lineup

• Modrums
• Contrafuego
• Viiaan

menu

appetizers

• Focaccia Pugliese (vegan)
• Quinoa and Chia Sourdough for Angee (vegan)
• Isaac’s Mini Arepas with Papalo Crema (gluten-free)
• Lesbian Wedding Zeytoon Parvardeh (Iranian green olives marinated in ground walnuts; vegan, gluten-free, has walnuts)
• Eli’s Matbucha (Middle Eastern roasted tomato and pepper dip; vegan, gluten-free)
• White Bean and Cilantro Dip (vegan, gluten-free)
• Caju Goat Milk Butter

salads

• Spiced Lentil and Carrot Salad (vegan, gluten-free)
• Massaman Spring Salad for Hervé (vegan, has peanuts)

mains

• Roasted Sunchokes and Maduros with Sol’s Salsa Huancaína and Black Olives
• Chickpea Tahchin (Persian baked rice casserole) forever for Mallory (vegan, has pine nuts)
• Prune’s Stewed Chicories with Mastic (vegan, gluten-free)
• Vegan Ajiaco (Colombian Vegetable Soup) for David (with accompanying cashew cream and capers; vegan, gluten-free, cream has cashews)
• Quibebe (Brazilian butternut squash stew; vegan, gluten-free)
• Turlu (Turkish roast vegetables; vegan, gluten-free)
• Manti Pasta with Vegetarian Beef and Garlicky Yogurt Sauce (gluten-free)

desserts

• Bergamot Buckwheat Cake for Yosef and McKenzie (gluten-free)
• Caju Caipirinha Pie for Sam W. (has cashews)
• Chimarrão Pie for Sofia
M. and Ale (has gelatin)
• Obsession: Dondurma (with accompanying crushed pistachios; gluten-free, has pistachios)
• Revani (Turkish semolina yogurt cake)
• Chocolate Brigadeiro Cake
• Walnut Date and Banana Cake (vegan, has walnuts)
• Chocolate and Peanut Butter Tart (vegan, has peanuts)

beverages

• Nameko Mushroom Hot Chocolate for Sam R. (vegan, gluten-free)
• Lacto-fermented Sweet Chile Soda for Kiki (vegan, gluten-free)
• Hibiscus Cherry Serbet (Turkish fruit drink; vegan, gluten-free)

post-midnight snacks

• Panela Cupuaçu Nib Rochers (gluten-free)
• Bom-bocado (Brazilian coconut custard muffins; gluten-free)

lore

Happy March, friends. We hope you’re all thawing out from the absolute frigid conditions that our city experienced the past couple of months, and are ready to greet the first yawn of spring by stretching out your arms, legs, and stomachs at our next Fiber, which takes place on the first day of Spring.

We usually start with a wrap up of musical notes and go deeper into what we’ve been thinking about, but this time we’re going to jump right in. If you keep reading, all of our usual information is below this reckoning about coming together.

The weather this week was such a relief after the onslaught of subfreezing temperatures and mounds of shitty snow this season. As I was walking through the Upper East Side on a job the day after the most recent storm, I was struck by how much cleaner the streets and sidewalks were up there. I passed a doorman on his knees polishing the brass entrance to a building, and thought about the streets around us at home in Flatbush, where only an hour earlier we’d helped an old lady with her shopping cart and a mother with two children and a stroller pass over 20 foot long patches of snow and ice piled up at the corners.

It is still winter but on Tuesday it reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Central Park, a record high. The last Fiber was held on the coldest night of the year, when it was 6 degrees Fahrenheit, another record. More than 20 unhoused people died of exposure on our city streets this year while our country is spending 1 billion dollars a day dropping bombs on Iranian civilians, as well as having given Israel some 20 plus billion dollars since Oct. 7, 2023 to carry out their genocide in Gaza. The HUD, before its most recent gutting, used to put the cost of ending homelessness in this country at 20 billion. The Pentagon, failing their 8th audit in a row, burned 93 billion last September, the cost of ending world hunger by 2030, in order to blow through their congressional allocation before it ran out: buying grand pianos, iPads, shellfish, ribeyes, ice cream, doughnuts, and other decadence befitting their depravity in the weeks before millions of our neighbors lost their SNAP benefits.

Last February we celebrated the Lunar New Year, and marked the passing of the year of the snake and the entrance into the year of the fire horse, with its promise of radical change. We are now in the ritual season of sacrifice and discipline in Catholicism and Islam, and the traditions of both Lent and Ramadan grew from the understanding that inner work was necessary before the word of God could be received. Instead, today we have the unchecked hubris and cruel delusion of men who claim the authority to pass judgment on others – fanatical hypocrites who peddle suffering and call it salvation, spiritually impoverished cowards who claim to be the instruments of gods and incite Armageddon.

The idea that there is a time and a place for mourning, for celebration, for building, for rest – these notions of ancient wisdom have all been uprooted. We live in a time in which our seasons, our cycles of grief and joy are all collapsed and intermingled.

LORE: GRIEF AND JOY

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.
– Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 6

It has been a hellish few weeks. Seeing the recent videos coming out of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Cuba, and the mines of Congo, to mention only a few places being destroyed in our names, this most recent depraved outburst by abject, dominating, narcissistic scourges has been difficult. Domestically, we continue to watch the attacks on our transgender siblings in America, the violation of our neighborhoods by fascist bands, and everywhere the sadism of politicians and corporations that are fighting to destroy our earth. In the recent storm of grief and the oncoming spring, we ask ourselves, “How do we live in this sick world?”

Well, the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter — leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machine are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move? – Tolkien, Letter 96.

There is something deeply ironic and frankly ghoulish about the proliferation of Tolkien references in the Thiel empire: Palantir, Anduril, Mithril, Valar. Each of these companies serves the vast militarization, privatization, dehumanisation, surveillance, and automated destruction of the flows and bonds that give us life. As a Tolkien reader of more than 20 years now, it astounds me that the fundamental lesson of a man who lost entire friend groups in WWI has been so distorted and twisted by the Saurons of our world.

The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally about the story of a fellowship of people with varying levels of trust and connection with one another. Against an overwhelming force and impossible odds, they make the irrational choice of carrying the Ring, the embodiment of power, back into the imperial core of Mordor to destroy it, betting on no more than “a fool’s hope.” It would be a mistake to read Tolkien’s philosophy as a simple religious abdication of the future to God. Rather, it is ultimately about the acts of human agency and courage chosen by those who love and care for the earth and one another, and the eucatastrophe of salvation that arrives at the convergence of those independent choices.

In the moments of loss throughout Tolkien’s work, songs are sung, tributes created, kisses given, actions taken. One of the questions that is presently being asked of all of us by the people of Gaza, Tehran, El Fasher, Beirut (the list goes on), is whether we are willing to grieve their losses as ours. Grief is necessary to the self in that it demonstrates that in the face of death and needless suffering, we are tied by bonds beyond nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, whatever it may be. We mourn people who we know, people who we do not know, people we wish to know, people who we will never have the chance to know. Grief with dignity is an act of agency that demands us to think about who we are, what we mourn, and what we will choose to do, in the future after these losses; it is oriented towards the existing relation between subject to subject, and the bond between that we acknowledge and memorialize.

Where grief is an agentic relationship with loss, joy is the agentic relationship with life. In the short years that we call this earth home, life continues, and loss happens. Grief and joy both stay with us, different from sadness and happiness, which are transient states that move through us. Responses like cynicism, hedonism, identitarian empathy, or numbness negate our common life; they’re paths of least resistance shaped by the powerful means that with countless tricks and resources divide and conquer our attention, willpower, and emotions. When we stagnate in these transient states without exercising the dignity of processing through them, we foreclose the possibility of our own growth. Partying itself is no different, and can either be hedonistic or joyful. The difference between them is whether or not the joy of the party can become the fuel for us to hold and carry the greater web of relations that each of us inhabits. The dark side of the mirror is when the pleasure of the party becomes hedonistic isolation, so as to avoid the necessary acts of subjecthood, when going out is turning away from our own guilt, shame, and relational obligations against the looming ashen rain.

The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” – Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”

We hope that Fiber is not just a party of hedonism, but a Shire of abundance, bonds, and care. We hope that the relationships, the energy, the community that we build can radiate into forms and communities beyond the walls of L&SD. The food that we contribute freely is in service of a Shire. The way we ask you to eat in community before dancing is part of that. The curation of Fiber’s energy is in service of a people that can extend the experience of a party beyond hedonism. The donations we make, the NOTAFLOF policies, are also similarly in that vein. The music we select is meant to feature a common thread of life across cultural experiences. But all good things come to an end, and this party is no different. The Shire must be left behind in deed but not forgotten in heart; it cannot exist for long unless we choose to embark on the quests given.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” – Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 6.

The Fellowship’s journey is one where each made choices in service of what they loved and wanted to preserve, each within their means and abilities. Fiber, as a party, is the art wherein we share not just in tribute of what we grieve, but also our joyous abundance with the world, all in service of a future we are willing into reality. Fiber is not alone in that effort, and we all need your contributions, your organizations, your own creations, and your devotion to the many Shires in NYC, so that you may carry your own myriad griefs and joys into the relational web we share. We support all our DIY friends and local organizers because we fundamentally believe in solidarity in both grief and joy as a necessity to the preservation of good, and the times call us to that duty towards the humanity and world we’ve learned to call home. Both The Hobbit and LotR begin their fairy-tales with the respective chapters ‘An Unexpected Party’ and ‘A Long-Expected Party,’ but neither of the books nor films end there.

LORE: HOUSEKEEPING SINCE WE LAST WROTE

Last Fiber meant a lot to us. We’ve got sets by resident myu 無 and by Matthew ‘Sax Machine’ Cha locked and loaded to listen back. Matthew’s recording, which really is more of a mere archival remnant or a holograph, plays back in stereo, but you really had to see it unfold in person, as he orchestrated quadraphonic swirls of sound and hypnotized us all.

Tonight, our resident Fuge will be on East Village Radio from 8–10pm playing new and experimental music from across Latin America, and he has a new mix out from a set last week on Laenz and Off-Brand’s show on The Lot Radio. Also tonight at the studio, Fiber Fam Chaia and Nema Hän are filtering traditional sources through electronic sounds and the studio. There’s also a new yoga studio on the second floor, Liminal Yoga, which is just what our bodies need after a bender, and the programming is growing. Next week brings Good Grief with some of our favorite live acts on Tuesday, and if we can dip out of Fiber prep for a few hours we’re definitely gonna catch the Present Sounds by KG to bring us back to the roots of the studio and how it made deep listening a practice in our lives. And then a few days after Fiber, Captain Groovy brings his playground back to studio with a reparative and bassy night of enjoyment. On Friday the 27th, Angee and Aline will be on 8 Ball Radio for the Rave Cafe’s Unlikely Pairings, where they’ll be talking about food and raving (and then myu 無 and Fuge start their new FiberFM show on 8 Ball on April 7th).

The weekend after Fiber, our homie Matük, the bandleader of Contrafuego, will be playing one of his incredible live sets at Heat Index. Additionally, we are also looking forward to another set by Jan Loup (b2bing with Ayesha), whose facemelting NYC debut at the last Final Passage wowed us. Heat Index, by Fiber Fam San Huan and Shape Language, is another party that pushes against the usual raveworld formula, with performance, live sets, scent creations, installation art, food, contemporary dance, and more. Our bestie Fedra has an INCREDIBLE BANGER out on the new Santa Sede compilation – the hit of the summer in the southern hemisphere – and one of the last live performances at Fiber, by the great mysterious multimedia artist sometimes known as – , has been released in song form.

THE PARTY

Even though we’ve left this till the end, we know it’s because you’re readers. Our party this time is going to kick off with a set from Modrums, who regularly DJs around town, spinning genres from the 70s through the present, with really deep collections in Salsa, Soukous, Soca, and all sorts of stuff that starts with other letters. He’s a musician and producer who works with the band Loboko and with his partner, Lollise, and his research into the contemporary mini-popular genres across the African continent and diaspora is on display every other Tuesday on Is This Afrobeats? on EVR. (Last week Aline led the show through two hours of pagodão, her absolute favorite style of dance music from her home in Salvador!!!!) He’s also played one of our favorite Present Sounds sets ever, so we know his range is far and his reach is wide, and we’re excited to have him set the stage for Contrafuego.

Contrafuego is the brainchild of Matük and his friends from the NYC Afro-Colombian bullerenge community, and if you’ve hung around us much you’ve definitely heard us talk about Contrafuego every chance we get. Over the course of some ninety minutes these incredible rhythmists are going to bring the song and dance of the Colombian coast and filter them through a barrage of synthesizers for one of the most trance-invoking performances that’s ever happened in the studio, ripping a portal into the ancestral spirit realm.

Our closer Viiaan releases music on some of our favorite labels, and it’s no surprise that her productions are regularly rinsed by a whole squad of left-field festival DJs. Her tracks pull from bass pressure, dub ambience, and polyrhythms that bounce between the carnavals and soundsystems of latin america, 90s breaks, and the records of classic Detroit techno. Growing up in Mexico with a family that loved dance music, she started clubbing and raving early, and then spent some formative years in NYC before moving to Berlin. Her sound is mature and rich, and her sets pull from many genres to keep the tension high and the groove infectious. A true sonic explorer, she also founded Voragine, a platform that she runs with the very far out (and recent favorite) Turning Torso, which releases music with one foot in the club and the other foot in experimentation. Viiaan has been deep in the weeds of this weird realm that we like to explore for more than a decade, and we’re excited to share the night together with her.

Come early to break bread and feast with us, stay through the Contrafuego trip into the cosmos, then have some late night snacks and dance with us as Viiaan takes us through her world. Again, the party is NOTALOF, so please reach out to us if you need assistance.

Fiber brings together music, food, movement, and solidarity at your favorite deep listening space. Inspired by block parties, house parties, and other improvised friends and family celebrations, from the salões de festas of Salvador, Brazil, to the parks and apartments of New York City, we invite our favorite DJs and producers to play personal sets, digging deep into their bags to play music they love that doesn’t fit easily in a club setting, letting them move you in expanded ways. There is a 4-point Klipschorn system, in a lovely and comfortable space, and there is a homemade buffet of high-vibrational vegetarian food to keep you fueled throughout the night.

LORE: OUR UPCOMING MENU, SAM THE SNACC FAIRY IS BACK!, AND RECIPES FROM VOL 15

If you check the menu for this upcoming Fiber, you will notice that the names of many dishes now allude to members of our community, or to people, ideas, and entities that inspire us. This is not random: as the party grows and leaves more of a mark in our day-to-day living, we feel an increasing need to acknowledge that our banquets do not unfold in a vacuum. We see some of you coming back time and time again, we discuss recipes with you, or we learn about what you like to eat, or maybe we realize that it was your birthday recently! We think it’s important to acknowledge the effect that our beloved friends and family leave in our lives, so dedicating our dishes to individuals is a way for us to say thanks for the communal idea-sharing and for enjoying what we create.

All of this and more end up in the menu, informing recipes, ingredients, and techniques. March 21st is also very close to Eid and Nowruz, and you can count on us to deliver our loving take on some recipes from across Muslim and Persian cultures to honor our debt of inspiration to their rich cuisines. We are already working with focus, intention, and joy in preparation for our big feast, and we can’t wait to share all this delicious, intellectual creation with y’all.

More important news! This Fiber, we are once again blessed by Sam the Snacc Fairy for snack provisions on the dance floor. Do you all remember her incredible khanom kroks from last year? After seeing Sam’s various journeys in the past few months – the un:send festival in Australia (that hosted a truly inventive set by Kiernan Laveaux) and her travels to Thailand – we are thrilled that she is back in New York City for a delightful stint to serve her genius creations across diy parties and events alike. Sam’s dish is still a surprise, but we’re absolutely certain it’s going to be another stunner.