Description
Book SynopsisIn
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
Trade Review"
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most important music scenes of the past 30-plus years." -- Dave Mandl * The Wire *
"Well-researched. . . . Drawing on these first-hand accounts as well as on his access to the personal archives of some of the artists involved, Bradley provides a lively account of the neighborhood’s vital experimental music movement from its underground beginnings in various squats and abandoned industrial sites to its eventual dissolution in the face of rising rents and gentrification." -- Daniel Barbiero * Point of Departure *
"One of the most important strengths of
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is that it elaborates with equal care, regardless of idiom or generation, on the intentions, ideas and aesthetic strategies of the highly diverse range of artists who could find a platform there. . . . What makes Bradley’s archeology at the same time so urgently contemporary is that so many of the artists covered are alive and active right now, even if a good number of them may still be underground." -- Patrick Brennan * Arteidolia *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
