Looking at the people seated through the electronic sets, the quieter moments lent the sense we were in a waiting room. Then a beat arrived and I imagined us driving along the highway, and they were texting while driving, looking up briefly when a beat came and when it went. Technology beautifies what James Agee once saw in an earlier Williamsburg and Bushwick: “the wood tenements, the bare lots and broken vistas, the balanced weights and images of production and poverty.” Fires, so many fires, a Lego playground in the ashes chronicled by slop and nightlife chatter. I can’t blame us for being so distracted.
At Mixed Signals, an electronic show at Hex House (undisclosed) in East Williamsburg, DJs aimed to address our disconnections with techno, an embodiment of the technological in the material world. It’s one of a series of Hidden City events running through August that seeks to echo “a spirit of New York that has not been championed in some time” due to “big tech co-opting every aspect of our lives,” per the press release that convinced me to go, all while fundraising for Mayday Space, a Bushwick mutual aid mainstay whose space in Bushwick was sold out from under them. Tonight, Hidden City hosted sets by MF Clark, Monica Duncan, Amy Jiang, and Lin Fang, among others.
No social media marketing drove traffic to the event, Hidden City claimed: only flyers and tabling at parks. Word of mouth mustered up enough of a crowd to reach the boiling point where more than three people danced. Under programmed lights, so out of step with Erin Wajufos’s techno set, two dancers worked together, and they appeared so natural. I wasn’t sure if they were hard at work, or simply better than everyone else here at having fun.
Around them, smiles out of place in a Brooklyn whose club culture is built on a self-seriousness that’s groveling and deferential toward Germans (derogatory). People around here are desperate to do anything while wearing all black. Here, the people seemed more like hippies and misfits, a glimpse of the urbanites that Pitchfork promised me when I was a child. Even if they compulsively checked their phones, there was a less oppressive air here.
Unfortunately, it all reminded me of the new 24/7 Corgi Cafe, a front for an AI-native insurance startup that’s opened where all bad ideas come to be (Nomad). I felt a distinctive disgust toward seeing their GTM goon post about it, though I hated the QT critiques more, for they reposition San Francisco as New York’s opposite and equal. They have a doge mascot, which alone addresses so many American problems: first, the unanswered question as to why our most iconic mascots represent insurance companies1; and second, a paucity of heroes forcing us to give hundreds of millions to chuds who can only idealize the fictional. Idealizing what comes out of wires makes hideous things laundered as “wholesome vibes.”
Electronic music idealizes the most optimistic parts of technology. It’s captured in the cult. We see only the worst of ourselves in the tech elite: an idealism that fits only one, relentless striving, the desire for validation. Every attack against tech culture further reifies their cultural power. Every small resistance seems like a sign that we’ve already lost, but it’s embarrassing to do nothing.
I don’t believe we’re in the time of escape. “They said the Earth was dying anyway and they said the end had come and it was the Day of Judgement,” voices tell Scott in The Sarah Book. The runaway ramp is far away and I’m not sure it’s long enough to slow us down to a livable impact speed. Joy is not an act of resistance, but rage is. Matching Alo Set Americans should walk around the Williamsburg made just for them knowing they’re despised. Their unfulfillment is a beautiful thing.
Electronic music is usually an excuse to do poppers and blow or nakedly reflect capital. Popular electronic music arrived at the peak of western manufacturing. By the time Kraftwerk defined the genre, globalism began chiropracting the West into what later became a K-shaped economy of service workers, starving artists, and corporate creatives managing third world slaves via spreadsheets. Techno like this is a remembrance for when we had chances to be productive. It prioritizes the rhythm of engine pistons, metal stamping, the predictable sounds of computers when we didn’t need them to be seamless and quiet like the parts of our brains we can’t even begin to name.
Now we’re all dried, battered and fried, eyes burning from last week’s sleep, and all we smell is ourselves, cooked and delicious and we’re gnawing at our arms like fucking coyotes because soon there’ll be not a job left and the last barista will be treated as a griot. It all suffocates. That night, I walked into Hex House with 8 hours & 45 minutes of screen time.
Mixed Signals ended with the incessant but truly human Moog noodling of Rob Interface. By then, the dancers were resting, and missed the loose, playful melodies. Interface seemed unconcerned, focused and enjoying himself. Also from The Sarah Book: “I dreamed all living things were magnets and from the moment of our births we were being drawn together by some invisible force.” We had all come here and had a time and then the end came, everything turning off, everyone unsure if we should thank God in a DIY space.
Out on Grand, passing a Sean Paul remix playing from an event at Viva Toro (987 Grand St.), I rounded the corner and came face-to-face with a man on horseback. He posed for a photo. There were two more mounted riders idling by a food truck. I wondered what they had ordered.
Hidden City is running events through the month. See their lineup here for details and tickets.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
- The most famous graduate from my school is Jake from State Farm (a close second is Master Shake). ↩︎
Leave a Reply