The Brooklyn Rail

Last October, Knitting Factory alumnus and bagpiper David Watson hosted the first concert of his inaugural Striped Light series in Long Island City. As with the two concerts since, anyone who wanted to attend had to direct message Striped Light (@striped_light) through Instagram to learn the address of the show’s location, which is kept secret.

Striped Light’s stealth is due to landlord issues, according to Watson. It embodies the now-tenuous Brooklyn spirit of DIY in Queens, harking back to an age not even fifteen years ago when avant-gardistes would bolt-cutter their way into warehouses on the Williamsburg waterfront to blast their noisiest experiments. And although Watson and his co-curator, guitarist Ian Douglas-Moore, open the doors to their venue with keys, the music inside is just as creative—and, at times, just as loud—as that of the illicit tradition that preceded it.

In fact, the music is the same sort of programming that Watson presented at FourOneOne in Williamsburg from April 2022—when it was called Shift—to September of last year, when the organization announced that their building, a former firehouse, would close for renovations on October 1, reopening in March 2025. (The building will be demolished and rebuilt with a performance space on the ground floor, according to FourOneOne program coordinator Che Chen.) During Watson’s tenure, acts included Brandon Lopez, Nate Wooley, Cecilia Lopez, Anthony Coleman, Joanna Mattrey, William Parker, and many more great experimental and improvising musicians. But New York’s avant-garde has always been itinerant; who knows how long the secluded, low-ceilinged, cold Queens space will host this music? Hopefully forever, but for now it feels like home.

For the first Striped Light, the appetizer was an ear splitting but mentally purifying drone duo between Watson and hyper-creative bassist Luke Stewart, who was amped up and playing with feedback. He also scratched the strings with a pencil, plucked them with a tightly hooked finger, and bowed vigorously below the instrument’s bridge. As Watson fingered repeating, phasing, Reich-like rhythms, the duo’s sound coalesced into a thick buzzing fabric in which, if you closed your eyes, you could hear micro-rhythms between the overtones as they faded in and out of the main drone.

Dessert was actually the second course: Sean Meehan. Focused like a craftsman carving a figurine for his daughter, he scratched the top of his snare drum with forks, dropped claves onto the concrete floor and hit them together (creating staccatos that made me wince), and performed his signature move of placing a hi-hat cymbal upside down on the snare’s head, inserting a wooden dowel into the center, and slowly running his fingers down the dowel. The ensuing vibrations, especially when he switched on the beads of the snare, were faint, simple, and oh so good.

The main course, which I unfortunately missed, was a rare performance by In Defense of Memory, an ensemble comprising Santa Fe bassist Carlos Santistevan, San Francisco percussionist Marshall Trammell, and Brooklyn violinist Laura Ortman. So named for their foregrounding of Indigenous histories, the trio—videos that @striped_light posted showed—played a propulsive, interrogative set, perfectly in line with their agitative ethos.

Afterward, I felt a wave of reassurance about the state of the arts—the grungy, mean, loud, annoying, uncouth, in-your-face, dangerous, daring arts—wash over me. This is how it used to be, I thought. Historical sentimentality overtook me, until I spoke with Watson.

“It’s an easy conversation—that good ‘ole days conversation. I mean, they’re not necessarily wrong [that the good days are behind us], but it’s not true,” he said. Watson is enthusiastic about the state of experimental music in New York. “I think, considering how horrific New York is financially, I’m amazed at how many places there are to play at the moment…Maybe it’s partly the energy of coming out of COVID or something, I don’t know. I think it’s fantastic at the moment.”

A glance into the rearview mirror shows quite a different story: the closing of the original Knitting Factory in 2002, the shuttering of its successor, Tonic, in 2007, the long list of spaces that includes Body Actualized Center (closed 2014), Death by Audio (ibid.), Shea Stadium (closed 2017), Silent Barn (closed 2018), Flowers for All Occasions (closed 2020), etc., etc., etc.

Two recent books don’t help the matter. Brooke Wentz’s volume of interviews she conducted with experimental musicians while at Columbia’s WKCR-FM, Transfigured New York (Columbia University Press, 2023), documents the flourishing Downtown scene from 1980 to 1990, and includes conversations with everyone from John Cage and Ravi Shankar to Laurie Anderson and Living Color. Cisco Bradley’s The Williamsburg Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023) draws on 250 interviews and tons of archival material to tell the specific story of that one neighborhood’s booming DIY noise and free jazz scenes from 1988 to 2014. Both volumes are important and absorbing. And yet they both give the impression that this distinct, thirty-plus-year period is over and done with and that we’ve moved into one characterized by stagnation and decline.

But peering into the second Striped Light show revealed good days ahead. At that December 4 concert, Vermont multi-instrumentalist Henry Birdsey sat in front of a mic and breathed deeply and peacefully into different harmonicas to produce long, droning multi-phonics. YO! Vinyl Richie spliced and looped vinyl records—one of which featured what sounded like snippets from a 1950s TV commercial—creating catchy and hilarious riffs. The Daxophone Consort accompanied him, bowing the wood of their amplified daxophones, drawing out menacing, dry timbres that were unmusical to my ears, and made for an unpleasant and asymmetric pairing with Richie, who should have been left to play by himself.

The debut collaboration between flutist Laura Cocks and vocalist Ka Baird was the centerpiece of Watson’s second concert; it was an astounding display of aggression and originality. Cocks alternated between flute and bass flute. They furiously fingered the keys and hurled unpitched, breathy aeolian bursts from the depths of their lungs. Baird took two handheld mics to pound-town, swinging them around, aiming them at the audience, yelling into them in dozens of disembodied voices—at one point they even shoved one up their shirt and beat it with their fist like an ape. At another point they hit them together like primitive man trying to make fire. The whole time, my jaw was wide open, and I was smiling. The best combination.

Striped Light number three, on January 22, was tamer than the first two. Jessica Pavone kicked it off with a solo viola set of four original compositions, each one alternating between monophonic melodic lines and dissonant, beautifully resonant spurts of improvisation. The second piece, Performance Novels, boasted accelerating ostinatos, quick bursts of fiddling, and a folkish phrase with a Rite-era Stravinskian tinge. In the third piece, Below the Threshold of Sensation, she dragged her bow up and down the instrument’s neck in a tight circular motion, creating a fuzzy snarl. She marked each run with an up or down bow near the bridge. At one point, she used just her left hand and pressed all her fingers hard onto the strings, scratching slowly toward the bridge, conjuring an almost electronic reverberance that actually gave me nails-on-a-chalkboard chills.

Next, in a Striped Light first, South African cellist Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi called for the audience to participate in “Tribute to Ntsikana,” a song from his Zulu-language African Song Cycle that references the Xhosa prophet. The audience was not a sing-along crowd, and our response was lackluster, despite Mhlambi’s engaging, extroverted stage presence, foot-tapping rhythms, musette-like earthy cello drones, and powerful voice. But the energy in the room was transfigured beyond recognition when couple Bob Bellerue and Katie Porter electrified it with their bass clarinet and synthesizer duo, Eternities. Bellerue coolly tempered swelling feedback, giving way to a loud, rapid jackhammering, placed an EBow on a dulcimer, and whistled into a mic, while Porter undergirded him with airy drones and whistling overtones. I experienced the same sort of cognitive cleansing as at that first show in October.

Striped Light, named after a lyric from Captain Beefheart’s song “Tropical Hot Dog Night,” has come out of the gate swinging, solidifying itself as a serious environment for experimental musicians from New York and beyond to try out their newest material, formulate their next concoctions, and inspire creativity among themselves and in their audience. For listeners, it’s a chance to hear the process, instead of the product, of musical creativity. “In a more commercial gig environment,” Watson says, “I think people tend to present more of a concert or a show, but something about what we have is a little bit more like a lab… It’s a chance for people to work on something.” The very essence of experimental music is its irreproducibility and its realization in live performance rather than in written score. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Striped Light's performances are welcome precisely because each one can never happen again. Not a bad way to spend a Monday night.