers. Basquiat immediately
proposed starting a band with Holman, and
the two founded Gray, an experimental group
where Basquiat coaxed bizarre sounds from
a cheap synthesizer and played guitar with a
steel file (a later iteration would include actor
Vincent Gallo). “The idea of being a fine artist
and in a musical band, that was normal,” says
Holman, who later became a filmmaker and
visual artist and now teaches at New York’s
School of Visual Arts. “Why not? Why would
you do that? Because you can. Because you
can be on stage and get chicks and look cool
and realize your fantasy of being in a band and
being a fine artist and a painter and dressing
like Cab Calloway or Frank Sinatra in the ’60s
and cutting your hair any crazy way you want
and dancing all night to four in the morning
at the Mudd Club and being a poet and being
an actor in a film. Jean was an actor in a film,
the leader of Gray, doing his SAMO graffiti, all
at the same time. Why? Because we could. Because nobody was there to tell us we couldn’t
do any of those things.”
The air was suffused with a collaborative
spirit as the ’80s dawned, abetted by cheap rents
that gave artists and musicians the financial
Left to right: John Cale, Gerard Malanga, Nico, and Andy Warhol, NYC, 1966.
Photo by Herve Gloaguen/Gamma-Rapnovia via Getty Images
Gray performing at Hurrah’s, 1979. Left to right: Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Michael Holman, Wayne Clifford. Photo courtesy of Michael Holman
freedom to innovate. “A lot of these musicians
that I met at the time often had training in art
school and not so much in music,” says the artist and musician Christian Marclay. “This was
a different art world. It wasn’t so commercial
as it is now, so people felt more freedom in doing performance because regardless, there was
no money to be made either way—if you made
paintings or objects they weren’t going to sell—
so you might as well have fun and just make
some music. We were all in New York to make
interesting art and, not compete with each other, but just kind of experiment together.”
In 1981, performance artist Laurie Anderson
scored an unlikely hit on the UK charts with
“O Superman,” landing her a seven-album deal
with Warner Bros. and putting performance art
on the musical map. In Marclay’s view however, the relationship between the two disciplines
had already borne fruit. “As a visual artist interested in performance art,” says Marclay, “the
leap from performance art to punk seemed to
me an obvious thing. Punk was so much about
a kind of performance—it was visual… very theatrical in a weird way, so I always thought there
was a connection between the two.”
For a while in downtown circles the term
“art music” became synonymous with noise,
thanks in large part to the efforts of Sonic
Youth, who built upon the atonal dissonance of
La Monte Young and no wave’s deconstructed
punk, adding their own unconventional guitar
tunings. Kim Gordon was an Otis Art Institute
graduate, painter, Artforum writer, and gallery
curator, while Thurston Moore organized the
nine-day NoiseFest in June 1981 at the Soho
gallery White Columns that established Sonic
Youth as key figures in the downtown scene.
Artists didn’t just get off on heady noise, but
also on the body music permeating the city’s
discos. Keith Haring, who rose rapidly from
making subway chalk drawings to become one
of the era’s most iconic visual stylists, drew inspiration from the proto-house music he heard
at the Paradise Garage. Haring became friends
with the Garage’s groundbreaking DJ Larry Levan, and his murals would ultimately decorate
the club. “I don’t know if you know how important the Paradise Garage is, at least for me
and the tribe of people who have shared many
a collective spiritual experience there,” Haring
wrote in a July 1986 letter to Timothy Leary. “I
can’t explain exactly why, but something about
just knowing it was there was a comfort, especially when I was out of New York City. There
was always something to look forward to immediately upon my return... It really was kind
of a family. A tribe.”
Graffiti-bombed subway cars and buildings
also fueled the city’s creative fires. Documented by filmmaker Charlie Ahearn and photogra-
phers like Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper,
graffiti artists were nearly as central to early hiphop as the rappers themselves; initially viewed
as vandalism, graffiti is now celebrated as one of
hip-hop culture’s five essential elements.
Fab 5 Freddy (born Fred Braithwaite) was
perhaps the key figure in bringing graffiti art
from the streets and subway yards into the
galleries. The Brooklyn native aspired to be
a serious artist, and had studied enough art
history—he painted Warhol’s soup can on the
side of a train—to be aware of both graffiti’s
radical aesthetic and the downtown art scene
that might be ready to embrace it. Besides
planning the watershed Canal Zone party
with Holman and Peskett, Freddy co-curated
the Mudd Club’s “Beyond Words” graffiti art
show in April 1981 with artist Futura 2000,
and is credited with bringing South Bronx
personas like Afrika Bambaataa and Lee
Quiñones their first downtown acclaim. A
hustler in the best sense of the word, Freddy
also released a rap 12-inch (1982’s “Change the
Beat,” with his line “Ahhhhh, this stuff is really fresh” sampled in Herbie Hancock’s seminal 1983 scratch single “Rockit”), appeared
in films like Ahearn’s 1983 Wild Style, and in
1988 became the host of the influential hiphop video show Yo! MTV Raps.
Soon music wasn’t merely a meeting
ground, but a subject matter of the art itself.
Marclay turned the vinyl record into a form
of material, whether making sound bricolage
via multiple-turntable performances (later
expounded upon by hip-hop turntablism),
collaging fragments of albums and cover
sleeves into sculptural objects he called “Recycled Records,” or fashioning turntables into
new instruments like the “Phonoguitar” and
“Phonodrum.” Conceptual artist Dan Graham,
Thurston Moore’s upstairs neighbor, created
Rock My Religion in 1983, a 55-minute video
essay (which included footage of a Black Flag
gig and music by Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca) that placed performers like Patti Smith
on a spiritual continuum stretching back to
Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers religious
movement. In Graham’s closing argument he
proposed, “In the 1970s the religion of the ’50s
teenager and the ’60s ‘counterculture’ is adopted by pop artists who propose the end of
the religion of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Patti Smith
took this one step further: she saw rock as an
art form which could come to replace poetry,
painting, and sculpture. If art is only a business, as Warhol suggests, then music expresses a more communal, transcendental emotion
which art now denies.”
But just as the cultural cross-pollination
was reaching full bloom, it withered and died.
Among those claimed by the AIDS epidemic
were Mapplethorpe, Haring, and Arthur Russell, an avant-garde cellist and composer who
straddled the worlds of the Kitchen and the
Paradise Garage, creating some of the most
forward-thinking dance music ever. “AIDS
was devastating to the scene in the ’80s and
early ’90s,” says Deitch, “because a lot of the
mixers—the people who put it all together,
the club entrepreneurs, writers—a lot of them
were lost to AIDS, and the community was
devastated. So there was a period in the ’90s
where there wasn’t as much connection between the performance and music sides and
the visual-art side.”
In the late ’90s, signs of life began to reappear. In 1999, Gavin Brown (the dealer for
painter Elizabeth Peyton, who had gained attention making small-scale portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain) opened a bar, Passerby,
attached to his Chelsea gallery. The watering
hole—complete with artist Piotr Uklanski’s
flashing disco-light floor—quickly became a
mecca for art-world and music scenesters alike.
James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin met for
the first time at Passerby—“That night changed
my life forever,” recalls Galkin—and soon the
pair not only launched DFA Records together, but returned to Passerby to present events
like Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom’s debut
DFA performance. “James Fuentes, a curator,
helped us stage a beautiful live show there behind banks of old TVs,” says Galkin. “We utilized an Atari 1970s video music interface. It
was fantastic.”
Deitch also helped connect the cultural dots
at his two Soho art spaces. “Most galleries are
really focused on a more narrow mission,” said
Deitch, “but we began opening up the gallery
as a platform for this new convergence which
characterized the 2000s and was a very exciting time for me.”
The most infamous figures of the new
convergence were the members of performance-art troupe Fischerspooner, which Deitch describes as “an ongoing project about
entertainment and spectacle.” The group’s
May 2002 showcases at Deitch’s Wooster
Street space were typically over-the-top; it
was Pet Shop Boys meets Showgirls, a campy
big-budget spectacular with dozens of performers, smoke machines, mullet wigs, Mad
Max costumes, and all the pomp—and pomposity—of a Broadway musical, albeit with an
Off-Off-Broadway bent.
Deitch and DFA’s Murphy met at a Fischerspooner performance, which led to collaborative events between the gallery and label at
Art Basel in Miami Beach. (Murphy will also
be co-curating an upcoming show on disco
at Deitch’s current institution, the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.) DFA’s
roster has been home to Black Dice (whose
members have included visual artists Bjorn
Copeland and Hisham Bharoocha), painter/DJ
Spencer Sweeney, and Gonzalez and Russom,
who also crafted sculptural objects in addition
to their performance work. Since their partnership ended in 2005, Russom now leads the
Crystal Ark, whose live shows look like what
might have happened if Warhol’s Exploding
Plastic Inevitable had been realized instead by
filmmaker Jack Smith: the stage bursting with
musicians, pulsing psychedelic visuals, campy
costumes, and a polymorphous panoply of exotic dancers.
Today, every major New York museum
also doubles as a de facto nightclub and performance space, from Kraftwerk selling out
a week of shows at MoMA last year to the Liars playing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
Temple of Dendur this month. MoMA PS1 in
Queens has devoted particular attention to musical programming. Both its performance-oriented Sunday Sessions and weekly summer
Warm Up series draw enormous crowds of
younger audiences, who might even pause to
check out the galleries in between checking out
each other.
Not everything works, of course. The
Brooklyn Museum’s monthly dance party Target First Saturdays was so popular it had to be
canceled in October 2012 after crowds swelled
to more than 20,000, overwhelming museum
staff. The same month, the fusty ol’ Met tried
to youthanize its database by hiring DJ Spooky
as its first-ever artist-in-residence (a job the
Twitterati quickly dubbed “relevance guru”),
not realizing that his license to illbient had
long since expired.
But hiccups aside, music has continued to
expand the art world’s reach, and curators are
well aware that a younger demographic offers
a potentially renewable energy source. “I think
it’s the marketplace that continues to divide
things up into these distinctions and say this
is art and this is music,” says Russom. “It’s just
basically how things get sold. As far as I can
tell, that’s the only thing that makes them really different.”
The real difference, of course, is that at a
New York club, a glass of wine will cost you
dearly. At an art gallery’s opening reception, as
any culture vulture can tell you, the drinks are
always free.
Casey Spooner of Fischerspooner, performing live at Deitch
Projects, NYC, 2002. Photo by Michael Doyle
11
CENTERFOLD
5/4 The Bunker
ARTIST Ken Meier
5/2 Drone Activity in Progress
ARTIST NBNY Projects
4/28 Fixed vs. TURRBOTAX®
ARTIST Merjin Hos
5/7 That!: Mykki Blanco
ARTIST Maya Wild
5/5 Classic Album Sundays:
A David Bowie Special
ARTIST Revenge Is Sweet
5/3 Brian Eno: 77 Million Paintings
ARTIST Brian Eno
4/29 Filmmatic: An Evening of
Rare Hip-Hop Documentaries
ARTIST Amadeus Waltenspühl
5/8 Four Tet
ARTIST Laurence Jaccottet
5/5 & 5/6 Flying Lotus
ARTIST Razauno
5/3 Masters At Work
ARTIST Brent Rollins
4/29 Mobile Mondays!
ARTIST Trevor Tarczynski
5/8 Four Tet Official Afterparty
ARTIST Mark Weaver
5/6 Brian Eno: An Illustrated Talk
ARTIST Mark Chiarello
5/3 Signals in the Storm
ARTIST Damien Correll
4/30 A Conversation with Erykah Badu
ARTIST Mark Chiarello
5/10 Dark Disco
ARTIST Trevor Tarczynski
5/6 Nanobot Picket Line
ARTIST Masa
5/4 Brooklyn Flea Record Fair
ARTIST Jess Rotter
5/1 A Night of Improvised Round Robin Duets
ARTIST Stacey Rozich
RBMA NYC 2013:
TERM ONE EVENT ARTWORK
5/7 That!: Le1f
ARTIST Maya Wild
8:11am
FEATURE
CAN'T
STOP
WON'T
STOP
Daniel Arnold is a photographer
with an uncanny ability to catch New
Yorkers in their most revealing moments:
a picture of a man mid-yawn on the
subway becomes poignant, a snapshot
of an old woman rooting through a bin
of watermelons in Brighton Beach feels
like a portrait of New York as a whole.
Arnold wanders the city, capturing these
moments compulsively. From the Bronx
to Times Square to the Church Street
Boxing Gym, we asked him to track a full
24 hours’ worth of the listening habits of
a diverse cross-section of locals.
Melissa Gagliardi
age: 19 occupation: Student
location: FAO Schwartz, Midtown
coming from: School at FIT
going to: Metropolitan Museum of Art
what are you doing: Photographing Turkish
jewelry for a school project.
listening to: Chris Brown - "Strip"
why: "It just came on shuffle."
6:15am
Brian Carmichael
age: 27 occupation: Ticket agent
location: East River Ferry
coming from: Pier 11 going to: 34th Street
what are you doing: Working.
listening to: Beats
why: "I'm writing to it."
7:31am
PHOTOgraphy and INTERVIEWS DANIEL ARNOLD
Erica Dinardo
age: 22 occupation: Finance
location: New York Federal Hall
coming from: Work going to: Back to work.
what are you doing: Trying to get a quick tan on a coffee run.
listening to: Krewella - "Alive"
why: "It's feel-good music. Happy music. A good way to start the day."
14
15
6:20pm
FEATURE
9:09am
10:48am
11:11am
Glory T Pride
occupation: 620 Boys, GVR Music (Glory Vintage Rebirth)
location: 15th Street and Broadway
coming from: Brooklyn going to: Nowhere for now…
what are you doing: Advancing our specialties in music and fashion,
preparing for a business meeting.
listening to: Joey Bada$$ - "Waves"
why: "We like things you don't hear everyday."
ages: 19
Kash & Stephon
occupation: Up-and-coming rappers (SBOE)
location: Fulton and Market Streets
coming from: Home going to: School
what are you doing: Meeting friends before class.
listening to: Wiz Khalifa with the Weeknd - "Remember You"
why: "It's our favorite song since the mixtape dropped."
ages: 18
12:00pm
Joe Wesley
occupation: Tech firm owner
location: Zuccotti Park
coming from: Connecticut going to: Capital Grille
what are you doing: Business lunch.
listening to: US Army Corps Orchestra - "Battle Hymn of the Republic"
why: "It's awesome!"
age: 42
3:33pm
Dilan Walpola
age: 23
occupation: Art director
location: Sixth Avenue and 16th Street
coming from: Bushwick going to: 19th Street and Broadway
what are you doing: Interviewing for a job.
listening to: STRFKR - "Mystery Cloud"
why: "No idea… shuffle?"
16
Eric Cruz
age: 41
occupation: Superintendent/Graffiti artist
location: Russell and Meserole Streets in Greenpoint
coming from: The Bronx going to: The Bronx
what are you doing: Finishing a graffiti mural.
listening to: Fugees - "Fugee-La (Sly & Robbie Mix)"
why: "Pandora."
1:50pm
Mc Ninja
age: 21
occupation: Music
location: L train between Bedford Avenue and Union Square
coming from: The Boogie Down Bronx going to: Where the money is.
what are you doing: Dancing and stuff.
listening to: Hip-hop and trap music
why: "It makes me feel good."
4:20pm
Loli Bang Bang
age: 30
occupation: Body piercer
location: Union Square
coming from: Washington Heights going to: St. Mark's Place
what are you doing: Heading to work where I recently
pierced a stripper's asshole.
listening to: Murs - "Yellow" (a Coldplay cover)
why: "My friends always say, 'Know how I know you're gay?
Because you love Coldplay.'"
Justin Milner
age: 32 occupation: Freelance audio engineer
location: St. Mark's between Second and First Avenues
coming from: Home going to: Xi'an Famous Foods
what are you doing: Beer. Spicy noodles.
listening to: Snoop Lion - "Ashtrays & Heartbreaks"
why: "Dude. It's Snoop doing reggae."
2:10pm
Elias Diaz
age: 19 occupation: Student
location: Church Street Boxing Gym
coming from: "I live in Manhattan." going to: "I'm going to fight amateur soon."
what are you doing: Working out and boxing.
listening to: Drake feat. Lil Wayne, Kanye West & Eminem - "Forever"
why: "It gets me into the mood."
5:05pm
Spencer Armstrong
age: 19 occupation: Student of acting
location: Outside a parking garage near Chambers Street
coming from: Class at Pace University
going to: Rehearsal and a meeting to determine next season's theatrical schedule.
listening to: Datsik - "Cold Blooded"
why: "The shuffle gods love dubstep."
17
FEATURE
FEATURE
7:11pm
8:55pm
1:09am
Quinn Brown age: 21 occupation: Dancer
location: Sixth Avenue and 14th Street
coming from: The Bronx going to: Home
what are you doing: Meeting my girl.
listening to: Janet Jackson - "Alright"
why: "I love to dance and show my talent."
Ottoniel Martinez
age: 24
occupation: Student
location: Bleecker Street station
coming from: Brooklyn going to: The Bronx
what are you doing: 'Bout to smoke.
listening to: Slaughterhouse - "Hammer Dance"
why: "That's my favorite group."
9:12pm
Nick Gazo age: 24 occupation: Clerk
location: J train
coming from: Clerk job in Downtown Brooklyn going to: Lower East Side
what are you doing: Heading home.
listening to: Britney Spears - "Scream & Shout"
why: "Because I'm one of her biggest fans."
3:00am
JC Nwabuebe & Anekea Umo
ages: 19 occupation: Engineering students
location: 125th Street and Eighth Avenue
coming from: Over by H&M going to: Morningside Heights
what are you doing: Just out walking.
listening to: Khia - "My Neck, My Back"/Busted - "Falling For You"
why: "It came on shuffle."
4:59am
Christina Jackson
age: 25
occupation: Actress
location: Eighth Avenue-bound L train
coming from: Williamsburg going to: A meeting with my manager.
what are you doing: Drinking? listening to: Lapalux - "Without You"
why: "I came across it on Tumblr."
9:59pm
2:25am
5:55am
James Sunderland
age: 85 occupation: Retired cook
location: A Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts combo
coming from: Rhode Island going to: Home, eventually.
what are you doing: My interest is music. But I like to be private about it.
listening to: Marches by the Goldman Band at Lincoln Center
why: "I grew up with it. My pop was in the service and he was a musician. My playground was the Navy band room."
11:22pm
12:01am
Daniel Arnold
age: 33 occupation: Photographer for today
location: The Edge in Williamsburg
coming from: The JMZ going to: Slowly home.
what are you doing: Working.
listening to: Animal Collective - "What Would I Want? Sky"
why: "Ask my brother. Goodnight."
for more, check out instagram.com/arnold_daniel
Macy Drake
age: 22 occupation: Student of psychology at Hunter College
location: Sunshine Laundromat at 860 Manhattan Avenue
coming from: Playing games in the neighborhood.
going to: Home to watch a movie.
listening to: Asa - "Jailor"
why: "She's got a lot of soul. She really makes you move."
18
Raekwon Nixon
age: 19
occupation: Dancer
location: Union Square station
coming from: The Bronx going to: Not sure yet.
what are you doing: Figuring out my new hat.
listening to: Waka Flocka Flame
why: "It sounds good loud."
Greg Daniel Smith
age: 34 occupation: Musician in Greg Smith & the Broken English
location: Tommy's Tavern in Brooklyn
coming from: Western Massachusetts going to: Home. I have a
landscaping job at 6:30am.
what are you doing: Drinking with a friend.
listening to: Bob Dylan - "The Man in Me"
why: "It's on the jukebox."
Ashley Pearson
age: 18 occupation: Student
location: Coney Island F train, end of the line
coming from: Coney Island going to: Staten Island
what are you doing: Just trying to stay awake.
listening to: Blackstreet - "No Diggity"
why: "Because I like Blackstreet."
19
COLUMNS
COLUMNS
LANDMARKS
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
if you ’ ve seen a box of holes and knobs
with a rat’s nest of wires dangling from it,
chances are it was a semi- or fully modular
synthesizer. With modular synths, nothing is
hardwired. Each stage of sound generation and
modification—oscillator, filter, envelope—exists
as a discrete “module,” and you manually create the signal path with patch cable. Modular
synthesizers are one way to get beyond presets
and predictable automation routines, if only
because there are often none of either. You’re
not just building your own instrument—you’re
reimagining your entire workflow.
Control is a boutique modular-synthesizer
shop located at 416 Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. Daren Ho and his partner Jonas Asher
opened it last June, partly in response to the
renewed interest in modular synthesis and new
formats like the Eurorack. It’s more than a few
people’s new favorite hangout.
LO G OS
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
“i don’t like pretty. I like secret gems,”
James Murphy told The New Yorker in 2010.
“You wanna feel like beauty is a rare thing.”
Disco-punk label DFA remains one of New
York’s jewels—even if it is, increasingly, not
a secret. Celebrating its 12th anniversary
this year, the label (founded by Murphy, Tim
Goldsworthy, and Jonathan Galkin) arrived on
the scene at the precise moment in 2001 when
New York needed a musical boost.
DFA’s musical style comprises a carefully
wrought combination of ingredients: live
drums, analog synthesizers, and a fondness
for cowbells. The design approach—dense
with scribbles, rubber-stamping, and heavily
photocopied text—is equally eclectic, skewing
more punk than disco. “It’s not polished, so
people don’t think of it as design,” says art
director Michael Vadino, “but it’s all very
contemplated.” He adds, “Some human
element has to be injected, otherwise
everything just looks like it came out of a
machine.”
According to Vadino, he and Murphy share
“a slight bit of OCD. Sure, we could make
everything slick, perfect, amazing—but that’s
20
not interesting.” Instead they intentionally
added constraints, paring down their design
tools to pencils, graph paper, and Polaroids.
“That’s when really interesting things
happen. When you’re constrained you have
to get creative.” He says the most common
feedback he gets from Murphy is: “It’s looking
good, but can you make it a little bit shittier?”
There’s something funny about two selfdescribed obsessives concerned with making
things look like crap.
Until recently, DFA’s logo—a doodle of
a lightning bolt—remained unattributed.
As Vadino recalls, “At the studio one day—
back in 2000—somebody just scribbled this
little lightning bolt on graph paper and
at the top added [the letters] DFA. And I
was like, ‘That kind of rules. That should
be your logo.’ James and Tim just totally
dismissed me. I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m
going to use it.’ So I just started putting it on
flyers, and that became the de facto logo.”
It was only in 2010, after a retrospective of
DFA’s graphic work in Sydney, that Murphy
claimed authorship, telling Vadino: “I drew
-Laura forde
that fucking thing.”
RBMA: Why do you think modular synthesizers are popular again?
Daren Ho: Many analog synthesizers from the
’70s and ’80s are becoming vintage in a “classic car” sense. The synths and their parts are
harder to come by and expensive to maintain—
which has driven up prices—so many [people]
end up going with modules that are clones of
the originals in sound and circuitry. There’s also
the camp that’s bored of sitting in front of computers dialing things with laptops. They seek
something more organic.
RBMA: How do you play a modular synthesizer?
DH: There’s an infinite amount of ways to play
a modular: keyboard, ribbon, joystick, wind
controller, contact mic, guitar, a piece of wire.
There are also touch controllers designed for
gestural performances that are unique to this
format. Recently, there was a video of a wireless computer trackpad being used to control
modules.
Market
Hotel
DH: It really depends what he or she wants
out of their sound. There are people who are
very free form and want every tool at their
disposal. For those trying to emulate a single-voice synthesizer, the basic tools would be
an oscillator, a filter, a VCA, [and] an envelope.
An LFO, a second oscillator, or a self-cycling
envelope are good complements. A sequencer, a keyboard, or something that will convert
MIDI from the DAW is necessary if they want
to achieve melody.
RBMA: How does a modular synthesizer different from say, a microKORG?
DH: An analogy would be that with a modular
synthesizer you can draw with different colored
pencils and charcoals—all on different types of
paper. With a microKORG, you’re stuck with a
No. 2 pencil and an 8.5 x 11 sheet.
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
this is a column about physical landmarks, which
is why it’s not perfectly suited for the likes of Todd Patrick, aka Todd P., and his Rorschach-like splotch of influence across the outer boroughs. There is seemingly no
loft or former industrial space that has not played host
to a show organized by Todd P. or one of his acolytes. So
it would be crazily remiss to leave out the person who
injected a much-needed DIY aesthetic into New York’s
indie rock/noise/punk/experimental scene. We’ll gloss
over some of the myriad venues he’s booked over the
years—Shea Stadium, Monster Island Basement, Silent
Barn, 285 Kent, Death by Audio, an annual festival in
Mexico—and zoom in on one of his favorites, the Bushwick-based Market Hotel.
The scrappy, graffiti-bedecked space, which opened
in early 2008, provided an initial platform for then little-known bands like No Age, Dan Deacon, Fucked Up,
Titus Andronicus, Wavves, and others too numerous to
mention. “For a while, we were able to be that moment
when a band breaks,” says Patrick. “It proved that you
could do that without money.” Formerly bank offices
and then a Dominican nightclub, Market Hotel was
shut down in early 2010 for operating without a liquor
license, but will reopen later this summer, according to
Patrick, as an above-board legal venue with all the proper permitting in place, down to air conditioning and an
elevator for wheelchair accessibility.
Patrick cut his teeth booking shows in Austin, Texas,
where he went to college, and at 17 Nautical Miles in
Portland, Oregon. He moved to New York in 2001, and
immediately noted a lack of such venues for the kind of
indie music he wanted to present (he wanted to emulate
spaces like the East Village’s Brownies, which closed in
2002 after 13 years of betting on little-known bands).
His guiding principle was to provide spaces for bands to
play that were affordable and open to patrons of all ages.
“Regular people pulling off regular things,” says Patrick,
“and filling niches in their communities.”
Patrick taught this city an important lesson: you
need little more than spit and shoe polish—or in this
case, amplification and inclusion—to put on a great
show, even in a city as expensive and impossibly crowded as New York.
-Adrienne Day
RBMA: What setup do you recommend for
first-timers?
Top
5…
Met Museum
Presents’ Musical
Events
PRESENTED BY
Met Museum Presents offers a
wide-ranging series of performances
inspired by the Met’s collection, special
exhibitions, and traditions. This season’s
highlights range from multimedia shows
in the galleries to eclectic concerts by
artists such as Salome Chamber Orchestra
and Man Forever.
THE BRONX
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
1
7
7 Record Mart
8 Deitch Projects
6
5
8
5
9 Area/Shelter/Vinyl
7
10 Studio B
QUEENS
5
2
9 8
10
3
8
MANHATTAN
4
What: Market Hotel
Where: 1142 Myrtle
Avenue, Brooklyn
When: 2008-2010
Why: DIY venue
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
DJ Spooky: A Civil
War Symphony
Working in tandem
with Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator
of photographs at
the Museum, Paul D.
Miller (aka DJ Spooky
That Subliminal Kid)
presents a newly
created piece for a
string ensemble, with
live-mixed electronic music and video
using images from the
exhibition Photography and the American
Civil War.
Liars
Breaking into the
New York dance-punk
scene in 2000, Liars
continue to reinvent
their work, shifting
styles from album to
album. For their Met
Museum debut, Liars
will be presenting a
multimedia, site-specific performance in
the Temple of Dendur
in the Sackler Wing
on May 18 at 7pm.
So Percussion and
Man Forever
So Percussion was
called New York
City’s “experimental powerhouse” by
Village Voice. The
ensemble joins Man
Forever in bringing
their adventurous
spirit to the Met to
explore the DIY and
experimental components of punk.
ETHEL and Friends
ETHEL, one of the
most acclaimed string
quartets in the contemporary classical
field, stars in this
music series specifically designed for
the Museum’s Balcony Bar, where every
Friday and Saturday
evening visitors can
relax while looking
out over the majestic
Great Hall.
DJ Spooky—iPad
Mixing Piece
Friday, June 21 at
9:30pm in the Petrie
Court Café, Miller
invites the audience to bring their
iPhones and iPads
and collectively mix
the soundtrack for a
listening party using
his proprietary app.
-Nick sylvester
21
NEW YORK STORY
NEW YORK STORY
ARE CITIES MUSIC?
Chaos, collaboration, and the cultivation of possibility in New York.
WORDS Vijay Iyer
ILLUSTRATION TIMOTHY GOODMAN
1. For me, New York’s superpower is its chaos of interactions.
It’s simple combinatorics: a city of eight million people can have
nearly 32 trillion distinct one-on-one encounters. Think about
that the next time you lock eyes with someone on the subway.
You bump up against so many people that it feels inexhaustible;
if you find this quality rejuvenating, you are officially a “city person.” It’s a setting in which certain kinds of artists thrive: those
who play well with others and especially those who learn to
harness the noise between people, the sounds and movements
of those in their midst—and let it erupt through their work.
2. How do you do that? You just wade right in to the froth of
culture and let it rush over you; you cultivate new relationships
and feature others alongside you. Music can contain the contributions of a multitude, reflecting and accommodating the communities in its sphere. A city is a place for collaboration.
3. Sustained, rich, detailed collaborations create radical specificity in the city’s chaos of encounters. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Run-DMC, Eiko and
22
Koma, Matt and Kim, Batman and Robin. In singling out and
building on one (or at best, a handful) of our 32 trillion possible
connections, such collaborations reveal how much can be made
of any such human exchange. Confronted by this everyday
abundance of ephemeral interactions, we learn to cherish the
fact that anything substantial can take hold between individuals; it can seem, on balance, pretty miraculous.
4. Over the last 20 years or so (including nearly 15 in New York),
I’ve had the privilege of making a lot of music with a lot of
different people, and I’ve also had the opportunity to study the
cognitive science of music: how our bodies and minds perceive,
process, and generate musical actions. I’m no scientist nowadays, but I still speculate about how science might help us understand human things—the things we do together, the stories
we tell about ourselves, what we find beautiful or necessary... In
other words, things like music.
5. There’s a movement toward a new “science of cities,” in which
researchers scrutinize our urban centers both as networks, in
the social sense, and as vast experiments in resource management. In these massive, noisy aggregates of people, capital, and
infrastructure, scientists and mathematicians are discovering
predictable, systemic patterns.
6. This new science of cities focuses less on a city’s chaos and more
on its order: its sewer systems, energy grid, traffic flow. It’s all about
the way we handle our desired and undesired fluids (traffic is also
a fluid, in the physical sense); it’s about resource management, the
flow of information, big-picture stuff. Most of the thinking in this
new field tends to focus on our messes (plumbing, disease, and so
forth) or else with entrepreneurial “ideas”—that is, technological
innovations and the wealth they are able to create. In the way these
details interact, it is said, all cities are basically the same.
7. Somewhere between our waste and our wealth lurks that
nebulous thing called culture—the stories of ourselves, the
things that give us specificity and humanness, that we gather
for and rally around. But the new science of cities seems scarcely concerned with the culture of cities.
8. It’s too easy to write off the arts as a mere footnote to questions of infrastructure and capital. But we know that culture
provides a city with a very different kind of energy, which is
not strictly entrepreneurial. Culture is what carries much of the
city’s identity—it creates communities, it attracts people from
elsewhere, it generates desire. To scientists of cities I ask: what
can culture tell us?
9. I ask because I am increasingly convinced that, at some level, the science of cities is equivalent to the science of music.
Or, more to the point: cities are music. Cities exist because
we—that is, “humankind”—are able to build things together,
and music was among the first things we ever built together.
The capacities to coordinate and synchronize our actions, to
incorporate each other’s rhythms, to make choices together in
real time—to groove and to improvise—these are human skills,
not merely musical skills. These are the foundations of what is
called civilization.
10. For our species, this thing we call “music” is essentially the
sound of ourselves—the joyful noise of people doing things together, the art of unsilent interaction. And we keep doing it not
merely because we can, but because we like it—more accurately,
we desire it. Desire doesn’t come from nowhere; nature uses it
to trick us into doing something that will sustain the species.
That’s what love is, for example. In other words, we evolved to
like the stuff that music is made of. We selected for it; somehow,
knowing how to listen to each other is a skill worth having.
11. The music of New York is therefore the sound of people
in New York—that much is clear. Cities are planned/composed
spaces full of unplanned/improvised behavior, and so the music
of cities is the sound of bodies navigating through systems of
control. But what is that sound? Is it pretty, gritty, both, neither?
And why?
12. Let’s be honest: New York, like most cities, is as much about
force, separation, and concealment as it is about interactivity
and sharing. Once you study how resources are managed, you
notice that they are not allocated equally, and that racism and
class hierarchy still govern the deployment of power and the
distribution of capital. And you hear all of that in the musics
of New York: the sound of defiance in the face of injustice (ever
heard Dead Prez?) or, conversely, the sound of domination and
excess (ever been to the opera?).
13. New York is therefore the sound of uneven, uneasy intersections of peoples. It’s not a “mix of styles”; it’s an overlap of communities. It’s not a “fusion”; it’s juxtapositions, collisions, and ruptures.
We don’t play “in a genre”; we play in the context of others, and
we find ways to play with each other. We struggle to connect and
sometimes, briefly, it happens. In time, these strategies become ha-
bitual, approaching something that might be called a “style,” but
in a city, such patterns of behavior are in constant flux, continually
disrupted by new and improvised encounters. The way to live in
a city seems to be to allow this to happen as much as possible—to
become, discover, transform.
14. I think of the late great cornet player and composer Butch Morris (1947–2013), an American maverick who guided the creation of
hundreds of thrilling collective experiences through the technique
he pioneered, called Conduction. He used a baton and the techniques of an orchestra conductor to channel and amplify the noise,
frictions, and static between people, their individual strengths and
collective interactive capacities, and their human ability to listen to
one another, make choices, and take action. In this way he helped
whole multitudes of people build—from scratch, in real time—massive, extended edifices of sound. He called them skyscrapers.
15. Are cities music? Sounds like Butch already answered my
question.
Vijay Iyer is a Grammy-nominated composer and
bandleader based in Harlem. His next album, Holding It
Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, is a project with
poet Mike Ladd in collaboration with American veterans
from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Find him at
vijay-iyer.com.
23
Brian Eno
77 Million Paintings
A constantly
evolving
sound and
imagescape by
Brian Eno
THROUGH june 2
145 W 32nd St
12pm-8pm (Closed Mondays)
Red Bull Music Academy New York 2013
April 28 – May 31
236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.
www.redbullmusicacademy.com
Discover More
On Red Bull Music Academy Radio
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