The Williamsburg avant-garde : experimental music and sound on the Brooklyn waterfront /

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Description based on print version record.Includes bibliographical references and index.Locating the Williamsburg Avant-Garde -- Utopian Spaces for Sound -- The Emergence of the Williamsburg Scene: Warehouses, Squatter Parties, and Punk Roots, 1988-1994 -- Pirate Radio and Jumping the River: The Williamsburg Loft Scene, 1997-2004 -- Art Galleries, Clubs, and Bohemian Cafés: The Williamsburg DIY, 2001-2006 -- Commercial DIY and the Last Underground Venues -- A Point of Confluence: The Downtown Scene Comes to Zebulon, 2004-2006 -- A New Generation Emerges: Zebulon, 2005-2012 -- A Fractured Landscape: The Last Avant-Garde Music Spaces of Williamsburg, 2005-2014 -- Art, Experiment, and Capital."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 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, free jazz, post punk, and noise musicians and groups ranging 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 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 further afield in Brooklyn and 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 lifespan of experimental music and art scenes everywhere."--