![]() Laswell, meanwhile, bumped into Brian Eno in their common East Village neighborhood, goading him to check out the group. In the late ’70s, a 17-year-old Bisi answered a Village Voice ad from bassist Bill Laswell, becoming a peripheral member of the bassist’s project Material. If it’s not Michael Gira living on a couch above the studio or the entire Zulu Nation crammed into the control room, it’s the very formation of the space that makes Bisi more than a footnote. Showcasing the opaque, roaring, visceral sound he’s come to epitomize, BC35 acts as a totem to his enduring role in NYC’s rock mythos. Mostly improvised, with a handful of pre-composed songs thrown in, it’s a sonic embodiment of risk-taking, rule-breaking, and antithesis that celebrates the endurance of a man and a space tied directly to New York’s noise, art-rock, punk, free jazz, hip-hop, and alternative movements.Īcross 13 tracks, Bisi demonstrates-as a producer, engineer, and general facilitator of the avant-garde-what’s made his name familiar to liner-notes obsessives and New York noise nerds for three and a half decades. 1280, Parlor Walls, Live Skull, Cop Shoot Cop, Foetus, and many, many more gathered for a two-day session and show, with an audience present and participating (namely as a choir on the gorgeous J.G. The credits read like a who’s who of New York’s experimental underground: members of Swans, Sonic Youth, Pop. The fact that friends of the humble producer found it necessary to organize a Kickstarter to cover his medical expenses speaks to the demise of a thriving creative class in the city.īC35 emerged as a result of that fundraiser for Bisi’s medical bills: a compilation of live takes (and a few overdubs) spanning one weekend in January 2016. It wasn’t until 2015, well into the neighborhood’s gentrification-you could by then see a Whole Foods from the studio roof-that Bisi lost some teeth to muggers on the block. Thirty-five years later, the pollution remains (the canal was named an EPA Superfund site in 2010) but Gowanus suffers the predacious developmental fate of many New York neighborhoods.
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