The United Sounds NYC Festival kicks off this Friday, October 25, and Saturday, October 26, in Red Hook at Pioneer Works. The inaugural event was planned by United Sounds founding members Shay Vishaw, Dipesh Sinha, and Diane Perni, who identified a gap in the New York City music calendar and sought to bring a unique experience to Red Hook, a neighborhood not always associated with the performing arts. The festival will feature 11 artists, many of which are based in New York City.
Pioneer Works is an independent cultural arts center in Red Hook that hosts a multitude of events, ranging from intellectual discussions with names like Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Werner Herzog, or Gloria Steinem, live performances from bands like SUNN O))), OM, and the Ragas Live Festival in 2023. Led by artists and scientists, Pioneer Works hosts programs and classes that foster an environment in which people can learn more about culture and technology.
Doors will open at 4 pm both days,
Tickets: https://dice.fm/bundles/united-sounds-nyc-festival-2d2p
Line up
Friday
Washington D.C.’s The Dismemberment Plan was formed on January 1, 1993. The initial lineup was Eric Axelson, Jason Caddell, Steve Cummings, and Travis Morrison. After recording their first album in 1995, Joe Easley replaced Steve Cummings, cementing the band’s lineup for the rest of its existence.
The band recorded five albums. Three were recorded for DeSoto Records and released by the same label. Emergency & I was recorded for Interscope Records but came out on DeSoto. Uncanney Valley was recorded for and released by Partisan Records.
New York trio Sunflower Bean—vocalist and bassist Julia Cumming (she/her), guitarist and vocalist Nick Kivlen (he/him), and drummer Olive Faber (she/her)— will release their new EP, Shake, on September 27th on the Lucky Number Music label. The band’s first fully self-produced and recorded project, Shake, features Sunflower Bean’s heaviest, most immediate, and loudest music to date. Influenced by the doom-laden, heavy metal sound of Black Sabbath, the EP embraces rock tropes and excess and recalls the sound of the band’s earlier projects, Show Me Your Seven Secrets and Human Ceremony.
“Shake was inspired by our first years as a DIY band, the spirit that birthed us and gave us the chance to have this enduring journey together,” Sunflower Bean says of the EP. “We wrote, recorded, engineered, and produced these songs so nothing was filtered through anyone else’s idea of us. We always felt like rock and roll was a feeling, not a sound. But sometimes, there is no subverting it or explaining it. We’re now offering it exactly as it occurred to us.”
Shake is Sunflower Bean raw and unfiltered, in the band’s most natural state. To further that theme, the band will release a 14-minute performance-based video that showcases each track through an interpretation of the natural elements: earth, wind, water, fire, and metal.
Dogsbody, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Model/Actriz (vocalist Cole Haden, guitarist Jack Wetmore, drummer Ruben Radlauer, and bassist Aaron Shapiro), is a coming-of-age album set between dusk and dawn. It is as much an exploration of love and loss as it is a sharp, piercing, and violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive—the overwhelming brightness of staring at the sun.
Saturday
Blonde Redhead
In the spring of 2020, Blonde Redhead singer and multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino encountered a passage from Didion’s 2005 memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the author reflected on the devastating experience of witnessing her husband’s sudden death at the dinner table. Amid the profound uncertainty of those early pandemic months, Makino was thinking of her own parents far away in Japan, the then-lost ritual of congregating for dinner with family, and the heavy, omnipresent feeling that life could change in an instant for any of us.
Owing to that sense of persistent togetherness, the immersive, meticulously crafted Sit Down for Dinner is a testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead has refined over its three-decade existence. Formed in the 1993 New York indie underground, Blonde Redhead quickly found a place on Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley’s label, Smells Like, before releasing beloved records on Touch & Go and 4AD that traced an arc from angular indie-rock to cosmopolitan art pop. The trio might have been a quintessential ’90s band if not for the fact that they continuously kept going, growing, never confined to any era but the present.
Almost out of necessity, Les Savy Fav’s sixth LP was born in a pocket reality: singer Tim Harrington’s Brooklyn attic. “A freaky barn,” as he calls it, the room was built over the ruins of black mold and plywood, a de facto studio. Unlike anywhere they’d ever recorded, the space allowed for a much-needed rebirth for the long-running post-hardcore band. In that in-between, they pieced together their latest evolution, OUI, LSF, growing the album’s title and cover art out of a patch of grass. “The record grew organically — literally and figuratively,” Harrington notes wryly.
When Man Man released its last album, Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In Between, frontman Honus Honus (né Ryan Kattner) was in a state of unrest, oscillating between hope and cynicism. Perhaps fittingly, the album ended up dropping during the pandemic. But much like that bizarre turn of global events, the ennui seems so distant now to Man Man’s creative force, whose revived sense of purpose washes through Carrot on Strings (out June 07 on Sub Pop), his latest release, which radiates a mix of calm and confidence.
Kattner always embodied a wild-man pied-piper vibe: his melodic, art-rock output just unhinged enough that it was at once intriguing and angsty. He was so alluringly creative that you went along with it, even if you were never sure where Man Man would take you. Carrot on Strings is no less inventive, but its ethos is radical in the context of the band’s two-decade, idiosyncratic career.
Soaring out of the underground of New York City’s booming DIY scene, Monobloc, helmed by vocalist Timothy Waldron and Michael Silverglade on bass is an exciting new project formed by two friends with a shared ear for merging pop sensibilities with a distinct metropolis post-punk attitude.
Completed by Zack Pockrose on drums and guitarists Ben Scofield and Nina Lüders, Monobloc’s strengths lie in its innate gift of storytelling. It pairs texturally rich, visceral, and emotional detail with minimalist instrumentation that sits as confidently alongside some of NYC’s artistic greats as it does entirely in its own lane.
Rose Main Reading Room, the fourth full-length by Peel Dream Magazine, is a lush, inviting headphones record, the kind of album made to accompany city bus rides and rainy-day solo trips to accidental destinations. The band — whose name nods to the BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel, arbiter of all things underground, quality, and (it must be said) “cool” — has been a genre-hopping experiment since its inception, jumping from motorik krautrock to shoegaze and space age pop. Their newest work is a perfect starting point for the uninitiated, beckoning toward a newfound romance and nostalgia with their catchiest collection of songs to date.
Bec Lauder and The Noise / Hard to Get
Tickets for the United Sounds NYC Festival can be purchased at:
https://dice.fm/bundles/united-sounds-nyc-festival-2d2p
