Dancing On The Power Lines: Martin Bisi on Songwriting After Four Decades Behind the Glass

Transmission 405: Interview with Martin Bisi

Martin Bisi has spent forty-five years on the other side of the glass at BC Studio in Gowanus, engineering records for Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, Swans and Herbie Hancock while quietly building his own body of work as a songwriter. For years he deliberately kept his own music away from the sounds passing through his mixing desk; that changed around 2011, when he let his influences bleed openly into his own records.

Title: Dancing On The Power Lines
Artist: Martin Bisi
Release Date: 2026-07-10
Genres: Art Rock, Experimental Music, No Wave, Noise Rock, Post-punk
Label: self-release
Description: Martin Bisi talks radical joy, Gowanus and forty-five years at BC Studio in an interview about his new album Dancing On The Power Lines.

His new album, Dancing On The Power Lines, is a collaboration with Diego Ferri (bass, baritone guitar, synth) and Oliver Rivera Drew (drums, percussion), the European wing of his band, with lyrics from Nora Almeida and Joan Hacker, who also contributes vocals. It arrives mastered by Fred Kevorkian, and in a title track built around a notion of radical joy that Bisi says clicked for him one night on a Berlin dancefloor: dancing as an act of resistance.

The record lands in the studio’s 45th year, marked too by a new documentary short updating Sound & Chaos, the film that first told BC Studio’s story.

Featured image: © Ego Sensation

How did you first become interested in music and what artists or bands influenced you early on?

Well, I was always, you know, an average teenager, just interested in a lot of music. In the seventies, I definitely had a sense of it being outside of the norm, outside of commercial music. But a lot of what I considered avant-garde was actually really big.

When I was a teenager, I liked… I think, you know, they played in stadiums, but somehow in my mind that was part of a sense of alternative or something, because it was prog. I think I liked a lot of stuff that was prog, like Jeff Beck. Also my mom was into classical music, so I was very immersed in listening to classical music, even though I really wanted to take a path as a listener into rock. But the stuff I thought was revolutionary seems pretty conventional now, like even the Sex Pistols, Frank Zappa, as a teenager I really liked and went to see.

Basically my path started in theater class. I was in theater class doing lighting and set design, this was in high school. As a teenager, eventually I just thought it would be good to get more involved with music. I actually played drums for myself, in my house, but I played very complicated drums. My fans were like, you know, Terry Bozzio, Alan White, the drummer for Yes. So very advanced drumming, and I didn’t really see that combining with a lot of the music I was listening to, so I didn’t really think about joining a band, but that’s what I was doing for my own pleasure.

The bands that made me go into music more seriously, and felt inspired to start recording, were local bands, mostly no wave, and had much more to do with them live than any recordings. I still don’t know if I’ve even heard any recordings of some of the bands that influenced me then, like DNA, Lydia Lunch‘s bands, which I would see live. I know that both those bands, DNA and Lydia Lunch, with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, appeared on that album from 1977 called No New York. I don’t think I’ve even heard that even now, but that was very influential to me, that’s what solidified my sense of it.

And then also witnessing some John Zorn stuff. In fact, I witnessed a rehearsal of John Zorn, which is kind of funny. The day I went to meet Bill Laswell in a building in Manhattan, I walked straight into, in the middle of the day, a rehearsal of John Zorn, and that was very life-changing just seeing it. So you could see how I would go from Frank Zappa to John Zorn, John Zorn game pieces with fifteen people doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s actually in a weird way sort of similar, except the John Zorn stuff was more deconstructed. But yeah, that was the beginning.

What do you remember most about the very first session at the BC Studio in 1981?

Well, the first session was really with Eno, with Brian Eno. One thing that’s funny is I don’t think Eno was in a big hurry, because it definitely wasn’t like he showed up and everything’s ready. Now when people show up at the studio, I should be ready, I need to be ready, I even prepare for sessions. So when people come in we do a little chatting maybe, but basically we should be able to get to work pretty quickly. That wasn’t the case for the first Eno session, for sure.

Even the first couple of days it was like, show up, the gear kind of set up, how are we going to do this, what do I do. Eno was almost an instructor, really. For instance, when we had track sheets, to document track one is this instrument, track two is this instrument, he was even advising me on the proper way to fill them in, what information was important to put in a track sheet. Because I would usually just put the person’s name, Bill, that’s it. And he was like, it might be good to put what Bill played, maybe that’s actually more important than that it was Bill. So if someone plays a harmonic… it was all very ambient, lots of weird instruments, or if you want to even call them instruments, sound-making things, pieces of tubing, for instance, rocks, stones, put in a box. So he’d say, don’t put like “Fred”, put “stones in a box”, or just “stones”. That’s obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me then. So that was him instructing me. I think there was some tape loops involved too, he showed me how to do that, and I think he kind of enjoyed that.

I think he got a little frustrated later, maybe a week later, or in the second week, because we were working like five days a week and then a weekend, and each of those weekends he would go up to Vermont, which is a little far. This record was called On Land, that’s what all the recordings we did went to. I think it’s a compilation of a few things, but anything we did was on land. That was his thinking. So in a weird way, I don’t know, you’d have to ask him, but maybe his trips to Vermont had something to do with wanting something that feels a bit more natural than the asphalt jungle that was my neighborhood in New York City at the time.

Since BC Studio’s 45th this year, what surprised you most about its longevity?

Well, it’s surprising to still be relevant at all. There have been moments, after the pandemic was the second time, where I really questioned whether… because having a recording studio is kind of a big deal, it takes a lot of work, it’s potentially expensive, it’s a small business. So there’s been twice in my life that I questioned whether it was viable anymore, whether the culture still supported something like a recording studio where people made albums, or even that style of music.

The first time I had these questions was around the time of Napster, with the whole download culture, where a lot of the downloading was singles, people would just download a single for free. This was before vinyl came to the rescue, because vinyl sort of rescued the independent music industry. It’s also the beginning of home recording studios. So I really wondered, because it seemed with home recording studios you could, in a very rough way, do almost anything. Maybe not very well, but you could do it. So you didn’t necessarily need a studio. I wasn’t sure if people would really feel the need to come to a recording studio like mine and record a whole album.

But then things changed, things recovered. I think vinyl really brought back the culture around a record, a large collection of songs that all fit together, that people are interested in getting all of. Also the fact that we’re talking about vinyl implied that people respected quality, that’s one of the reasons people would like vinyl, they’d get something that wasn’t electronic, wasn’t digital, wasn’t downloaded, and had maybe more of an audiophile quality, which is true. Maybe the audiophile quality isn’t the most important thing in my mind, but nevertheless people caring about that was helpful.

The second time I started questioning the viability of the studio was post-pandemic. A lot of people were wondering, where did all the bands go? I think the post-pandemic period was very challenging for bands, for large collaborations. A lot of pre-existing bands either had to break up or people would move away, there was a lot of mobility, people would re-evaluate their lives, some would leave New York City, move to another city, go nomadic, all kinds of things. So there were a lot of duos and not a lot of bands.

One thing that did go through the pandemic was a lot of beat-based music. There were dance parties, dance nights, which were kind of the only thing that was really big still, because it’s young people, and after the pandemic there were fewer live rock shows, they’d be earlier in the night, cut short, there were problems there. I think stylistically it seemed that people liked this culture where, because during the pandemic a lot of people would work on their music at home, they’d have stuff on Ableton Live, so there’d be a lot of solo performances where someone would just play on top of their Ableton Live track. All this was quite depressing to me, in terms of, I’ve always felt I’m more of a live music advocate, the importance of live music, of collaborations. I think it’s special, people collaborating and you can see them live on a stage in person, that’s valuable. That’s where I’m coming from, which started feeling very retro, very much of the 20th century and not of the current moment. So I had my doubts about where things were going.

I think things have recovered, and that’s with the 45 year anniversary, that’s one story that seems to be there. Coincidentally, this is a return, and it’s Gen Z, very young people pushing this thing of being interested in watching a band of collaborators, and they’re also not enamored with everything being new, everything being on TikTok, which is very solo, individual oriented, everything’s a selfie, a musical selfie, or just a selfie. A band, and live music, the value of that, and maybe the fascination and the support by very young people… I feel like a bit of my… and I’m going to use a word I’ve usually associated in a negative way, which is retro. I’ve usually used that word in a negative sense, but at the moment this seems like a very retro period, but it’s kind of very positive, because I guess, maybe because of the internet, a lot of music seems timeless. Young people are curious about what happened before, before the internet, let alone before the pandemic, or even how things were done, and if things were obscure or hard to find for some people, there’s that curiosity, well, let’s dig it up. I think for at least some very young people there’s a sense of having been robbed, we have a sort of backlash to the rule of the technology industry. So all that’s kind of a very positive moment, and I feel that’s part of my longevity at the moment.

I mean luckily, very luckily, it’s really luck, I’m just in a building that supports the arts. I didn’t pick this building in 1979 when I moved here, it was vacant, it was an abandoned building, and luckily it went towards the arts. I still have to advocate for myself that music is important to have in the building in some way, because there are visual artists, all kinds of stuff in my building, but luckily I’ve managed to secure a bit of support from the building. That’s partly luck, because it’s not like I tried to get in this building, I don’t think it has necessarily a lot to do with the quality of the recordings, it’s just that it exists, it’s not like the building is evaluating every record and giving it a rating. But anyway, some of my longevity is this, there’s been a bunch of luck, combined, of course, with my doing stuff that people want to talk about.

You started as an engineer before becoming a songwriter yourself. How did that shift happen?

Well, I was always doing recording stuff on my own, so even when I started recording in ’81 I would just come into the studio and record some stuff. The idea of putting it on a record… honestly I was doing it for sanity. I mean first I had that creative impulse, but part of why it was important was to keep sane, because I needed to be on the other side of the camera a little bit. If I’m always behind the camera I felt kind of lost. So it really helped to unify my creativity with me being a recording engineer, because in some ways I am a recording engineer, my creativity is sort of subtle, I think it’s important, as a recording engineer, what that contributes to a record, but it’s kind of subtle, I keep it subtle on purpose, I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m imposing anything. So for me to have stuff on my own, and be on the other side of the camera, made a lot of sense.

It wasn’t until SST, the record label, became a thing, and I had more contact with SST because of Sonic Youth, that I realized there was a way to release a record. There was a sub-label previously owned by Mike Watt of the Minutemen, called New Alliance, under the umbrella of SST, and the way I understood it, it was for studio projects for artists that didn’t tour, artists that would be interesting but didn’t tour. Since I wasn’t touring at all then, I didn’t see myself that way, studio work was very exciting, it was more exciting in a way then as an art form than even it is now, so I was very involved with that. The idea of not touring wasn’t a big deal, so I was happy with that label. I managed to release my first solo record, in 1989 I believe, eight years after the Brian Eno sessions, that record’s called Creole Mass, a little difficult to find, but you can still find vinyl and some CDs kicking around.

I continued for a while, a few records on SST, definitely enjoyed being on the label, then I started getting the taste for having ideas, and also all my music seemed to be very much on purpose, trying to stay away from everything else I was doing. I was trying stylistically to not sound like all the stuff I was recording, that was very important to me, to have my own identity musically, so I was definitely not sounding like no wave, not sounding like Swans, not sounding like Herbie Hancock, none of that, some weird combination of things I would do.

That also changed later, in the 21st century, after the whole Napster disaster, that’s when I started thinking, you know what, live is important, maybe live is all there’s going to be, or all that’s where all the power is. And it’s true, that’s what really matters in the end, being in a room with people. So in 2011, around then, my first record, Ex Niculo, in this new mode, I stopped trying to stay away from a lot of my influences, I stopped staying away from the styles that I was a part of making. I realized this is also part of me, so with that record it started sounding a little more like other stuff I do, in my own way, and that was an exciting change, that’s really a division. And with that also came me being more of what you’d normally think of as a musical artist, more live playing and touring.

How has Brooklyn and the Gowanus neighborhood shaped the sound of the studio over the years?

It’s funny, because I can refer to Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”. I don’t know if you’ve heard that, the principle is that you might look for the geniuses, but the reality is you might want to think of it as a whole, because no genius is possible without a collection of equally genial people that they get inspired from.

When I go out, and I do try to go see a lot of live music, maybe once or twice a week, I don’t have to like everything, but it’s interesting to get a sense, a flavor of the language, because ultimately it’s the language. So making, putting together an artistic concept, is the combination of the language itself, some people are just not going to understand the language, and then also what the language is transmitting, people have to get the language to understand what’s being said. So I think putting together the language, sort of the community vision, is crucial.

New York City has really informed that, because there’s also a lot of social concerns, in the eighties New York City was very violent. How does that affect things? There was also a lot of autonomy, in a sort of anarchist sense, because the ruling systems in the eighties were collapsing in New York City, there were entire areas where the police wouldn’t even go because it was too dangerous. A lot of land in lower Manhattan was essentially abandoned, as crazy as that may sound, maybe more than half the land was literally abandoned by the owners, sometimes they’d set it on fire, arson buildings just to collect the insurance, crazy stuff like that. But on the other hand, once the governing systems are on their knees, it was great for music, that’s why in the eighties you had hip hop and punk, it was great for art, people thought of New York City as the cultural capital of the world, more so than it is now, I don’t think New York is necessarily the cultural capital of the world now the way it was for that decade.

So also the concerns, I’m impressionable, I’m affected by my peers and their opinions, and there was a lot of anger and politics, a lot of no wave was quite political, and also a lot of very bold sexuality, a lot of no wave was very boldly sexual, in your face, in a way that was confrontational, it wasn’t about being sexy in the normal sense. So, Richard Kern‘s films and this kind of stuff, and also some of Lydia Lunch’s work, all that influenced my brain, because I agreed with all of it. I’m a creature of my place, so New York City… I’ve actually been concerned if I ever have to leave New York City, whether I would lose something musically, I think it matters. I like this arc that I’m on, and it’s not just a question of who, like what people can do for you, or collaborations, it’s also what your impulses are. I’m afraid, frankly, if I go live somewhere in nature, that it’s going to change what I do, because I think what I do is pretty urban, to answer your other point, it’s kind of industrial and urban, it’s hard sounds, hard, with undercurrents of anger, and when it’s not angry, it’s alienated sounding, there’s an alienation to it. In a weird way, with a lot of the music I work with, not everyone that comes to the studio is trying to capture those sentiments, but it is funny how I feel like nevertheless, I can’t help it, as an engineer I’m sort of bringing out maybe a little bit of that feeling in things.

So yeah, I’m very connected to New York City. Gowanus is super important, really, because it’s at the forefront of a lot of things. For instance, Gowanus, being not that far from Manhattan, was one of the last to gentrify. Williamsburg, which you might have heard of, was the first neighborhood to really gentrify the way we normally think about it, that was almost twenty years ago, that’s also Brooklyn. That’s beyond gentrification now. Gowanus is only now starting to gentrify, because it’s a flood zone, there’s a lot of toxicity in the ground, it’s highly polluted, there are problems there. In a way that has saved me from being displaced two decades ago, but here we are now, I’m the one facing the wolves now, potentially, I hope not, but we’ll see, the story continues.

Is there a piece of gear or a technique from those early years that you still rely on today?

Interestingly enough, I have a Lexicon PCM42, which is a rack mounted unit, and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, I bring it everywhere I go when I play live, because there’s so much you can do with it, it’s not presets, there’s knobs, so you can turn things, change the pitch of things, modulate the sounds, change the speed, all this kind of stuff. That’s what I used, not the exact unit itself, but the same model, on Rocket to do the Led Zeppelin sample, which finally people are talking about. On Herbie Hancock‘s Rocket there’s a stab, like a guitar sounding stab, at the top of each verse, very short, like a double, that was sampled or captured on the Lexicon from a Led Zeppelin record. It’s finally being talked about, because for years I talked about the Led Zeppelin sample in Rocket and thought that was super interesting, but no one wanted to talk about it for some reason. Now that song keeps getting a lot of interest, almost picking up more now, this sort of Gen Z phenomenon where they’re looking back at the eighties and go, oh my god, what is this song, with the scratching and all that stuff. Suddenly people are like, oh, that sound is Led Zeppelin, now they think it’s interesting.

So that’s the one piece of gear, a different actual unit, the same model, that I still bring with me everywhere, because you can use knobs, a lot of manual control. But that’s pretty much it. As a producer, engineer, I feel like I’ve always been about controlling the sounds, I don’t do a lot of set it and forget it, there’s not a lot of just capture the performance and nothing else, there are always adjustments and stuff, and I think it makes things better to be able to think about them, put them together, adjust the sounds. Also people are expecting to work faster.

So I’ve moved away from… I mean, my computer is still a G4, in terms of Pro Tools I’m using a very old Pro Tools, Pro Tools 5, that’s nineties, and it has old plugins. In that sense, yes, it’s still not the old, old days, but it’s kind of the old days. I’m not a big fan of always trying to update things, because I’m too scared of losing something, if something’s working, and it’s about the creativity, why am I going to worry about changing the technology, I’m more likely to just take a step backwards with new equipment, unless I really need to somehow move forward. So I’m cautious about moving forward.

But yeah, now, I don’t believe in trying to put everything on tape, this kind of stuff, because you lose a lot of control, and I think that’s essential. I know people are thinking differently now, they want to work on stuff, so when I do a mix now, the actual mix that gets used might be mix five, mix seven, that used to not be that way, it used to be mix one, and if there’s a problem, it’s difficult, mix two back then would mean there were some real problems, that you really weren’t happy with. But now people don’t work that way, they want to do mix one, then they think about it, then they try a couple of things, that’s mix two, then okay, now we’re getting there. So yeah, that doesn’t work with the old methods and the old equipment, basically.

Is there a theme or thread that ties the tracks together on Dancing on the Power Lines, or does each song stand more on its own?

Well, it’s really about intersecting, it’s always that way with me, it’s about intersecting with the world, in a sort of existential and political way. It’s not a perfectly linear thread, but towards the end of the record, the last two tracks, it picks up and the concept becomes clearer. The final track, Anarcho Nihilist, is kind of like an epilogue for humanity, it’s really the end point, in fact that’s what it’s called, the final communication, Anarcho Nihilist, the final communication. So it picks up. But for instance there’s a song, 1992, which addresses the dystopia of New York City in 1990.

So the one, I’m sorry, I don’t even remember the titles exactly, but Strategy 1992: Eat A Rich, that sort of paints a picture of the New York City dystopia, basically with ruling systems falling apart. Buildings falling apart, parks falling apart, people going a bit insane, and then I start a countdown, in the lyrics I rattle off some years to the present point. So I’m trying to paint this arc happening from that period.

Also, even the title track, Dancing on the Power Lines, the opening track, that’s my thinking about this concept of radical joy, which I’ve had a hard time exactly understanding, but that’s important to people, and now I finally understood it. I finally understood it one night in Berlin, where I was at some dance party in the middle of the night, and people were happy, and I was with some queer friends, and I suddenly understood why people wanted to feel joy, and that dancing could be an act of resistance. I finally got it. So my friends from that night, I’d say, thanks, because it helped me understand what I’m doing here with this song, because sometimes you do a piece of music, and especially with lyrics, you think you understand a reason, but then the reason comes more clearly out of your subconscious onto something a little more solid. So Dancing on the Power Lines is almost this act of resistance, mocking the powers that be.

And then, of course, the song Cubesmart Sunset, which immediately follows that. It’s also this weird dystopia, because it’s about this building that a lot of people would think is extremely ugly in Gowanus, a storage building that’s really tall, bright blue and orange, what most people would call ugly. But the person who wrote the lyrics, I had a co-creator on some of these songs, a lyricist, a poet, Nora Almeida, who’s in Gowanus, also an activist there. That’s a poem she wrote, Cubesmart Sunset, which is totally ironic. So you have this building that, if you think of it a little differently, is absolutely beautiful, because it stands like a fortress on the side of the Gowanus Canal, and the actual sunsets reflecting above and off the orange and the blue are really stunning. So it’s this kind of humorous take-down, I would almost have to have her explain exactly how sweet the ironies are in it, but it’s between the human narcissism that beauty can only be a certain kind of way, and also that we can’t revisualize what we’re looking at in a way that’s not intended, because the people who designed the building and those colors probably were doing it just to get noticed, to brand it, and to be ugly, probably on purpose. And now here we are, thinking it’s quite beautiful during the sunset.

So all of these things paint a picture, and it really gets very linear in the last two songs. The penultimate one, The Last Conquest, is a reference to 1492, when Columbus landed in Jamaica, and I keep saying “the blood moon”, because there was a lunar eclipse.

The Last Conquest refers to the landing in Jamaica of Columbus. When I say “the blood moon”, which I keep repeating over and over, that’s the lunar eclipse, a historic event that Columbus used to intimidate the inhabitants of Jamaica at the time, to get some concession, he wanted more food for the people on his expeditions, stuff like that. But I always thought the symbolism of the blood moon, as people usually call lunar eclipses, seemed kind of amazing as a sort of predictor of what would happen, the massive loss of life because of disease, enslavement, and forced ethnic cleansing that happened in the Americas. This, to me, and here I am living in an area of the Americas that was depopulated by a pandemic of the time, well, that’s a catastrophe. So what I’m suggesting in that song is that the last conquest wasn’t 1492, it’s the one to come. I was suggesting that humanity can maybe get away with one more global disaster, and then maybe that’s it for our global empire.

And then I actually do it in the epilogue, Anarcho-Nihilist. There’s a whole pronouncement starting in the middle of the song, where I’m making an announcement of the end, and what that means. I’m addressing Anarcho-Nihilists, and I take on the aesthetic of an authoritarian, or whatever. I’m ending all my live sets right now with that. I stand in front, the band keeps playing, maybe a little more minimally, and I make this announcement to the audience, and I say there’ll be no further communication. And then I drop my hand, and if I’m lucky, the venue will turn off all the lights.

So the point is, there might be a future, but I think that maybe in some century, or a couple of centuries, there could be, because I don’t think things are going in the right direction, including climate, that there could be this sort of future, and there might be a future after that, and that might be good. But what I tell people is that guy, in other words me, you don’t want that guy. I’m not saying I’m a bad person, I’m just saying that when that’s happening, if I’m making this, that’s something you don’t want, but that’s where we’re going. I almost feel a little like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, where he’s making fun of Hitler because that’s where their world is going. I’m not a Hitler in that thing, but I’m still saying maybe you don’t really want that, if humanity doesn’t, and I don’t think humanity can come to its senses. I’m very pessimistic, because we can’t organize, we can’t come together, we can’t decide things collectively. We’re too big a population, spread out over the whole world, how is this going to happen? And I don’t see a lot of political will, and the powers that be aren’t going to allow a big realignment and readjustment of how things are done on the planet.

Is this collaborative group something you’d want to keep working with going forward, or was it built specifically for this record?

I think I really need to continue with the same people. The thing I might be a little unsure of is the lyrics, because it was fantastic working with Nora Almeida on about half the lyrics for half the record. She’s a poet, a political activist and climate artist, I should say, and a librarian, all kinds of things, but she’s also a poet, I think she studied poetry. So the lyrics were good and aligned, and except for Cubesmart Sunset, which was a pre-existing poem, on the other three songs she worked on she came up with the lyrics listening to the music, considering my sensibilities, and did an excellent job. So that’s a little what I’m unsure of, because I think she really made it possible for me to finish this record. I’m not exactly sure, it’s like a crutch, I don’t know if I really should. I think in the future there will be another lyrical collaboration, but I don’t want to get lazy, it’s also possible for me to write some of my own lyrics. So that’s a bit of a question mark.

But with the band, that was Oliver Rivera Drew in Berlin and Diego Ferri. Oliver Rivera Drew came to Brooklyn and recorded the drum parts, and then Diego Ferri overdubbed remotely. They’re also my band in Europe, what I call the Berlin chapter of my band, so anytime I’m in Europe I play with them. That’s precious, so that’s going to continue. You might notice that on some of my records I go back and forth between the New York chapter of the band and the European chapter. On this one it’s fully the European chapter, but on the previous EP it’s mostly the New York chapter.

The only thing that’s a little funny is that Diego Ferri, who is part of the Berlin chapter, actually came to the US to do a few tour dates, and since he was here, we recorded with the US drummer. So on the previous record, Your Ultimate Urban Fantasy, that’s mostly the New York chapter, also with Genevieve Fernworthy playing synthesizer on most of the songs, except for one song, Transit Hub Extraordinaire, which is fully the Berlin chapter, in fact that one was recorded in Berlin at a rehearsal space.

So I basically use both chapters, there’s a revolving group of people. Actually, I feel like for the next one I really need to make it more New York, so I’ll probably use the New York drummer, at least on a few songs. But these relationships are precious, because we get better every time. Less talk, more rock, I’m joking, but yeah, less talk, more music, for sure.

Are you working on new material?

No, because I feel we’ve just started playing this latest material live, and I’m still preparing the record. We’re already playing three of the songs live, and I might add one more, so I’m really focused on that. I’m not in a rush, I work very slowly, I only release one record of music maybe once every two years or something, so it takes a while to get there.

Another interesting development is I might have joined this band I’ve worked with a lot called Weeping Icon. Weeping Icon will be featured in the new documentary, there’s an update, it’s like an update on the original documentary, because the original documentary was 13 years ago. So the new one, to mark the 45th year of the studio, discusses the current context of Gowanus and New York City, and also features some of the bands that have really worked in depth at the studio in the last year or so. It’ll be a documentary short, it looks like it’ll be around 25 minutes, with a bit of a look at the current year, the 45th year, but also looking back a little into the years in between.

For instance, it addresses the record called BC 35, which was released, by the way, on Bronson in Ravenna. That record was basically a collection of collaborations done specifically for the record, with people who had worked in the studio for a long time. That recording happened after the previous, the original documentary, called Sound and Chaos. So the new documentary, I don’t know the title yet, will address what’s happening in the 45th year of the studio, and also touch a little on BC 35, which was another milestone, another marker in terms of the passing of time. Because basically the original documentary was at the studio at 30 years, and then that record was at the studio at 35 years, and now we’re at 45, we skipped one because of the pandemic.

Photos courtesy of Martin Bisi

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others