Fear and Loathing at the Knockdown Center: Here For New York ‘24
BY: N.K YILMAZ, CARTER NYHAN, & JAYLEEN ABREU OF MODERATE ROCK
We caught wind of the fact we were covering Here for New York 3 days before it was happening. Kisi made a groupchat consisting of Carter Nyhan, Jayleen Abreu, and myself— effectively assembling the most formidable press team this side of the Gowanus Canal. She’d dropped the flier and said “We are all on the list for this… but we have to work.” We’d seen promotion for it months ago and grit our teeth as our empty pockets drowned our love for Eartheater and RXK Nephew. This marked Rambler’s first official coverage of an East Coast festival— none of us had ever repped a press pass at the time, let alone covered anything of this caliber.
EMPTY STARES Jayleen Abreu; 35 mm
I went from a CCNY class to a Roisin McKeown show at Gold Sounds later that Thursday. As she sound-checked, Jay and I sat at a table in the back and took to writing a press brief. In preparation, we wrote a single question for everyone on the lineup and watched Nardwar’s Ice Spice interview. We didn’t know it then, but we'd never get to ask Vegyn about his favorite NYC Vegan spot…
Friday evening saw us convene on an Essex stoop to plan the attack. We desperately wanted to vend CDs with our zines, but hadn’t burned any. This marked the moment of conception for the Rambler Radio Hour-- as we weighed options with Carter he declared he’d make a mix of everyone featured on All Night on Film in the morning. So we set off to crash at Yellowdoor Studios to immediately start an assembly line at dawn.
Upon waking, we rounded up nearly 200 CDs, cases, surplus Rambler copies, and an Arizona bottle full of moonshine. Tough things to acquire in Park Slope on a Saturday morning. Carter took to hunting deep cuts for the mix spanning everything from Sasha Worms’ unreleased acoustic ballads to Modroc’s acidic ambient late-night monologues (see track 27: Tweaker Shit). 70 handmade bookmarks, A scorching mixtape, and 200 prints later, we took to the Knockdown Center.
The Knockdown Center is a godless place. Deep in the industrial interzone between Brooklyn and Queens, it's a repurposed glass factory, complete with smokestacks and a barbed wire fence. Heaven for wax-psychosis driven twenty-nothings on a paternal dime, hell for OSHA.
By some miracle, we arrived on site early, feeling surprisingly prepared. We were greeted by the rib-rattling breakbeats of Alice Longyu Gao’s soundcheck and the odd aroma of smoke machine fluid, as we set up shop in the vendors corner. We were immediately told to move our booth 40 feet to the left by a very nervous man.
RAMBLER BOOTH @m.ariatsar
We eventually got situated, the lights eventually came on, and the crowd eventually poured in. Jayleen and myself dove into the sea of Zoomers and Millennials, hoping to fish out some words from the crowd:
“New York means getting money, fucking bitches, doing everything at the same time cuz your’e at the astral plane of existence. We are here to see Eartheater… I want twin kids, I want one to be a gay son and the other to be a thot daughter so they can give each other advice.”
-underaged patrons from Harlem
“Here for underscores, and a bunch of other people… uhh… I’m lit right now… I’m looking at you, you’re looking at me who cares what I’m into”
–unidentified cloaked individual
“We flew to see Alice and Vegyn. The music’s better here, the people are better, but they love raves down there too.” – Ezra and Carson from Atlanta
EVENTS IN DENSE FOG Jayleen Abreu; 35mm
Most folks had hitched a ride from out of state, displaying the extreme lengths American youth would still to dance in a sweaty room.
NYC’s own Push Ups were the first to shake the soundsystem, flooding the room with full-bodied shoegaze chords. This was the first set any of us had observed from a press-pit, crouching before the monolithic subwoofers, steeped in delay and distortion. Before the major-media heads could even flinch, Jayleen and Mar dove in front of the monitors and captured this amalgamation.
PUSH UPS Jayleen Abreu; 35mm
We stepped out on the smoker’s pavilion for a breath of fresh air. We turned around to see Push Ups doing the same and accosted them with questions:
How’d you like the sound, how’d you like the stage?
“Sound was cool, the stage was cool… First time playing knockdown center.”
What time did you guys get here?
“5:30”
Did you guys eat??
“No, not yet”
Who are you hype to see on the lineup?
“MGNA Crrrta, best band ever… but honestly Vegyn.”
They have cigarettes and elf bars for sale in the bathrooms
“That is a cool classy vibe”
Favorite pedal / piece of gear?
Scarlet [bass]: “Bass Big Muff”
Grey [guitar/vox]: “I love my Rat pedal”
Harry [guitar 2]: “I’d have to say my heart”
[the crowd goes wild]
Aidan [drums]: “TC Helicon Hart-Tune Voice Tone, its an autotune pedal”
What are your side projects?
“Aidan has two bands, The Dallas Cowboys and Branching out. Harry and Scarlett have solo stuff under Harry Teardrop and Scarlett Rae, respectively.”
LIV.E N.K Yilmaz; Iphone
Two overpriced Tekates later we found ourselves at the foot of Liv.e's heart-wrenching show. She was singing through the mic of a 70s call center headset, gliding across the stage to her signature blend of ambient neosoul. She’d take to the controls in the back to mix the set and adjust her lush vocal tones, masterfully using her board and laptop as instruments. Behind Liv was a visual display akin to a webcore feverdream, channeling imagery of corporate surrealism that complemented her sound to conjure a coherent vibe of early-2000s-stalgia. Think Eryka Badhu’s songwriting with the audiovisual aesthetic of Windows-XP.
From this point forward, I must ethically inform the reader that things get blurry. At every festival in human history, there lies a midpoint so wrought with dehydration, malnourishment, and fadery that it compromises all journalistic integrity. As I took to (unsuccessfully) searching for a meal under $15, Jay and Carter covered Eartheater.
Carter:
The first time I saw Alexandra Drewchin, known professionally as Eartheater, in concert was October 15, 2022, on the fourth floor of a bougie industrial building turned blue-chip art gallery near 125th in Harlem. If I’m being honest I was not very impressed. On any given night 100+ factors will inevitably affect the evening's performance even if only by a small margin. Such was true for James Brown, and such is true for that Beatles cover band who play Thursday nights at your local bar. 100+ things can go wrong on a given show night and yet, none of them seem to happen here at HFNY. If one combined all the best parts of SALEM’s “King Night” record mixed with the pop sensibility of a Rihanna vocal hook, you’d get Eartheater. All performed with live guitar, drums, and bass, maintaining that essential sense of reality through the many abrasively ethereal backing tracks. As green lights dominated our field of view, Eartheater held the mic to the many fans moving along to her 2019 track, “Supersoaker”. Jay and I, being the novice photographers we are, did our best to capture the moment in all its glory with nervous hands and old cameras. If the music ever stopped, I couldn't tell you, the hour or so of sound melding together in my memory as a continuous movement of some of the most tasteful experimental electronic pop music in our time.
EARTHEATER Carter Nyhan; 35mm
We regrouped in the sweaty sideroom which held the second stage. An aged Roy Blair stood before a pioneer spinning a berlin-esque DJ set.
Having danced ourselves clean of starvation, we were ready for closure-- midnight fell upon the knockdown center and Vegyn started spinning on the mainstage. As he elapsed into an ineffable fade and dropped into “Walking on a Dream”, we strode into the press pit for a final time waving our cameras. Kisi grooved on the bleachers as I took panoramas atop the monitors. I felt a tap on my shoulder and braced for forcible removal-- but it ended up being Stella, the coordinator who had booked us. “We need shots on stage,” she said, “you wanna come up?”
Within the minute, I found myself behind Vegyn as he stirred a human sea with buttons and knobs. When one has such a profound mastery of DJing, the dials on a board don’t just grant the complete sonic manipulation of any track— they control parameters for the movement of crowds. For instance, a low-cut steadied the waves by depriving the masses of bass, and sent them jumping upon its reintroduction, while a fade into Playboi Carti conjured a rather violent moshpit in the sea’s center. On stage, music becomes a more tactile, visceral experience. Behind the soundsystem, one hears less than the crowd but feels every kick and snare run up the spine through the barge’s vibrations. He closed with a remix of Uffie’s “Difficult” mashed with a Steve-Reich-esque ambient track, leaving the room at a perfect equilibrium.
Having sold or gifted all our mixtapes and burned through all film rolls on site, we decided to pack up and call it a night. The ringing left in our ears drowned out all remaining thought as the sea spilled onto the sidewalk and trickled into the veins of the transit system. We stopped by an alley to take the night's last picture. Back at Rambler HQ, we split a pack of stale Sour-Power-Straws in celebration and sat on the couch in the dark attempting to process what just happened.
Nearly all footage and audio of the interviews was lost shortly thereafter.
CARTER’S EPILOGUE: On Acoustics and Friendship
A booming room, in regards to both acoustics and people. Something special happens when standing in a space that old and big if you end up positioned anywhere but right in front of the stage's gaping mouth. The music reaches you, yes, but the doors are closed and it's got nowhere to go like a spirit running circles in some TikToker’s room after buying Etsy paulo santo for the first time. It reaches you, but it crawls, guttural and aching— low and indifferent to the artist's sonic ideals. While this may appear like a flaw to some this is actually a very important feature of a space like this.
Here, the dissipation of sound into the old steel and wood is similar to the forest floor scavengers of old, crawling, gnawing away but creating space for life. In our case, life is conversation, our growth lies in strangers, our table blanketed by a young, budding forest. Free CD’s, the latest Zine, a wonderful poetry book from our editor in chief– we grew and ate good that night. But nature is messy. She is unforgiving, unkind, unpredictable and she will take you home with her at the days end, whether you like it or not. In this sense, the metaphor cuts deeper, pulling us along. After a day of intense prep, pages of game plan, and having assembled a NASA level team of creative individuals, much was lost to the night.
Some of us slipped into dark corners with new friends funneling a 20 year old Berliner's crack dream (shoutout RXK Nephew) into our noses– others, a long quiet descent into mental depths yet unknown to those who surrounded them and held them near. Was it the lights, the people, the volume of it all? Maybe the old beams and wood carried an essence to them only a chosen few can see. At the table, all of us slipping somewhat effortlessly between performers and passive side characters– from the inevitably dumbed down and anxiously chipper sales pitch to calmly watching who will dare come to the table next, trying not to stare and frighten them off. There's always an angle, the tree root breaks the concrete. “Oh, you also run a magazine? Here let me follow you, albeit, with an unspoken obligation that you will follow us back even if we think your graphic design is bad.” This is the result of enshittification, the psychotic mental rot of the internet. Yes, in a publication dedicated to moving away from such a world in which quick content is the norm, the bloody scrolling thumb reaches us even here. We had intended to use the night’s wonderful event as a pool of content, sustaining the minds connected to hungry thumbs for months. But like the night itself the weeks after proved to be just as slippery. So it goes. Footage was lost alongside their respective apparatus and sadly the foundations of the friendships tethering us to their owners went with them in some cases. Meetings were planned and canceled, and all the while the heavy shadow of failing to create content grows and grows over the forest. Hungry hungry hands indeed. The footage will come, fret not. And to all who came and spoke to us, it was a pleasure. Nature just gets in the way sometimes. So, to conclude what is essentially a long list of personal ramblings and excuses, I ask you this dear reader… if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And, if a person in Bushwick slips slowly into a crowd to dance the night away, and nobody takes a video— were they ever really there?
