DAILY NOTE2211 Of

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013

ART + MUSIC = NYC

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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 Editor 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

All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt

Contributors Daniel Arnold Mike RubinAdrienne Day Nick SylvesterLaura FordeTimothy GoodmanVijay IyerJaci Kessler

Cover Photo Grace Jones, 1986, Andy Warhol Image and Artwork © 2013, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Licensed by ARS.

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.

MASTHEAD

ABOUT RED BUll MUSIc AcADEMY

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

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

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!

Bok Bok speaking with Emma Warren at the Academy. Photo

by Dan Wilton

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FROM THE ACADEMY

“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 UPfRONT

MAMA SAYS

Modern parenting with Erykah Badu.

RECORDED LIVEFOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIOTUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM

TONIGHT

UPCOMINGEVENTS

MAY

10METRO AREAGERD JANSONBOk BOkL-VIS 1990

DARk DISCO @ 88 PALACE

MAY

19MAY

20

MISTER SATURDAY NIGHT VS.DOPE JAMS

GIORGIO MORODER fIRST EVERLIVE DJ SET

INVITE ONLY

DEEP SPACE @ OUTPUT

MAY

21BRENMARNICk HOOkSINJIN HAwkEMORE

TAMMANY HALL

MAY

22DRUM MAJORSMANNIE fRESHBOI-1DAYOUNG CHOPDJ MUSTARDMORE

kNITTING fACTORY

MAY

23UNITED STATES Of BASSBIG fREEDIAAfRIkA BAMBAATAAEGYPTIAN LOVERDJ MAGIC MIkEDJ ASSAULTDJ fUNk + MANY MORE!

SANTOS PARTY HOUSE

MAY

24THE ROOTS Of DUBSTEPSkREAMMALAPLASTICIANHATCHA

SRB BROOkLYN

MAY

2512 YEARS Of DfATHE wHOLE LABEL fAMILY ON fOUR STAGES

GRAND PROSPECT HALL

Suzanne kraft

loS AngElES, CAliforniA

“Bernie Worrell just doing his

thing, inches from me. That’s still vivid in my head.”soundcloud.com/suzannekraft

kORELESSglASgoW, 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

Rudi ZygadlolonDon, EnglAnD

“I really enjoyed Stephen O’Malley’s lecture. Stephen’s

was the most interdisciplinary and kind of wide-

ranging 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

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.

Bok Bok’s actual favorite place in New York is a random barbershop on Union Street in Brooklyn “run by a mad Rus-sian.” True to form though, Bok Bok

(né Alex Sushon) is choosing to keep that secret within the family. Night Slugs is not only a Lon-don-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 com-puter 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.

LOVE179 MacDougal St., (now closed)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 deco-ration 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.

THE THING1001 Manhattan Ave., BrooklynEven though it’s legendary, I discovered the Thing by accident. Me and my girl-friend 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.

NICk HOOk’S STUDIOgreenpoint, BrooklynIn 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 DRUMS35 Beadel St., BrooklynWe had a really good par-ty there a few months ago. It was the first time we had done a Night Slugs party by ourselves in NYC with no oth-er 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 any-thing, just white smoke. I’m definitely trying to repeat that experience.

SLUG IT OUTNight Slugs label head Bok Bok on his favorite places in NYC.

Dark Disco: A Red Bull Music Academy Specialwith 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

Erykah Badu is all love. She is a magical per-former, 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 eloquent-ly 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 ex-hortation 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 Brook-lyn! 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 walk-ing around in the house, thinking about so many things, and I am missing everything that’s happen-ing. 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 pre-fer 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

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

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 En-gland? I guess it was the big boomboxes, the old-er 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 pota-toes and then keeping it moving like that… then rap-ping 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 differ-ent 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 turn-tables 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, any-thing 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

nobody was checking for a kid like that. It was like, it’s cute. But as I grew, after high school and the ac-cent… 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 know-ing 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 Pu-mas and Pro Keds; mock necks, silver medallions, and stuff like that. And then the Bronx moved on—Brooklyn too—with the Jamaican look: the Walla-bees 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 lit-tle 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 to-gether.” 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, high-light 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 be-came 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 cas-sette 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 sud-den 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 dis-respect 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.

SLICk RICkThe perks of being a skinny British rapper.

Q&A

PHOTO OlUgBEnRO OgUnSEMORE

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feature

MORE SONGS ABOUT

PAINTINGS AND

fOODA half-century of art and music commingling in New York City.

WORDS MIKE RUBInPHOTO 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 collabora-tors. 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 choreo-graphed 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-and-take that over the last half-century energized and inspired both communities, all while gener-

ating no small degree of exploitation and hype.“When you have a city that becomes the

center of vanguard culture,” explains long-time gallerist and curator Jeffrey Deitch, “you have a convergence of innovation in visual art, dance, music, film, literature, and that hap-pened 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, cou-pled 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 ab-stract expressionist painters like Jackson Pol-lock, 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.”

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In the early 1960s, the Fluxus movement fueled additional crossover. Arising out of Neo-Dadaism, Fluxus emphasized the mix-ing of media and the merging of artistic dis-ciplines, which proved a boon to both exper-imental music and performance art, while Fluxus’ underlying principles of DIY, working with found objects, and anti-commercialism have remained present for decades in seem-ingly unrelated genres like punk, hip-hop, and electronic music. When Welsh viola play-er 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 concep-tual artist Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street apart-ment). 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 contrib-utor 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 Under-ground would be complete without mention of Andy Warhol. Though Warhol had been design-ing album-cover art since 1949, it wasn’t until around 1963 that he began to directly mani-fest his interest in music, occasionally singing backup vocals along with artist Lucas Sama-ras 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 Round-ers 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 Under-ground’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 In-evitable’s total derangement of the senses grew out of the anarchic spirit of filmmakers like Rubin, Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Piero He-liczer (whose 1965 film with the Velvets called Venus in Furs is now lost to history). “Every-body 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 strug-gled to reach beyond the art world. The Vel-vets’ 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-

table’s multidisciplinary circus cast the blue-print 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 key-board drones and Vega’s cathartic stage per-sona. The band moved from playing gigs at galleries to venues like the Mercer Arts Center, but their cacophonic electronics and confron-tational 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 vi-tal influence on punk, synth pop, and industri-al 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, Ve-ga’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 pho-tos 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 tem-plate for the mid- to late-’70s downtown explo-sion. 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 commis-sioned a 1987 book, What the Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Songs, pairing Byrne’s lyrics with work by art-ists 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 dou-ble 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 Lon-go (Menthol Wars and Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio), sculptor Nancy Arlen (Mars), photogra-pher 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 Bas-quiat—who occasionally played percussion for Liquid Liquid.

Then there was Basquiat himself. He was still known primarily for his SAMO graffi-ti 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 up-town 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. Be-cause 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

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 art-ist 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 do-ing 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 oth-er, 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 howev-er, the relationship between the two disciplines had already borne fruit. “As a visual artist in-terested 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 the-atrical 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 in-spiration from the proto-house music he heard at the Paradise Garage. Haring became friends with the Garage’s groundbreaking DJ Larry Le-van, and his murals would ultimately decorate the club. “I don’t know if you know how im-portant 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, espe-cially when I was out of New York City. There was always something to look forward to im-mediately 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. Document-ed by filmmaker Charlie Ahearn and photogra-

phers like Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, graffiti artists were nearly as central to early hip-hop 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 real-ly fresh” sampled in Herbie Hancock’s sem-inal 1983 scratch single “Rockit”), appeared in films like Ahearn’s 1983 Wild Style, and in 1988 became the host of the influential hip-hop 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 “Re-cycled 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 Bran-ca) 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 ad-opted 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 busi-ness, as Warhol suggests, then music express-es 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 Rus-sell, 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 be-tween the performance and music sides and the visual-art side.”

In the late ’90s, signs of life began to re-appear. In 1999, Gavin Brown (the dealer for painter Elizabeth Peyton, who had gained at-tention making small-scale portraits of musi-cians 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 togeth-er, 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 be-hind banks of old TVs,” says Galkin. “We uti-lized 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 excit-ing time for me.”

The most infamous figures of the new convergence were the members of perfor-mance-art troupe Fischerspooner, which De-itch 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 per-formers, smoke machines, mullet wigs, Mad Max costumes, and all the pomp—and pom-posity—of a Broadway musical, albeit with an Off-Off-Broadway bent.

Deitch and DFA’s Murphy met at a Fisch-erspooner performance, which led to collabo-rative 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 part-nership 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 ex-otic dancers.

Today, every major New York museum also doubles as a de facto nightclub and per-formance space, from Kraftwerk selling out a week of shows at MoMA last year to the Li-ars playing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur this month. MoMA PS1 in Queens has devoted particular attention to mu-sical programming. Both its performance-ori-ented 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 Tar-get 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 re-ally 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.

“wE wERE ALL IN NEw YORk TO MAkE

INTERESTING ART AND, NOT COMPETE wITH

EACH OTHER, BUT JUST kIND Of ExPERIMENT

TOGETHER.” - CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Casey Spooner of Fischerspooner, performing live at Deitch Projects, NYC, 2002. Photo by Michael Doyle

Left to right: John Cale, Gerard Malanga, Nico, and Andy Warhol, NYC, 1966. Photo by Herve Gloaguen/Gamma-Rapnovia via Getty Images

The Canal Zone Party Crew. Left to right: Slave, Fab 5 Freddy, Roanne, Stan Peskett, Michael Holman, 1979. Photo courtesy of Michael Holman

Gray performing at Hurrah’s, 1979. Left to right: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Michael Holman, Wayne Clifford. Photo courtesy of Michael Holman

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4/28 Fixed vs. TURRBOTAX®

ARTIST Merjin Hos

4/29 Filmmatic: An Evening of

Rare Hip-Hop Documentaries

ARTIST Amadeus Waltenspühl

4/29 Mobile Mondays!

ARTIST Trevor Tarczynski

4/30 A Conversation with Erykah Badu

ARTIST Mark Chiarello

5/1 A Night of Improvised Round Robin Duets

ARTIST Stacey Rozich

5/4 The Bunker

ARTIST Ken Meier

5/5 Classic Album Sundays:

A David Bowie Special

ARTIST Revenge Is Sweet

5/5 & 5/6 Flying Lotus

ARTIST Razauno

5/6 Brian Eno: A

n Illustrated Talk

ARTIST Mark Chiarello

5/6 Nanobot Picket Line

ARTIST Masa

5/2 Drone Activity in Progress

ARTIST NBNY Projects

5/3 Brian Eno: 77 Million Paintings

ARTIST Brian Eno

5/3 Masters At Work

ARTIST Brent Rollins

5/3 Signals in the Storm

ARTIST Damien Correll

5/4 Brooklyn Flea Record Fair

ARTIST Jess Rotter

5/7 That!: Le1f

ARTIST Maya Wild

5/7 That!: Mykki Blanco

ARTIST Maya Wild

5/8 Four Tet

ARTIST Laurence Jaccottet

5/8 Four Tet Official Afterparty

ARTIST Mark Weaver

5/10 Dark Disco

ARTIST Trevor Tarczynski

1514

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.

PHOTOgRAPHY AnD InTERVIEWS DAnIEl ARnOlD

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."

ERICA DINARDOage: 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."

MELISSA GAGLIARDIage: 19 occupation: Student

location: FAO Schwartz, Midtowncoming from: School at FIT

going to: Metropolitan Museum of Artwhat are you doing: Photographing Turkish

jewelry for a school project.listening to: Chris Brown - "Strip"

why: "It just came on shuffle."

6:15am

7:31am

8:11am

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FEATURE

kASH & STEPHONages: 18 occupation: Up-and-coming rappers (SBOE)

location: Fulton and Market Streetscoming 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."

JOE wESLEYage: 42 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!"

DILAN wALPOLAage: 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?"

ERIC CRUZage: 41 occupation: Superintendent/Graffiti artistlocation: Russell and Meserole Streets in Greenpoint

coming from: The Bronx going to: The Bronxwhat are you doing: Finishing a graffiti mural.

listening to: Fugees - "Fugee-La (Sly & Robbie Mix)"why: "Pandora."

MC NINJAage: 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."

LOLI BANG BANGage: 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 alway say, 'Know how I know you're gay?

Because you love Coldplay.'"

JUSTIN MILNERage: 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."

ELIAS DIAZage: 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."

SPENCER ARMSTRONGage: 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."

GLORY T PRIDE ages: 19 occupation: 620 Boys, GVR Music (Glory Vintage Rebirth)

location: 15th Street and Broadwaycoming 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."

9:09am

12:00pm

3:33pm

10:48am

1:50pm

4:20pm

11:11am

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1918

MACY DRAkEage: 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."

CHRISTINA JACkSONage: 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."

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."

RAEkwON NIxONage: 19 occupation: Dancer

location: Union Square stationcoming 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."

JAMES SUNDERLAND age: 85 occupation: Retired cook

location: A Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts combocoming 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."

QUINN BROwN age: 21 occupation: Dancer

location: Sixth Avenue and 14th Streetcoming 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."

NICk GAZO age: 24 occupation: Clerk

location: J traincoming 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."

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."

JC NwABUEBE & ANEkEA UMO ages: 19 occupation: Engineering students

location: 125th Street and Eighth Avenuecoming 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."

DANIEL ARNOLDage: 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."

FEATURE FEATURE

7:11pm 1:09am

9:12pm 4:59am

9:59pm

8:55pm 2:25am 3:00am

5:55am

fOR MORE, CHECk OUT INSTAGRAM.COM/ARNOLD_DANIEL

11:22pm 12:01am

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COLUMNS COLUMNS

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 cre-ate 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 Williams-burg. 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.

RBMA: Why do you think modular synthesiz-ers are popular again? Daren Ho: Many analog synthesizers from the ’70s and ’80s are becoming vintage in a “clas-sic 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 com-puters 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 wire-less computer trackpad being used to control modules. RBMA: What setup do you recommend for first-timers? 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 sin-gle-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 sequenc-er, 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 dif-ferent 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.

-NICk SYLVESTER

A column on the gear and

processes that inform the music we make.

this is a column about physical landmarks, which is why it’s not perfectly suited for the likes of Todd Pat-rick, aka Todd P., and his Rorschach-like splotch of in-fluence 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 Bush-wick-based Market Hotel.

The scrappy, graffiti-bedecked space, which opened in early 2008, provided an initial platform for then lit-tle-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 prop-er 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 crowd-ed as New York. -ADRIENNE DAY

MARkET HOTEL

“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

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 self-described 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 that fucking thing.” -LAURA fORDE

The origins of iconic images from

NYC's musical history explained.

LO G OS

TOP 5…MET MUSEUM

PRESENTS’ MUSICAL EVENTS

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.

PRESEnTED BY

1DJ SPOOkY: A Civil

WAr SymphonyWorking in tandem with Jeff L. Ro-senheim, 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 electron-ic music and video

using images from the exhibition Photogra-phy and the American

Civil War.

2LIARS

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-spe-cific performance in the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing on May 18 at 7pm.

3SO PERCUSSION AND

MAN fOREVERSo Percussion was called New York

City’s “experimen-tal powerhouse” by Village Voice. The ensemble joins Man Forever in bringing their adventurous

spirit to the Met to explore the DIY and experimental compo-

nents of punk.

4ETHEL AND fRIENDSETHEL, one of the

most acclaimed string quartets in the con-temporary classical field, stars in this music series specif-ically designed for the Museum’s Balco-ny Bar, where every Friday and Saturday evening visitors can relax while looking out over the majestic

Great Hall.

5DJ SPOOkY—IPAD

MIxING PIECEFriday, June 21 at 9:30pm in the Petrie Court Café, Miller invites the audi-ence to bring their iPhones and iPads

and collectively mix the soundtrack for a listening party using his proprietary app.

QUEENS

THE BRONx

STATEN ISLANDBROOkLYN

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

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WHAT: MARKET HoTElWHERE: 1142 MyRTlE AvEnuE, BRooKlynWHEN: 2008-2010WHY: DIy vEnuE

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NEW YORK STORY NEW YORK STORY

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 per-son.” 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 contri-butions of a multitude, reflecting and accommodating the com-munities in its sphere. A city is a place for collaboration.

3. Sustained, rich, detailed collaborations create radical speci-ficity in the city’s chaos of encounters. Charlie Parker and Diz-zy Gillespie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Run-DMC, Eiko and

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 individu-als; 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 nowa-days, but I still speculate about how science might help us un-derstand 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 manage-ment. 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 scarce-ly concerned with the culture of cities.

ARE CITIES MUSIC?Chaos, collaboration, and the cultivation of possibility in New York.

WORDS VIjAY IYERIllUSTRATIOn TIMOTHY gOODMAn

8. It’s too easy to write off the arts as a mere footnote to ques-tions 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 lev-el, 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 to-gether, 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 intersec-tions of peoples. It’s not a “mix of styles”; it’s an overlap of commu-nities. 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 Mor-ris (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 tech-niques 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—mas-sive, 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.

RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY NEw YORk 2013APRIL 28 – MAY 31236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.www.REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM

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