DIY Files #2: Iran at Glasslands Gallery
Light Asylum
For DIY Files, Paul Caine attends DIY concerts across the city. These shows are often held in unconventional locations and neighborhoods, where they serve to incubate the next generation of New York bands. Read more about the project here, and send suggestions here.
In the annals of Williamsburg’s DIY renaissance, Glasslands Gallery occupies a storied place. It’s where bands like Passion Pit and MGMT serenaded small clusters of curious listeners, before those clusters turned to hordes. It’s where members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On The Radio still drop by for secret shows. And it’s one of the last DIY venues on the Williamsburg waterfront, along with the Monster Island complex a few blocks away, to survive the recent wave of real-estate development.
As befits its unlikely survival, Glasslands is as scrappy as ever, with the sort of construction for which resourceful art students are known: practical, unvarnished, endlessly idiosyncratic. Bathrooms flank the sides of the bar, a rickety balcony hangs above some mismatched couches, and an oddly shaped stage sits squashed in the corner. The whole place stands as a symbol of Williamsburg's creative evolution, a takeover of industrial ground for the purposes of art.
It's a sort of takeover that regenerates. The current crop of Brooklyn artists and musicians—especially within the DIY milieu—consists in large part of folks who’ve moved to the area in the past few years. Similarly, venues come and go, with defunct spaces quickly forgotten and new ones instantly celebrated. Time ends up elongated: Glasslands opened in 2006, for example, but it seems to date back half a decade longer, when bands like Oneida and Black Dice—and, indeed, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On The Radio—were just starting to peddle their skewed takes on rock 'n' roll around the neighborhood.
A couple of bands on Thursday brought concrete connections to those underground acts of yore. Light Asylum is an electronic duo fronted by Shannon Funchess, a Brooklyn scene staple who’s sung on albums by TV On The Radio, !!!, and Telepathe. The sound of her latest project is skewed and loud, full of electronic stabs and overloaded synthesizers. At its best, Light Asylum sounds like a Nine Inch Nails take on Xiu Xiu.
But alas, few were there to appreciate it. Glasslands was a ghost town. Even the venue’s walls, which usually moonlight as some sort of site-specific installation, felt bare, an emptiness matched by the scant crowd.
Iran
We expected a bigger gathering. The headliner, a garage-rock outfit called Iran, features Kyp Malone of TV On The Radio, and Glasslands is just a few blocks away from that band’s recently shuttered recording studio, Stay Gold. But Malone was nowhere to be found. Not on Glasslands’ balcony, which sat empty save for a couple involved in a hardcore make-out session on the couch. Not on the floor, where about a dozen people waited past midnight for Iran to take the stage. And certainly not during Iran’s set. (Turns out TV On The Radio was in Europe on tour.) Frontman Aaron Aites was seated for much of the time with his head between his knees, and the other band members stared at their shoes. The emphatic “woo-hoos” sounded more like yawns than shouts. And it took an audience member—one of just 15 still left by the end of the concert—to request the hookiest of Iran’s new songs, “I Can See The Future,” which the band performed with hardly any of the album version’s exuberance.
But while the concert floundered, the light attendance gave the whole event a sense of furtive connoisseurship—of being in on the secret. Maybe that’s what it felt like a decade ago, to wander through Williamsburg’s then-menacing streets in search of something new. Even now, and especially on a weeknight, Glasslands’ riverfront location is fairly desolate, and the absence of a crowd upon our departure made for a Williamsburg vista of a classic sort: squat factories cloaked in darkness, empty streets reverberating with the sounds of a lover’s quarrel, and tall condos in the background, unsold and empty, their lights unlit.
