“If you fuck with me, fuck with me and if you don’t fuck with me go somewhere else,” said Luwayne Glass, tall, operating behind dreads, plumes of smoke and better known as Dreamcrusher. Originally from Kansas, Dreamcrusher has spent the past decade as a kind of immortal and lingering noise poet of the area, see their 2015 record “Myrtle Ave-Broadway,” a maze of piercing distortion that reveals itself as a hauntingly beautiful loop of anguished field recordings. I’d recognize the sound of those sirens anywhere, even if I can’t.  I had caught Dreamcrusher once before, a year earlier, playing a sparsely-attended DIY music festival, which had booked a room at a nearby gay bar. It was interesting to see what a difference a few blocks could make. Or not see. More at home here, Dreamcrusher seemed to recede in the dark, more relaxed as an outline, faintly illuminated. The lack of lighting seemed to benefit the overall Dreamcrusher experience, a sound that was just porous and without particular form outside of noise, part of what the writer Hanif Abdurraqi once called Dreamcrusher’s protracted “battle to create work that borders on the political without being seen solely as a political entity.” 

Something in the early spring air felt calmer now. Perhaps it was the incense Dreamcrusher would light up and then lift, which would occasionally illuminate the minimally elevated stage at Market Hotel. Dreamcrusher was second-billed, in front of Holland Andrews, the improvisational, non-simultaneous opera singer and clarinetist, and then behind Lia Ouyang Rusli, releasing their latest album that night under the spirited moniker OHYUNG. A composer of growing renown — they scored Julio Torres’ Bushwick-set comedy Problemista last year — Rusli followed this move by recording the ominously titled You Are Always On My Mind, full of big billowing pop drums, melodramatic strings and “the deeply emotional, often ecstatic experience of New York City nightlife,” as PAPER magazine would have it. They’re giving the album a brief tour around the northeast, which will include a stop back in Bushwick opening for the undergroud rap duo Armand Hammer and L’Rain, another cult indie composer, inside a warehouse at 99 Scott. In fact, Rusli shot the music video for one of those songs, the bombastically sad “No Good,” out in the nearby warehouses too, recognizably on Flushing Avenue. In the clip, Rusli struts on the sidewalk’s cold concrete, by themself and wearing various parts of a wedding dress. 

On stage, Rusli is similarly charismatic, capable of holding a look for moments, and then for seconds. The way they sang the songs had a kind of pierced, glaring forcefulness; beautiful in a rough, energetic way that hung in the room. For the last song, Rusli tore into the crowd of some hundred or so people and jumped on one of those foldable metal chairs and sang loudly from there. Then they walked back to the stage, bowed down, and sang loudly some more.

You Are Always On My Mind is out now on NNA Tapes. Listen on Spotify or buy on Bandcamp.

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Photos taken by Michelle Maier and Andrew Karpan.