Russel Smith thinks there should be a spot like Pixelated Records (7-92 Onderdonk Ave.) in every neighborhood. Why not?
“People know I’m a good dude, or whatever you want to call it,” Smith told me one night, some months after soft opening the bar, which also maintains a small collection of 12″ records for sale. “And they knew that if I took over, I was going to make it something special.”
In his early fifties, he’s a towering figure, which means something coming from me1, and greets me in a bucket hat, an affable beard and a pink, loose-fitting Free Palestine shirt. He grew up in the ’80s, in Yonkers, went to high school in Connecticut, and started raving when studying abroad in London.
“I started with Ministry of Sound. I was 19 years old. I fell in love with everything about that whole world,” he said. He started DJing when he moved to Lake Tahoe, spending his weekends driving into the Bay Area and spinning in small clubs in those years before the city was taken over entirely by the Silicon Valley boom, when the innocent naivete of the West Coast felt like a warm premonition of the country’s future.
“It was a great time back then in the ’90s. The parties were so fun, and not pretentious,” he told me. “It was just dreads in a sweatshirt, I loved that.”
When the West Coast stopped happening, he ended up here, landing in East Williamsburg in 2008 and spending most of his time in the Lower East Side. Though nowadays, he says he never goes to the city anymore. The move has been even deeper eastward, toward Bushwick, Ridgewood and further along the L.
“I don’t even go to Williamsburg anymore unless I want to go shopping. That place doesn’t exist for me anymore,” he said.
These days, he occupies the vital second Saturdays and fourth Fridays of the month slots behind the decks at pregame spot The Keep (2-05 Cypress Ave.), though he’s recently given up a fourth Friday to spend more time promoting Pixelated, which took over the spot of Scorpion Records, itself the project of a handful of regulars from the Scorpion Cafe, a longtime local bar in Ridgewood that closed during the pandemic.
“We loved Scorpion, but, like, it had its life,” Smith told me. Beyond DJing at the Keep, he threw his own parties, first at Ivy House (1040 Metropolitan Ave.) and other random spots in the area. Around this time, he met Chia Minaya, who he runs Pixelated with.
“And then I met my future wife, and we were kind of like, let’s try to throw something, you know, a party. And then we called it Pixelated,” he said. “We would just rent out a spot and set up a bar, set up the equipment. Like, you know, one-offs.”
Now, they live down the street, just around the Bushwick border on Cornelia Street. (“Bar Cornelia? I’ve never been to that bar. It’s not for me.”) At Pixelated, they’ve fashioned the place into the kind of small club that Smith hopes people will stop by before partying, or on their way back from partying. He’s going to start offering open decks soon, and start booking comics for Thursday night. It’s Ridgewood: why not?
“We play house music. But we play house music of every feeling and every genre. We don’t care about genres,” he said. “It’s not that crazy, not that deep. It’s a place where you can come hang out.”
On the walls, he’s splashed extensive graffiti art painted by Avery Nice, who used to DJ with Smith back in some of the early Pixelated parties. It’s all very streetstyle, Bushwick-coded, today’s version of yesterday’s future. In the bathroom, Smith has hung up a picture of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the late Wu Tang rapper whose face I always see painted on the roof of the new condo across from the Forest Avenue M station. Laughing, he says, “it’s Old Dirty Bathroom, geddit?”
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
- height estimated between 6’3 and 6’4, depending on who is counting. ↩︎
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