silent barn redux

oriana on 17 Jul ’13

neighborhood: ridgewood | space type: music, art, events | active since: 2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

By now everyone probably knows the storied history of the Silent Barn. The band Skeletons started the DIY venue in their Ridgewood apartment in 2005 (which I profiled back in 2009), and until 2011 it was a raucous, dingy, rollicking good time—and then they got ransacked. Around $15k worth of equipment was destroyed, and then the city came in and evicted them. That probably should have been that, but the Silent Barn launched a Kickstarter, which brought in more than $40k. So they decided to start over, but this time, to be as legit and legal as they could be.

the Husk; photo from Showpaper

Fast forward to early 2013, and the Silent Barn 2.0 opened its doors in Bushwick. The new incarnation is definitely a continuation of the Husk (which the original space is now called), on a much bigger scale. The building itself is a lot lager—three floors and a yard, with eight bedrooms, thirteen roommates, three stages (or more, as needed), an art gallery, a dozen art and recording studios, and on and on. The scope is bigger too; in addition to music shows nearly every night, there’s the Babycastles videogame collective, science art, Aftermath Supplies artist reuse shop, multimedia video art events, a supper club, piñatas, theatre groups, and a whole lot more. And the community involvement this time around is huge: there are about 150 people participating, in various degrees, in the conceptualizing and running of the space. Administration is framed on the metaphor of a kitchen, and there are about 60 Chefs, each responsible for keeping a small aspect of the Barn going. It’s all volunteer, all consensus, and all making it up as they go along. It is, I think, pioneering a new way to do DIY—intentional, flexible, transparent, and innovative. (Want to join in the fun? Go here.)

Here’s a short Q&A with Katie, the Press Chef, and below that I asked two questions of a dozen different Barn members: 1) What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here, and 2) Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

brooklyn spaces: From the structure of the collective to the special vocabulary to all these working groups—did that evolve spontaneously as you figured it out, or was there a model you were working from?
Katie: We’re making it up as we go. We have weekly Kitchen meetings with all the Chefs, and part of that is Stew, which is all our discussion topics, whether it’s what murals are coming up or how to deal with conflict resolution; everything goes in the Stew and we work it out together.

all pix by Alix Piorun unless noted

brooklyn spaces: I love that. I feel like this space is really breaking new ground in a lot of ways, sort of changing the meaning of DIY in Brooklyn.
Katie: Well, there’s a responsibility here. Places come and go, you know? When the Husk was ransacked, we had such a huge reaction from the community, so it was our responsibility to do things the right way. After the Kickstarter, we could have re-opened the next day—and then probably gotten shut down again. So we decided to focus on longevity. I think we’re really on the right path. People always try to define DIY; we’re still doing it ourselves, we’re just doing it differently. It’s not like we’re trying to change the model for other spaces; this is just what we have to do. Plus look at this! This place rules! This never would have happened if we hadn’t taken the route we took.

Martha Moszczynski’s painting and piñata studio

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on the neighborhood? What’s it like being in Bushwick now, especially after having been in Ridgewood?
Katie: We’re really trying to make ourselves an asset to the neighborhood. We go to community board meetings every month. We want people to know us and recognize us, to know that they can come to a show or book a show or play a show or put up some art. We really want to find new ways to integrate with the community and make our presence a positive thing.

***

brooklyn spaces: What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here?

Katie: I like the ones that seem to be holistic Barn, like when there’s a house show and a complimentary show downstairs. Like the Modular Equinox, which took place in every single room. It was really neat to have that kind of foot traffic everywhere, even in the “private” areas.

Tricia: Lani’s birthday party. We had been holding our breath waiting for a liquor license for so long, and I think that was the first show where we’d really come into our own. It was this giant wild night, everyone went crazy, just the whole Barn partying.

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): This question never gets easier. I’ve seen / thrown / taken part in easily over a thousand shows at Silent Barn! My favorites are those that come out the blue from old friends, the ones that have strange challenges, the ones with moments that feel like magic, the ones that somehow discover a new way to use a place that thousands of bands have been playing with for years.

zine library

Mila (website): I trust that if I show up on any given night, I will see something intriguing. One evening that stands out is the Public Meeting we had in May,“Women in DIY.” It was amazing to see the room filled with women who have done really extraordinary things. It felt supportive and positive, inspiring and motivating, to be a participant in this community.

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): The Wild Boys Immersive Party, which had performances, dream machine, food, piñata, art, community costumes, etc.

another living room; sometimes transforms into the Hawkitori Dinner Club

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): No offense to the events (and I’ll give another shoutout to that Modular Solstice night when there were three completely different events going on simultaneously), but it’s the times in between the events and the things that happen because events are going on that I most remember.

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): My favorite events are the ones I don’t show up for on purpose. I’ll be working in the shop or my studio and there will just be someone singing their heart out or the most nasty thrash band totally destroying. I stumble into the show room with total awe and appreciation of what’s going on and that I happen to be there to witness it.

Deep Cuts (barber shop + record shop)

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): On the one hand, I really love the Modular Synthesizer Solstice and Equinox shows I curate here, because I always include so many individuals who are part of the community and have such crazy visions about weird electronics. On the other hand, I really love our weekly administration meetings because it’s crazy how much we get done for a group with no traditional top-down hierarchy. Both “events” speak to the possibility of surprise still existing in such a dead, predictable, monotonous society.

***

brooklyn spaces: Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

Brandon: I used to do house shows in Michigan, and the intimacy and humanity of that scale of cultural happenings was really important. When I moved to New York I was so depressed, going to all these crappy clubs where they tally at the door how many people paid for your band. It just sucked. And then I found the old Barn and it was so different. It’s a way to exist in New York and interact with other people on a much more human level.

Gravesend Recordings / Future 86 Recording Studio

Katie: I think that’s what a lot of our answers are, actually. I’m from a small town in Mississippi, where there aren’t any clubs or bars or anything, so it’s only DIY stuff, jamming with your friends, playing in someone’s basement or on the beach or whatever. And I was so depressed when I moved to New York too; I got stuck in this dorm with these people I didn’t get, and the Husk was the first place I felt at home. It’s home and family, that’s why we do it.

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): I love working toward the future of Silent Barn along with all these other pretty incredible people who all have such different talents and viewpoints, knowing that I might never had the change to even meet them otherwise.

backyard during Warper blockparty

Tricia: I’m here because I can be. I can’t think of anywhere else that would say, “Hey neuroscientist, come have a space!” Not only can I learn about art and music and DIY culture, but I can collaborate with artists. It’s just amazing to do science and art in the same space. And to show it to people who want to see it!

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): Being here lets us work with a bunch of people who are good at things we’re not good at. For a recent show, Martha made a huge dick piñata for us. It would have taken me ages to figure out how to make a dick piñata! There’s so many skillsets here. You can just email the Kitchen saying, “I need this weird thing. Does anyone have it or can anyone do it?” and you get three emails back saying, “I can do that!”

another living room; paintings by Devin Lily, photography by Nina Mashurova

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): The constant friction and motion of interacting with people, art, life, and general day-to-day bullshit, like emptying trash cans or drinking coffee and sharing “that time I puked” stories over a taco. Navigating a place that is a whole made up of parts, and all the interesting drama that brings about, while ultimately having a community of people who’ve got your back. A second place to call home, to take creative refuge in.

One the living rooms; art by Lena Hawkins, Lani Combier-Kapel, Jen May

Lani (Volunteer Chef): It’s easy to get wrapped in bar culture here, or to just go to a show and leave to go home, fall asleep, and go to your 9–5 job. That’s not the life I’m interested in; I want to be immersed in the art and music that happens here. Being involved in Silent Barn satisfies a part of my personality that helps me grow as an artist and musician.

Eli (Art Chef): Silent Barn is an excellent experiment in joining art, life, and politics. We’ve managed to corral so many brilliant people and force their conflicts and concordances into creating something with the potential to be truly new and exciting.

Nina (hosts Phresh Cutz): It’s this great community environment that really supports experimental ideas or any kind of creative thing. My whole life, the events I’ve really enjoyed and been inspired by have been in community-based creative art spaces like this, so it’s really great to support that and help facilitate it by giving people space to do what they want to do.

Phresh Cutz, photo by Meghan O’Byrne

Kunal (Babycastles): The thing that’s important is the promise of this strange experiment actually producing something of immense value to the world. Once we get all the pieces solidly in place, a massively successful mechanism of including participation from almost anyone interested, a successful “community-building” pathway for any new voice interested in gathering and growing any piece of culture inside of a stew of culture, successfully extending the value of all this community, strengthening the celebration to our direct neighbors and thereby to the city as a whole as a truly exhaustively functioning projection of the social ecosystem that the world should be, the potential for the thing to be so strong that it continues to channel and nurture and organize new voices in art and communication almost entirely, and finally, some sort of flowering and seeding aspect, where the energy is too much for the small space, and the vision encompassed inside starts to blow up, fly with the wind to surrounding areas, and just take over life in the city itself, and the ideas propagate strongly and successfully. Stuff like that.

Hieroglyph Thesaurus performing

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): Silent Barn acts as an artistically inclined autonomous zone, where we get to make the rules and share the work we want and are excited by. I don’t think it’s too different than the DIY ethos of other collective art spaces in Brooklyn and around the world throughout history, but I happen to live here and want to be able to participate directly in the culture I consume, and this is as solidly sustainable a way to do so, on my own terms, that I’ve found in New York.

Mila: The Barn is a place where my ideas about what I can and can’t do are constantly challenged. I am constantly forced to reexamine how I think and how I do things, because infinitely more is possible, permissible, and at stake. Plus it feels like family.

Title:Point theatre company’s desk/workspace.

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): I participate in the Silent Barn because it’s giving vitality and substance and life to the concept of constructing our own world—a concept that I find hyper-American but strangely near extinct in this country today. I love experiencing the art and ideas that all these diverse individuals create and, in a broader sense, I love helping to create the space that makes that human freedom possible.

***

Like this? Read about more collectives: Flux Factory, Monster Island, the Schoolhouse, Hive, Bushwick Project for the Arts

dead herring

oriana on 23 Jan ’13

space type: apartment & music | neighborhood: williamsburg | active: 2007–2013 | links: myspace, facebook, twitter

For most of its run, Dead Herring—an apartment that sometimes doubled as a DIY music and occasional theatre space was fairly averse to any sort of press. That’s just part of the fun of running an underground apartment venue—some measure of paranoia is often called for. But Dead Herring closed Feb 1st, 2013, right after an amazing commemorative closing show, featuring the Immaculates (a band that was formed at a Dead Herring party), Moonmen on the Moon, Man (who broke up and then reunited just for this show), Necking!! (one of the Dead Herring creators’ band), and special secret guests.

Cuddle Machines, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Read my interview with housemates Liz, Nicki, Jeff, and Andrew, which took place on the eve of the end of Dead Herring, below. For more pix from Nicki, there’s a terrific six-year DH photo retrospective at Impose Magazine. And be sure to check out their new space in North Williamsburg, Cloud City!

show posters, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a quick history of how this all got started.
Jeff: Liz and I went to college together in California, and we both lived in this co-op called Cloyne Court Hotel in Berkeley that used to have shows in the kitchen, in the basement, wherever. The first time I went there Nerf Herder was playing, and I was like, “Whoa, this place is awesome! I’m moving in here next year!”
Nicki: My band played there once, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were kegs in the quad, there was a room no one could go into, there was the most disgusting bathroom I’d ever seen in my life, it was covered in graffiti, and just everyone going crazy and hanging off pipes. It was so cool.
Jeff: And then years later I wound up living across the hall from Liz and Nick in the McKibben Lofts.
Liz: Nick and I are the ones who started Dead Herring. We had a couple of shows at McKibben, and when we heard about this space, we thought it would be great place to continue to do that. Nicki moved in six months later, and Jeff moved in in 2008, and Andrew moved in two years ago, in 2010.

Bare Wires, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What was the first show?
Nicki: It was Maneguar, Pterodactyl, Golden Error, Marvel & Knievel, and Nonhorse.

brooklyn spaces: Do you all book shows?
Liz: I don’t. Nicki books all the music now, Jeff does the variety shows, and Andrew has brought some plays in.
brooklyn spaces: Nicki, is there a succinct way to characterize what kind of music you book here?
Nicki: No, not really. We used to have a lot more experimental noise shows when Nick lived here, because he was into experimental noise music and he booked that. I’m more into punk and rock and indie pop. I don’t know, it just depends on what comes together. If there’s a band coming through that we know, we’ll book around them. Or if we see a band we really like we’ll tell them to come play here. It used to be easier for bands to find us when we used the MySpace page, but that just became too much, we were getting like fifteen emails a day. None of us is a full-time booker, you know? When I have ten minutes I’ll IM people, like, “Hey, you want to play a show?”

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me either the coolest or weirdest thing about living in a place where there are shows.
Nicki: A funny thing is that people don’t realize that we live here. People come here for shows and then they’ll come over for a potluck and be like, “Oh, wow, it looks so different. I didn’t know you had a couch.”
brooklyn spaces: I think that’s part of the charm of these spaces, that you know while you’re watching this band you’re sitting on the roof of someone’s closet or washing your hands in their kitchen sink.
Jeff: Did you read the article about the new Silent Barn in the Village Voice? They were saying how most DIY spaces are illegal, like no one can talk about it, which has kind of been our thing. But now the Silent Barn is like “No, this is completely legal.” They’re going to get a liquor license and whatever. One of our old roommates, Joe, who’s part of Showpaper, he lives there now.
Andrew: I had a lot of conversations with Joe when he lived here about this whole thing, about how all these spaces are somewhere along a continuum, like how much are they a house, and how much are they a venue? Silent Barn has always been basically a venue, even though people live there. We’re really a house that has shows once in a while.

Golden Error, photo by Nicki Ishmael

Nicki: We have to tell people all the time that they can’t have their birthday party here, or their mud-wrestling party. We’ve gotten a lot of weird requests over the years. But overall it’s fantastic, this house pretty much made my life in New York. I met all these people, I found something to do and a community to be in. I had no idea there was a music scene that was this small and this amazing here. You have these moments where you realize this is happening in your life and you created it and you’re a part of it. It makes me so happy. It’s so great when you have a whole bunch of bands come in at the beginning of the night, you’ve never met any of them before, and at the end of the night they’re all giving you giant hugs and saying this was the best show they’ve ever played. It’s so amazing that we had the opportunity to do this.
Jeff: People really appreciate us just trying to make an awesome, fun night, and when everybody’s stoked on it, it’s a good feeling. It’s great when really talented, amazing people have a great time performing here.
Andrew: We just had a theatre show that did a three-night run, and It was like we were living in this little theatre that everyone was a part of. I don’t know if you could achieve that in any other setting.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you think that being in Williamsburg has affected the space?
Nicki: I really like that Death By Audio is so close, and 285 Kent, and Glasslands. It’s nice that there are still a few really good spaces around here. And I feel like living off the L and the J is convenient, a lot of people can come out to shows here. I don’t always want to go all the way to Bushwick, but people seem happy to come all the way out here, which is awesome. Jeff’s shows get put up on the Nonsense NYC list sometimes, and people come here from wherever because they’re like “Oh, I know where that is, I can get there.”
Andrew: For a performing arts venue it really makes a difference if it’s in a part of town that people want to go to.

Teenage Nightwar, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: And it’s nice to see that there are still places like this in Williamsburg. A lot of people think that all the creativity is gone from this neighborhood, but that’s not true. It’s just a little harder to find. Anyway, tell me about some of your favorite shows.
Nicki: My favorite “I can’t believe I actually pulled this together” show was when Forgetters played here, Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker’s band. So many people I know have loved his music since we were like sixteen years old, and he played in my living room! And we had this band called Leg Sweeper come, they played with our friends’ band Sleepies, and they were so excited about playing here, and we were so excited about having them play, and after the show we all hung out until 5 in the morning, and everybody slept over, and we made waffles in the morning, and it was magical. Or another one, after The Men played, we had a limbo contest with the guys in the band, which was so ridiculous and fun. I think the craziest show we ever had here was Calvin Johnson and Chain and the Gang. When I introduced Chain and the Gang, everyone just freaked the fuck out.
Liz: That show was my teenage dream come true. I was so thrilled, I couldn’t believe he was in our house. He got here early, and we were trying to set up, and our old cat was sitting on the bar, and he sang a song to the cat! It killed me. My other favorite moment was when Social Studies, our friends’ band from San Francisco, played last year. Right before they started to play my favorite song, someone cut in and said, “We just found out the Giants are going to the World Series.” The whole crowd was full of people from California, and everyone was so so so excited.

photo by Maximus Comissar

Andrew: I’m from Minneapolis, so when our friends’ theatre group came from Minneapolis to do their play, it was really exciting for me to get to share this space with them. They used to live in a space like this in Minneapolis, and one of them had a space like this in Baltimore before that where my theatre troupe performed, so being able to return the favor was really gratifying.
Jeff: I like all the variety shows, I guess. Oh and Reggie Watts, that was awesome. And Corn Mo.
Nicki: And the ventriloquist! And the magician who sawed a woman in half! And the guy from Cirque de Soliel who took all his clothes off and climbed all over the entire audience! And the lady who juggled with her feet! I know it sounds like we’re making this stuff up, but we’re not.
Jeff: Yeah, we’ve had some crazy stuff.

Hunters, photo by Nicki Ishmael

brooklyn spaces: What advice do would you give to other people who want to do something like this?
Nicki: Be nice. That’s something we try really hard to do. Now we’re friends with all the bands and performers and other DIY spaces in the city. That’s why we’re not super nervous about going into the new space. We feel like we’re not going to be alone, because all these other people are going to support us. All the DIY spaces are kind of in it together.
Jeff: Yeah, it sounds cheesy but we really feel like we’re part of a community. And we’re good at welcoming people in and having a positive vibe about everything.
Nicki: That makes it a lot more fun for everyone. We want to have fun too!

***

Like this? Read about more apartment performance spaces: Silent Barn, The Muse, Cave of Archaic Remnants, The Schoolhouse, Greenroom Brooklyn, Newsonic, Jerkhaus

vaudeville park

oriana on 25 Mar ’12

space type: art & music venue | neighborhood: williamsburg | active: 2008–2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Vaudeville Park is a plucky arts venue with wildly diverse programming. It sits right on the borderline (at least, the current one) between Williamsburg and Bushwick. Run by experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist Ian Colletti, Vaudeville Park has shows nearly ever night, including all kinds of music (from synth to neo-chamber to ladies of experimental music), literature, film (from Noir Night to avant garde), dance and performance art, gallery shows, comedy, discussions, workshops (from yoga to circuit bending), and more. The space has been active for almost four years, and is now starting to get a lot of attention from the media, including regular mentions from the likes of Time Out New York, Brookly Vegan, Artcat, and Rhizome. Ian is one insanely busy guy who is also incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about the work he does. Check out my interview with him, and then please, go see something amazing at Vaudeville Park!

Ian Colletti, photo from Vaudeville Park's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: How did you get started with all this?
Ian: I’m from New York, born and raised, and I’ve been an artist and a musician pretty much my whole life. It felt like the early 2000s were a dark time for counterculture in Williamsburg. I mean, there was a lot of cool stuff going on for artists, but that was when groups like the Strokes and Interpol and Ambulance LTD, and really high-fashionisa galleries were huge. It was an appropriation of mainstream, cookie-cutter ideals into counterculture. It was like everyone who was in a band really just wanted to be a model in a Levi’s ad. Now artists have a chance to really represent themselves through their own savvy with the internet, but at that point there were just a few labels and magazines that promoted musicians. I was living with this guy from Fader magazine, and he was like, “Man, if you want to start your own weird art collective, you have to kiss these people’s asses.” I was like, No way. I just didn’t want to be part of this phony, arrogant, silver-spoon kind of thing. But I was really worried about the culture here, so in 2007 I stopped playing shows and performing, saved up as much money as I could, and turned my recording studio into an arts venue. The first show we had was Dreamtigers, by Brian Zegeer, who’s one of my best friends. He just headlined the Queens Museum “International 2012,” along with two of my other good friends, Ben Lee and Rachel Mason, both of whom have been really involved here. There’s an extreme synergy here that’s really important.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Was it a nonprofit from the start?
Ian: Well, it was always nonprofit in its mission. We’re sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts now; they picked Showpaper two years ago and they picked us last year. NYFA is good people, but we need our own 501(c)3, which we just went for, and we need to get larger grants.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How do you pick your programming? Are you the only one who directs it?
Ian: Yes. Basically the mission of Vaudeville Park is to represent underrepresented artists of high craft. My goal is to pair the best minds and artistry and craft in music to the best visual and performance art. I really feel that people’s eyes have gotten bigger from constantly looking at things, but their ears have gotten much smaller. People don’t listen to records, they don’t really put effort into making records, and if they do it’s just ear candy, it’s less performance-based, there’s less heart and soul, it’s not as evolved. So I wanted to have a venue for counterculture music, like dark wave, coldwave, post-whatever, and new chamber and post-classical music. I felt that if I put the music in a gallery context, it would up the ante, like, “This music better be pretty damn good because these visual artists are so good.”

art by Alexander Barton, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: So all the shows are music plus visual art plus something else?
Ian: Well, no. We have several different programs, and sometimes we combine them. There’s a gallery art program, with one show a month, either a group show or a few specific artists. Then there’s an archival film program, which includes one of our most famous shows, Noir Night. We’ve also had cartoon carnival stuff, we’ve had optics, we’re now working with the curators at Millenium Theatre and Anthology Film Archives, and we’re starting to have closer ties with the Kitchen. Then we have a TV program on Manhattan Neighborhood Network with my good friend Scott Kiernan, who does ESP TV. Then we have a performance art program. There are only four galleries and art spaces in New York City that host performance art. We’ve done a bunch of performances in the past, recently Esther Neff and The Penelopes and Performancy Forum. And finally we have the music program. We do workshops too, we’ve hosted a lot of extremely successful workshops, the biggest one that everyone constantly asks for is the electronics in music workshop for circuit bending. But we just can’t do it again without funding.

circuit-bending workshop, photo from Vaudeville Park's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What about your own art? What kind of music do you play?
Ian: I do a lot of stuff, I’m a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer. I was the first featured soloist in the Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in November, and I made all these crazy handmade instruments and soundscape synthesizer stuff. I’ve done a lot of film scores, dance scores, music for fashion. I mostly do new works for chamber. The music that I’m doing now, the best way to put it is the orchestral coldwave height of pop that was never made. It’s like post-romantic coldwave blitz with eighteenth- to nineteenth-century post-classical music, and also a lot of Latin jazz and obscurities.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of your favorite shows here.
Ian: One of my favorites was a Crystalline Flux installation, because one of the things I want to push for Vaudeville Park is doing something totally new, something that’s almost like a trip back to Bauhaus, or Kaprow’s Happenings, which were installations and events where a whole art space was transformed into a stage full of specific performers. So a bunch of my friends—Ben Lee of Beta Copperhead, Brent Arnold, Anthony Johnson, Caleb Missure, and Naomi Rice, who’s in a band Next Wave Festival—we transformed the whole space into a stage that would specifically fit one performer, kind of like a static music video. That was one of the most special art events I’ve ever been to. Also Noir Night is one of my favorite ones, I really think it works with the intention of the space. And I really like the Dreamtigers and Avatar Atavistic, and Myra Brim’s gallery show “April Sky,” and Christy Walsh’s dance piece, this flamenco classical guitar thing. I like pretty much everything here, it’s kind of a blur.

[below, from Ladies of Experimental Music: Leah Coloff, Meaghan Burke, and Valerie Kuehne; photos by Maximus]

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk a little more about the neighborhood. Do you feel like being here on this weird cusp between Bushwick and Williamsburg affects the space?
Ian: Vaudeville Park is not a Williamsburg space, I’m not trying to make it “Williamsburg-y.” It’s the gateway to Bushwick arts, since we’re on the first block of Bushwick. During the last Bushwick Open Studios, the L train was down and we were the first place people saw. That’s a great festival, Arts in Bushwick works really hard.

brooklyn spaces: You’re getting a lot of attention from the media lately, but ultimately, this is a small space. Is there any worry you’ll get too well known?
Ian: No. Lots of shows here are really packed, but I’m trying to only do things that make sense in a smaller space. This is an arts venue, it’s done with no money but with the best programming and art possible. And by being good to people and treating artists well and believing in this community, you can go a long way. People who have run spaces like this, they do it for a couple years and then give up, and they have every damn right to, because it can be really hard and really frustrating. But what happens if you don’t give up? What happens if every time you think, “This is as far as I can go,” you’re like “Let’s go further”? What happens if we just keep expanding more and doing better? I’m really excited and happy to be doing this and to have all these special people involved. I’m really lucky.

***

Like this? Read about more arts venues: Chez Bushwick, Gowanus Ballroom, Bushwick Starr, Monster Island, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Fort Useless

silent barn

oriana on 9 Feb ’11

neighborhood: bushwick | space type: music space | active since: 2005 | links: website, facebook, twitter, myspace

update spring 2013: The Barn is back! Now in Bushwick, and bigger, more diverse, and more ambitious than ever. Read my profile of the new space here.

update October 2011: In July, the Silent Barn was completely ransacked. About $15,000 worth of equipment was stolen, and the space itself was violently sabotaged. But demonstrating the indomitability and resilience of the NYC DIY music scene, the people who run the Barn launched and completed a Kickstarter campaign in September, raising an incredible $40,000 toward a new space.

photo from Showpaper

Silent Barn is an all-ages music venue. It’s also a living space with a rotating cast of roommates, the walls feature dozens of murals by local artists, and there’s an intricate recording system with mics scattered throughout the house. Silent Barn is also home to a zine library with over 700 books, and the DIY videogame arcade Babycastles. It’s one of Todd P‘s many go-to venues.

This one is kind of a cheat, I know, because Ridgewood is of course in Queens. But Silent Barn is barely in Queens, literally across the street from Bushwick, and anyway, it really exemplifies the kind of space I started this blog to cover: relatively unknown, DIY-great, creative and fun and unique. Plus it turns out that one of the bookers (Jordan Michael, who is also the editorial director of the DIY music listings publication Showpaper) is a friend of a friend, and he was happy to let me poke around and take pictures, and he graciously chatted with me while setting up for the night’s show, plugging in mics, digging through buckets full of cables and wires, telling sundry band members where to load in, and arguing with other Silent Barn folks about who’s worse at setting up PAs and which bands have made the latest unreasonable demands. Interview below!

Juiceboxxx, photo from Fiddle While You Burn

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space?
Jordan: It was started six years ago by this band Skeletons. They lived here and used it as a practice space, and they started playing shows and having their friends play shows. Over time there’s been dozens of people who have moved in and out, and lots of people who get involved don’t actually live here, like myself. This isn’t really my project; it doesn’t really belong to anybody, it belongs to the community.

 

brooklyn spaces: How did you get involved?
Jordan: Me and Joe, who lives here, work together on Showpaper, which is basically a publication about DIY music spaces like this one. I also work with comics and zines, and I started the zine library here. About a year ago I curated some workshops with the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, they came here and did some workshops on making indie comics. Then I did a benefit show for the zine library where if people donated a zine they could get in for free, and that went really well, and I just realized I liked and was good at organizing bands. Organizing bands in a space like this is kind of like marbles. You know the game marbles, where there’s a circle that’s like a wall, and the marbles all just roll away on their own momentum out of the wall? It’s kind of like that.

brooklyn spaces: Is it always the same kind of music?
Jordan: No. Tonight’s show is indie-rock-punkish music, and the show I have Saturday night is all chiptune, and the last show I did was a mixture of hardcore punk and local hiphop, and the show before that was folk. So I’d say it’s just all good music. I don’t know, everybody’s called me a music snob my whole life, but now I’m a curator.

brooklyn spaces: You mentioned that there’s a system where all of the rooms are recorded, not just the show space. What’s that about?
Jordan: That’s Lucas’s project. He’s a cassette artist, and he’s in the band Woods. It’s a recording of the entire space at the same time, not just a recording of the bands that play. So on a Friday, you hear the Dominican restaurant next door playing bachata music and people screaming at each other.

brooklyn spaces: And it’s used for what? Just to have?
Jordan: To record. To survey.

Team Robespierre, photo from Brooklyn Vegan

brooklyn spaces: Since this is a blog about Brooklyn, do you have any opinion about whether a space like this could have happened somewhere other than Brooklyn?
Jordan: Yeah, it could have happened in Ridgewood! I mean, there’s tons of spaces like this, all over. One of my favorite things about doing this is getting to meet all the people that are participating in places like this from all over the world. They all have their different things, but they’re all similar. There’s a place in Bushwick called Shea Stadium, their sound booth is an actual recording booth, on their website they have professional recordings of all their live shows. There’s a place called the Rhinoceropolis in Denver that’s a lot like this, there’s The Smell in LA, there’s Whitehaus in Boston; in every city there’s a place like this. It’s normally run by people who are in bands and can’t get anybody to book them, so they just have their friends come over and play for them, and then their friends want to play, and then people who came to their friends’ show want to play, and it just becomes a thing. It can totally happen somewhere other than Brooklyn. Actually, I’d say one of my major pet peeves is when people talk about Brooklyn like it’s this wonderful Oz place, the only place where things like this can happen. There are tons of cities, like Athens, that have a much more historical independent music scene than New York. I don’t really think New York’s all that special, to be honest. I’m way more impressed by Philadelphia or Baltimore. All the people in Baltimore are doing cool shit all the time, and they’re in a lot more danger than we are here. This isn’t a great neighborhood; it’s not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not great. But Baltimore is horrible.

Wham City, photo from Hyperallergic

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you want to tell the world?
Jordan: Yeah, don’t hang out outside the doors. We’re not BYOB, don’t bring in your own beers. And don’t be a dick about it when I try to take your beers away from you; it’s my friend’s house, I can take away your beer. And I want to stress that we really don’t let kids drink here. And don’t smoke upstairs, people live here. Smoke downstairs! We let you smoke inside, just go downstairs, stop being a dick about it.

brooklyn spaces: So generally stop being a dick?
Jordan: Yeah, stop being a dick.

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Like this? Read about more music spaces: Shea Stadium, Death By Audio, Dead Herring, Fort Useless, Bushwick Music Studios, Newsonic Loft