Nothing new happened at C2C Festival, hosted last weekend at Knockdown Center (52-19 Flushing Ave), though some of the music migrated outdoors this year. Be grateful for that. We’re circling something here, and drains are sort of exits.

Knockdown’s grounds used to have a productive history (the former home of Gleason-Tiebout Glass and Manhattan Door), and it’s heartening to see that history still on display: I can confirm Knockdown still has doors, some made of glass, at least when the cops aren’t calling. In America, Jean Baudrillard writes of the roadside motel: “All the corridors, with their worn-out carpets, display a single sign: EXIT. You can leave in any direction you like.”

What’s left in transit accessible/colonizable Maspeth and East Williamsburg are logistical hubs of entertainment, places where you should run, not walk, through adult theme park experiences: Elsewhere, Mansions, an amusement park (Area 53). It’s a place where no one lives but everyone seems to be, and still they haven’t discovered funnel cake: at KDC, you could eat from a catering pop-up called Empire BBQ, which served no discernible BBQ; or from a mobile version of Roberta’s (which Helen Rosner in the New Yorker once incorrectly declared as being in wherever ‘east Bushwick’ is); or exist solely on The People’s $8 well shots.

I don’t feel any nostalgia toward the old masses clocking in for dangerous, backbreaking work. This isn’t their place or history anymore. Inversely to everyone at C2C, the former residents probably moved to the Sun Belt, or western Pennsylvania (from which confirmed but accidental SodaStream owner and and editorial overseer Andrew Karpan came).

The people who make the short commute to Maspeth now are crowds of knowledge and service workers, humble retail employees and people who consult and strategize about cadences, modalities, the structure underpinning all internal comms. They all dressed in some iteration of blacked-out club attires (accented with narrow sunglasses), Burning Man adjacent ravewear, and hordes of guys¹ —all probably there for YHWH Nailgun—who were best exemplified by a guy in a Spiderland shirt who seemed lost. And together, they bobbled their heads together.

Nothing you haven’t seen before. C2C’s whole world was like the one cousin you like.

Notes: 

Elias Rønnenfelt: Rønnenfelt played outdoors with a minimal set up, pushing new material from an album he recently made with Dean Blunt. A “formidable mediocrity,” more notable these days for terrorizing astroturfed Jenna Ortega stans. He lacked the urgency that made his earlier music with Iceage so compelling. He’s become a sort of everyman, living the fate that comes for everyone in their 30s: if change is not the option, you can do what you’ve always done, run back the same bit, and you can probably get away with it until your hair gets too thin and security feels bad when they peep your ID. There is an afterlife: we all grow up into ghosts, singing tender and moving songs that sound like buying expensive t-shirts. His voice, which has always sounded so distinctly like 10 or so other asstd. punk singers from the years 1980-86, feels now only somehow fainter and more tired, as if he wished profoundly to sound like something else and had given up.

I imagine receiving Best New Music from Pitchfork must feel good, even if no one takes them seriously anymore. Even gold star stickers glitter for adults. But not every band has the PR team to get BNM five times in a row, as Rønnenfelt’s still persisting group has done. (They have number six coming out later this month, if you want to start putting odds on Kalshi.) Nor can every band get away with being the Jesus Lizard, running back the same album four times to endless praise from guys who love punk but have also read a Gladwell book in the last 3 years. I imagine the incoming 7.6 might sting like antiseptic.

Malibu: Concurrent with Rønnenfelt was Malibu, a tense French producer playing a very loose type of ambient brought to life by a Sauron searchlight. It was a great place to be on your phone: one of the tried and true pastimes of any concert.

Aya: DJing behind enormous flopping pigtails, the English producer behind im hole (yes, BNM, yes, Philip Sherburne writes: “A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom…) would occasionally ask us what we wanted her to play. Maybe something esoteric and experimental or more of those drum and bass bangers? At other times, Aya Sinclair would lament “the state of the NHS,” as a writer for the Guardian would later report back.  I tried to imagine them somewhere in this big warehouse with us, thinking, “It was part of the performance: Aya’s chaotic music rebels against formal structure, becoming a sonic vehicle for exploding the limitations of gender.” But did it make you (w)hole?

YHWH Nailgun: Where This Heat’s Deceit lamented decline and nuclear death, Philly transplants YHWH Nailgun aestheticize rot as something to mosh or even dance questionably to. Language has no communicable meaning, and the sound of a guitar no longer resembles how it looks. There’s no social contract left to dramatize or argue over. We might as well be apes. And, in that medium, YHWH are doing something that, inversely to the experience of the legacy of This Heat, feels both new and interesting to British people.²

YHWH closed out the sets in the club’s backyard with a preview of their upcoming album Magazine in a set that lasted maybe 20 minutes. Shouts for encores rang out and I was happy they didn’t return. Had they returned to play all of 45 Pounds, which was also about 20 minutes long, we would’ve heard nothing new and they did a good job refining their soon-to-be old sound.³ 

It sounded enough like their old sound, at any rate. Brooding hardcore, sung so gutturally that it required singer Zack Borzone to also prowl onstage in circles but, unlike Rønnenfelt, he was sweating profusely. He was also aping something – Iggy Pop, 1968-72 – but it was a self-possessed impersonation, he was letting the character breathe. At one point, Borzone began dramatically biting into an orange and I’d be also impressed if I lived in London. You can’t imagine they get good fresh fruit over there

Avalon Emerson: I’ll always associate Emerson with the CA-1 north of Big Sur, where it becomes something like cowboy country as I listened to “Sandrail Silhouette” on the way up through San Fran to the Redwoods. Her newest album, Written Into Changes, is a louder and brighter sequel to & the Charm. Her quieter pop stylings have become medium-sized venue-friendly ’80s throwbacks in the vein of the 1975. Behind her, a saxophonist, charmingly swings the thing up and down, as if that decade will never end and maybe this one won’t wither. She looks so happy playing those songs, the only unconditional joy that night.

Los Thuthanaka: Automatic God. Among the various Pitchfork BMN winners gathered that night, Los Thuthanaka was the only urgently new music at C2C, and most urgently dressed; the pair of Andean-Californian siblings appearing in matching indigenous (Ayamra) getups, bedazzled with illustrated flowers and crowned with cowboy hats.

Slowed cumbia beats dissolved into washes of noise in which there must’ve still been a rhythm, but it was impossible to find, even when I closed my eyes and focused. The songs are wordless and count in numbers unknown to us. In Pitchfork (etcetera, etcetera) Joshua Minsoo Kim writes: “There’s something to these subtle developments,” and, he’s right, there is.

I looked up and imagined the roof disassembling, its component pieces floating up along with me, through the opening and onto a connecting flight to La Paz. Record scratching and a return to Uyuni. Air horns coming from the Devil’s Door outside Tupiza. Circular guitar riffs giving me a walking tour through Sucre. The totality of a truly syncretic cultural object blocking the road to Cochabamba, along with all the bloqueos occupying the highway, making me turn back to KDC, returning gorgeous, infinitely to where it’s all beginning again. 

I saw awe on the faces of others. They either lost or learned their capacities for dance. Pop components produced a totally new whole.

Nourished by Time: Singsongy in the way of childhood hits, earnest and profound, accessible to anyone with a sixth grade reading. A reiteration of Prince without the pretension of also being an elf, singing songs to Arthur Russell beats, a living balance of world-wariness and happiness. Baltimore’s Marcus Elliot Brown achieved all of that despite being the one performer whom KDC’s audio team seemed to have it out for. They couldn’t adjust his bass levels, or make his vocals clear, or give his small backing band a fully functioning synth.

He played all those songs we liked from his last album, and then songs from the one before that too. Sometimes, on stage, he would turn around to flip through a book, in front of a camera, with the footage projected behind him. It was evocative of Daniel Lopatin’s use of filmed puppets during his set last year at the same festival.

Brown held composure through it all, Job-like and joblike (he mostly wore business casual). It’s a relief to know there’s no use in throwing a fit.

Arca: While DJing, Arca appeared superimposed on the screen behind her, a filter rendering her liquid. A former Björk associate, Arca makes the music of capital: information is quantified, sequenced, and delivered to a recipient as quickly as possible. She is the global, frictionless flow of information, a dream from the ’90s, heightened by signals toward Ghost in the Shell (leather, light, the cybernetic shapes she takes on her album covers). Sometimes, she would jump on top of the table and smoke a joint and it was remarkable how charismatic she made even doing that look.

Her remixes were largely referential valorizations. The repetition of “porra de caralho” in a baile remix laid bare the appeal of her Exoticism for Dummies: such an evocative phrase just means “Goddammit,” or “Shit fuck,” as if you stubbed your toe. In addition to playing a Bad Bunny remix, this was music that repackaged culture for audience intent on other things: dance, photography of the self, casual drug culture. And so on. 

Outro

During Nourished by Time, a tall man blocked my view. He had one arm around his blond girlfriend and held her drink in his free hand. I never saw his face in profile, but I could tell his jaw was strong, his hairline intact, and I imagined us fighting and me somehow, impossibly, winning, before I saw he was wearing a Cindy Lee shirt. This was a soulful, harmless white boy who had earned his life as I saw it: a celebration of taste he cultivated online, and love.

Cindy Lee defines our current cultural condition across music and fashion. Initially a part of Women, one of the last innovative post-punk bands ever, Patrick Flegel took up 1960s throwback drag and perfected Pinkian hypnagogic rock. It’s beautiful music, but nothing new, intentionally so.

Cultural innovation seemed to’ve exhausted itself by the invention of skinny jeans. In the chillwave/American Apparel era, culture seemed to stop, or enter a new nostalgia mode, as defined by Frederic Jameson, who I am sure most readers here are glad to see quoted, especially when he says that mode expresses “the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.” After American Apparel came successive waves of normcore, boho revival, 80s and 90s throwbacks, the Covid-era y2k revival.

And now, in 2026, we look to the late 2000s: indie sleaze is still endemic across the territory. Everyone dresses like your average Hoosier Walmart shopper in 2008. In our calendar of revisiting, we’re mere years away from the post-Recession blues that rendered us incapable of generating innovative art. After that, one can only assume a new era of throwbacks to throwbacks that will collapse like an LLM training on its own outputs, eating its own shit until we’re out of clothes, asses out, finally coming to the admission that—for now—we have nothing new to say, no new sounds to make, no new ways to display ourselves.

Everything is faster than ever, all of it easily recognized. Until the break’s over, I’ll be grateful that nothing’s going on.

Photos by Andrew Karpan.

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1. Including coteries of Post-Hardcore Americans kept on going into the bathroom stalls two or three at a time. They must’ve just been having sex together. An attempted Rockefeller Sinter bacchanal in City Councilman Phil Wong’s Maspeth, his America. ↩︎
2. An imprint of Young, the London label behind the xx and FKA twigs, put out their debut 45 Pounds and higher-tier London indie 4AD signed the band shortly after their C2C set. ↩︎
3. I say this as someone as the proud of not just one, but now two, YHWH t-shirts
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