(Location artwork for the Glass Bees project "Venice, Brooklyn")
If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.
Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.
New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn.
Voracious listeners of genre-bending tunes including indie rock, avant garde, and free jazz, Williams and Das are no strangers to the local music scene. Former members of Sick Passengers, the Glass Bees have come to the conclusion that “you don’t have to just compose a song.” After years of working within mainstream conventions, the duo ventured into more abstract work, and have amassed an amazing library of sound prior to their involvement with the 2009 ConfluxCity festival.
The duo decided to participate in the underground music and arts festival, focusing on neighborhoods that the other participants neglected. Noting that New York is larger than just Manhattan, the Glass Bees headed to Gerritsen Beach and Sheepshead Bay because, as Jason so succinctly puts it, “Nobody goes there.” Most of Conflux 2009 took place in Manhattan or northern Brooklyn.
Completed within a span of ten hours on September 20, the Venice, Brooklyn installation came armed with debris collected from our shores, recordings of coast guard frequencies and ambient noise, as well as maps highlighting the areas that would be affected by severe coastal flooding in the coming years. Continue Reading »
