Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighborhood so unlovely it’s been named an EPA superfund site, is Ground Zero now for music lofts, as reported in my new City Arts-New York column. In a half dozen or so artist-run spaces — including IBeam, Douglas Street Collective, Littlefield, the Brooklyn Lyceum and Issue Project Room — available for presentation and rehearsal of hard-core experimental sounds, dance, video and performance art, the programming is typically spiky, ambitious and unsentimental.
Manhattan music “loft” Roulette takes big chance on Brooklyn
Roulette, since 1978 a formerly humble Manhattan-based presenter of avant-garde “intermedia,” has signed a 20-year lease on a former YWCA art deco 600-seat theater in Brooklyn. This Next weekend (Oct. 7, 8, 9) is the space’s three-night benefit “Easy Not Easy,” assigning emerging (read: little known) artists presumably simple scores by such its longtime stalwarts as Pauline Oliveros and John Zorn. Read more all about it in my column in City Arts – New York . . .