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The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919044

1534-150X

David Pearson,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley David Pearson The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront. By Cisco Bradley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. [xiv, 388 p. ISBN 9781478016748 (hardcover), $109.95; ISBN 9781478019374 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9781478024019 (ebook), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 510] Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant- Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront is, to my knowledge, the first book-length study of a music scene that has dramatically impacted United States culture in the new millennium. Although the more visible signs of the scene's impact are its more watered-down forms and least rebellious aspects—think of the mainstreaming of indie-rock sounds, the marketing of hipster fashion, and the popular attitude of ironic detachment—Bradley focuses on the avant-garde strains of music in the local scene and the collaborative, DIY methods central to their development. Avant-garde jazz, noise, and electronic music figure prominently in the narrative, but, to Bradley, it was the breakdown of genre boundaries that truly defined the scene. As he explains, "Genre was in decline, people were hearing things that challenged them and opened new doors, and this, together, resulted in the Williamsburg sound: an eclectic array of sounds, origins, styles, rhythms, and instruments melded together into a coherent whole with an eye for experiment, newness, surprise, and futuristic visions" (p. 85). Throughout The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Bradley introduces us to this eclectic array of musical sounds. We learn about Michael Zwicky's Scrap Metal Music, whose performances relied on audience members joining in on found objects, an example of the more general ethos of audience participation in the Williamsburg warehouse shows of the 1990s. We learn about brutal prog, which, as its moniker suggests, was "more focused on dissonance and intensity than other forms of progressive rock" (p. 231). This genre highlights the omnivorous ethos of Williamsburg musicians, in this case with an appetite for Japanese noise and punk genres such as grindcore that never went mainstream (and grindcore fans will appreciate the irony and, well, sacrilege of fusing it with progressive rock). In these and other examples, Bradley provides clear explanations of techniques and aesthetics that are both specific and elastic, and he shows why Williamsburg musicians chose those techniques and aesthetics and developed them in the ways they did. For example, Bradley astutely points out that "as a reaction to the postmodernism of the 1980s, immersionism rejected the idea that deconstruction was going to change the world" (p. 27). And among the young crop of jazz musicians moving to Williamsburg in the 2000s, he identifies an impulse to reject college jazz training that never steps beyond "Giant Steps," and to embrace free improvisation while fusing it with "rigorous composition" (p. 137). Lest I give the erroneous impression that Bradley mainly focuses on aesthetic analysis, another great strength of his book is the attention to social geography and the role of music venues and curators within the music scene. "Williamsburg's defining spatial characteristic was the postindustrial environment" (p. 4), and Bradley makes clear that without abandoned warehouses along the waterfront, cheap rents, and less police intervention than today, the avant-garde that sprang up in the 1990s through weekend one-off warehouse extravaganzas and intimate DIY venues would not have been possible. He also explains that Williamsburg was not an open slate but a working-class, immigrant neighborhood al-ready occupied by people struggling with the challenges of the postindus-trial environment, including unemployment and official neglect. Tension between artists flocking to Williamsburg and the residents who already lived there is a consistent theme in the first half of the book; as early as 1993, "a Puerto Rican artist from the neighborhood began stenciling '90 Days' on [End Page 511] the walls of some DIY music venues and art galleries, declaring that they must close and reinforcing the demand with bomb threats" (p. 53), as if channeling the spirit of Lolita Lebrón. While Bradley correctly points to the larger forces at work—namely real estate capital and the city government that serves...