Full Description
In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene's social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood's punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and groups---from Mary Halvorson, Zs, and Nate Wooley to Matana Roberts, Peter Evans, and Darius Jones---produced shows in a variety of unlicensed venues as well as in clubs and cafes. At the same time, pirate radio station free103point9 and music festivals made Williamsburg an epicenter of New York's experimental culture. In 2005, New York's rezoning act devastated the community as gentrification displaced its participants farther afield in Brooklyn and in Queens. With this portrait of Williamsburg, Bradley not only documents some of the most vital music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he helps readers better understand the formation, vibrancy, and life span of experimental music and art scenes everywhere.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Locating the Williamsburg Avant-Garde 1
Part I. Utopian Spaces for Sound
1. The Emergence of the Williamsburg Scene: Warehouses, Squatter Parties, and Punk Roots, 1988-1994 21
2. Pirate Radio and Jumping the River: The Williamsburg Loft Scene, 1997-2004 55
3. Art Galleries, Clubs, and Bohemian CafÉs: The Williamsburg DIY, 2001-2006 100
Part II. Commercial DIY and the Last Underground Venues
4. A Point of Confluence: The Downtown Scene Comes to Zebulon, 2004-2006 145
5. A New Generation Emerges: Zebulon, 2005-2012 189
6. A Fractured Landscape: The Last Avant-Garde Music Spaces of Williamsburg, 2005-2014 228
Afterword. Art, Experiment, and Capital 263
Notes 271
Art Sources for the Williamsburg Avant-Garde 335
Bibliography 343
Index 367
