The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

by Cisco Bradley

Overview

In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and groups—-from Mary Halvorson, Zs, and Nate Wooley to Matana Roberts, Peter Evans, and Darius Jones—-produced shows in a variety of unlicensed venues as well as in clubs and cafes. At the same time, pirate radio station free103point9 and music festivals made Williamsburg an epicenter of New York’s experimental culture. In 2005, New York’s rezoning act devastated the community as gentrification displaced its participants farther afield in Brooklyn and in Queens. With this portrait of Williamsburg, Bradley not only documents some of the most vital music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he helps readers better understand the formation, vibrancy, and life span of experimental music and art scenes everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478019374
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	618,602
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Cisco Bradley is Associate Professor of History at the Pratt Institute and author of Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Locating the Williamsburg Avant-Garde  1
Part I. Utopian Spaces for Sound
1. The Emergence of the Williamsburg Scene: Warehouses, Squatter Parties, and Punk Roots, 1988–1994  21
2. Pirate Radio and Jumping the River: The Williamsburg Loft Scene, 1997–2004  55
3. Art Galleries, Clubs, and Bohemian Cafés: The Williamsburg DIY, 2001–2006  100
Part II. Commercial DIY and the Last Underground Venues
4. A Point of Confluence: The Downtown Scene Comes to Zebulon, 2004–2006  145
5. A New Generation Emerges: Zebulon, 2005–2012  189
6. A Fractured Landscape: The Last Avant-Garde Music Spaces of Williamsburg, 2005–2014  228
Afterword. Art, Experiment, and Capital  263
Notes  271
Art Sources for the Williamsburg Avant-Garde  335
Bibliography  343
Index  367

What People are Saying About This

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde - Bernard Gendron

“Cisco Bradley compellingly guides readers through the successive adaptations of the experimental music community to a rapidly changing Williamsburg environment, from industrial graveyard to overpriced bohemia. In offering the first book-length account of the rich musical life in Williamsburg’s heyday, Bradley showcases experimental music while accentuating the life-and-death struggles of musicians in the face of creeping gentrification. This highly impactful book makes an excellent contribution to the literature on experimental music.”

Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century - Nate Chinen

“With a sharp eye for detail and an awareness of broad cultural implications, Cisco Bradley has captured a clear image of an elusive moment, vividly chronicling an artistic movement and social scene as distinctive as it is historically significant. The Williamsburg he lays out is a staunchly alternative confederation of improvisers, performance artists, painters, poets, and sculptors all united in their renegade stature. This is an authoritative book on a creative foment that has often gone unrecognized in the discourse around experimental music in New York.”

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most important strengths of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is that it elaborates with equal care, regardless of idiom or generation, on the intentions, ideas and aesthetic strategies of the highly diverse range of artists who could find a platform there. . . . What makes Bradley's archeology at the same time so urgently contemporary is that so many of the artists covered are alive and active right now, even if a good number of them may still be underground."--Patrick Brennan "Arteidolia" (6/9/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"Well-researched. . . . Drawing on these first-hand accounts as well as on his access to the personal archives of some of the artists involved, Bradley provides a lively account of the neighborhood's vital experimental music movement from its underground beginnings in various squats and abandoned industrial sites to its eventual dissolution in the face of rising rents and gentrification."--Daniel Barbiero "Point of Departure" (6/7/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most important music scenes of the past 30-plus years."--Dave Mandl "The Wire" (2/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"One of the most important strengths of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is that it elaborates with equal care, regardless of idiom or generation, on the intentions, ideas and aesthetic strategies of the highly diverse range of artists who could find a platform there. . . . What makes Bradley’s archeology at the same time so urgently contemporary is that so many of the artists covered are alive and active right now, even if a good number of them may still be underground."

Arteidolia - Patrick Brennan

"Well-researched. . . . Drawing on these first-hand accounts as well as on his access to the personal archives of some of the artists involved, Bradley provides a lively account of the neighborhood’s vital experimental music movement from its underground beginnings in various squats and abandoned industrial sites to its eventual dissolution in the face of rising rents and gentrification."

Point of Departure - Daniel Barbiero

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most important music scenes of the past 30-plus years."

The Wire - Dave Mandl

"Bradley’s vivid portraits of the dynamic interactions between musicians, curators, and other participants behind the Williamsburg avant-garde scene are made possible by way of his extensive interviews with scene participants that provide the bulk of the data in his book. These interviewees illuminate important information that would be difficult to find in any written record."

Notes - David Pearson