As many of you New Yorkers (hopefully) know, The Silent Barn in Ridgewood, Queens is one of our great treasures - a DIY, all-ages venue that has been home to some of the best indie rock shows the city has seen in the last few years (they also house a zine library, and have had numerous art shows). Perhaps you’ve even been to one of our shows there, like, for example, the Hospital Blossoms release show we played in June alongside Jason Anderson, Mountain Man, and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks.
What you probably didn’t know was that they recorded the whole thing. As it turns out, the nice folks who live and work at the Barn have microphones set up all over the building (in the show spaces, yes, but also in the hallways and even by the front door), and have recorded a handful of shows by having all of these microphones set at equal levels, going straight to cassette. The end result is less of a “live recording” in the traditional sense and more a documentary of the overall experience of the show (see G. Lucas Crane’s eloquent discussion of this “non-amoral surveillance” here).
And now, they’ve kindly posted a number of these recordings for your listening pleasure right here, including a good portion of our set from the release show! You’ll have to listen to a bit of Mountain Man to get to it, but that is totally ok because they are awesome (WW starts about a third of the way through the recording).
Now, I will be honest, I wouldn’t really recommend listening to this stuff unless you have a pretty high tolerance for dissonance, ambient noise, and extremely lo-fi recording technology, but if you do, this right here is a goldmine. On our recording, you’ll find one of the best WW lineups of recent memory (Jason Anderson on piano, Ted Gordon on bass, Dylan Clark on drums, and myself on electric guitar) blazing through one Hospital Blossoms favorite, a couple new tunes, and a sweet Tom Petty cover. You’d be wise to listen to Jason and Bleeker’s sets as well. If you close your eyes and use your imagination, it would almost be like you were at this awesome show in the flesh.
Of course, it might also help if you had a couple beers and danced until you were really, really sweaty.