Eye and Ear Festival Highlights DIY Music
The dingy warehouse air was thick with cigarette smoke, the $5 vegan chili was locally-grown and the “music” — depending on your definition of the word — was inescapably hypnotic at the New York Eye and Ear Festival this weekend.
The two-day DIY music festival and record fair showcased 36 New York City bands and 39 record labels of a variety of genres (free-music, minimal synth, noise, no wave, and neofolk to name a few), all of which were brought together by Todd Brooks, who is also known as Todd Pendu.
“I was trying to show how these Do-It-Yourself bands can have an extreme amount of quality and diversity and not have managers or play music for a living,” Brooks said.
Brooks estimates 400 to 500 people attended the festival, which was held at the spacious Vanishing Point, a 4,700-square-foot industrial loft by the Montrose L stop. Record labels set up tables on one side of the warehouse and there was still plenty of room for the crowd to dance erratically — if at all — or sit down along the walls.
I stopped by Saturday night and was lucky enough to catch Excepter, whose reverberating static trances sounded like a swarm of locusts pulsating with satisfaction after devouring the season’s last crops. Though the music was enjoyable, my friends and I felt uneasy among the stoic crowd whose arms remained crossed throughout the experimental performances.
“Is it okay to smile in here?” we asked each other, as we wondered whether our natural behavior was acceptable.
Complex inner conflicts aside, NY Eye and Ear was a success and Brooks is planning on making it a biannual festival with the next event being held in June (location has yet to be determined). For those who can’t wait that long, Pendu will be hosting an “Eve of New Year’s Eve” party on Dec. 30 at Vanishing Point.
Fingered Media videotaped all 36 performances and will release a DVD of the event in the upcoming months.
