lineup

• myu 無
• San Huan (Live)
• nguyendows99 (nguyendowsxp b2b 99 ranch)

menu

appetizers

• Koji Butter Brioche
• Tangerine Tapenade (vegan, GF)
• Khanom Krok (Thai coconut pancakes with assorted toppings, salted egg, green onion + other surprises)

salads

• Late Summer Tomato Soy Salad (vegan)

mains

• Puchero (Chickpea Tomato Stew with Chard) (vegan, GF)
• “Ants Climbing a Tree” with home-made Adzuki Tempeh (vegan)
• Chinese Eggplant and String Bean Stir-Fry (vegan)
• Harissa Cauliflower with Yogurt Dressing (GF)
• Roasted Gochujang Cabbage (vegan, has peanuts)
• Coconut Red Lentil and Vegetable Curry with Pumpkin and Lime (vegan, GF)
• Roasted Carrots with Candied Cumin and Caraway Granola (vegan, has nuts)
• Jeera Aloo (Indian Cumin Potatoes) (vegan, GF)

desserts

• Raspberry Sachertorte (has almonds)
• Ube Halaya Sheet Cake with Whipped Cream Cheese Frosting
• Adzuki Dessert Soup with Tapioca (vegan, GF)
• Matcha Pound Cake (vegan)
• Roasted Apple Espelette Ice Cream
• Toasted Barley bavarois with Yuzu Chantilly

beverages

• Turmeric Latte (vegan, GF)

lore

Hi, Fiber friends. We’re back again for October! In respect to Halloween & Samhain and the passing of the autumn equinox that will bathe the entirety of our parties in moonlight for the next 6 months, we’re dialing the thermostat towards the colder aspects of electronics. This one has been cooking for a while, as we’ve been really excited about these artists and wanted to hear what they could do on the holographic sound system at L&SD in a comfortable setting with a crew that is down for wherever they take us.

This Fiber is also being thrown in honor of the birthday of bass queen Angee, whom without her behind-the-scenes machinations would leave many projects unaccomplished, including this party.

Last time was a lot of fun, and probably had the most food of any of the Fibers. Hard to say if we’ll continue to up the ante on that (how crazy can we be?), but the menus have twisted minds of their own now, with wills to expand and dominate table space and the space in your digestive tracts, and are claiming headliner status. Don’t forget to show up early to get your food, and that we continue to give this food for free as our offering. If you have the funds and feel compelled to respond to that offering, please go ahead and buy a suggested or supporter ticket, as the money goes directly to keeping this DIY space open, and to supporting the artists as well as the organizations tabling with us.

We had some technical difficulties with our recordings last time, but managed to salvage a funky snippet from the Fedra + fuge set that traverses a lot of breaky territory from the Global South. If you wanna see what Plebeian got up to, you’ll have to head to Portland next week for Osmosis in the Trees, and the mind blowing set by Sobolik is just going to live in memory until L&SD opens up its extensive analog archives of recording fragments. It’s hard to express how much our minds were blown over the course of those three hours, but for now check out their newest release on Clasico.

Finally, before we get to the main event, if you don’t eat too many of those magic chocolates at Fiber and can get up the next day in time, go to our friend the multimedia artist Amanda Mehl’s fashion show: La Munda. You may have seen her sick rave-adjacent collection on the rack at recent Fibers. This show-slash-party is gonna take place at Maria Hernandez Park on Sunday, Oct. 5 from 2-6pm. (We hear that one of NYC’s favorite Jamaican-born rave activators is gonna be behind the decks for this one, but no idea if that’s true…)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 6p

Opening this round is our resident myu 無, who likes to combine feral energy with driving orchestral movements over industrial and drum and bass percussion. Their elemental ragers typically close the night, but we’re excited to see what kind of ritual they can set the stage for as an opener. In response to allegations of creating unwelcoming soundscapes, they promise they will be digging into the strange. “Less bleak, more silver linings.”

Spanning from the sentimental to the cerebral, San Huan exerts a dynamic emotional and technical range across their productions and sets that are informed by dub, IDM, techno, and dreampop, weaving recorded sound fragments through voice-like electronic processing to create a mythological language. San Huan’s recent live set at the exhibition Mythologies for a Spiritually Void Time made us dwell on the fragmentation between technology and spirituality and asks whether the two can be constitutive instead of corrosive. In an era where that question is increasingly relevant, we’re more than thrilled that they’ll be bringing a resounding ‘yes’ in the form of a live set.

Closing the night, we have nguyendows99, a b2b between besties nguyendowsxp & 99 ranch. 99 ranch’s lava recordings series has hosted some of our favorite sets of the past year, with Jaijiu, le Frit, and a wild one by nxp. Both nxp & 99 ranch are known for their high-energy post-club sets, captivating us with their unexpected conjunctions of kinetic tracks with serious bass weight from a truly global sound system culture spectrum. Beyond the catharsis and subterranean slaps they’re both known for, you can also expect creative detours into the headier, ethereal edges of electronic music with a diasporic sensibility.

CULTURAL SOLIDARITY PROJECT IS BACK

We’re happy to have our homies back from the Cultural Solidarity Project, an organization that has been at the forefront of the ongoing Boiler Room boycott, and who support artists and activists facing repression for their artistic, vocal, and demonstrable support for Palestine. They’ll be bringing art and other merch for sale, and are going to talk about how to get involved: they recently opened the organization up to general membership, and are looking for cultural workers with all manner of talents & experience who are committed to building the anti-imperialist cultural resistance. If you want to support them there is an add-on in the cart, which goes directly towards their mutual aid efforts.

The CSP helped organize the successful boycotts and counter events to the Boiler Room events in NYC and were behind the grassroots work to get DJs to pull out of the event. In this little corner of Brooklyn it may seem like everyone is tapped into the idea that Boiler Room is a cringe organization that exploits cool, gentrifies the underground, and leverages their popularity to attract investment firms who want to turn raving into fungibles that can be invested in murder technologies, and lobby to destroy the natural world. Not so everywhere. In Salvador, Brazil they recently pulled off a massive 2 night event with some of the most politicized Afrobahian groups in the city, whose well-known stories of resistance go back decades. Apparently not everyone knows, or cares. Or maybe there aren’t simply enough alternatives, like the ones we have here at L&SD. This question has been in the air lately, and we attended some interesting conversations in this very space: an informal group conversation in the middle of DJ Voices’s Present Sounds, and a town hall with the homies from the Rave Cafe on the concept of degrowth in nightlife. How do we pull back, out of the globalized tech media loops and into our communities right now? What are the viable alternatives?

LORE: SUSTAIN-RELEASE

Some of us Sustained and Released last week, and we’re still buzzing from the energy and elation that it exerted in so many folks. Being on the organizing side of things generally these days, and even volunteering at the fest, we see how huge of an effort it is from so many ravers even before the carry starts. When we go to festivals, we pay attention to the means of production, we see how these are year-long projects of planning and execution that require hundreds of people to create ecstatic joy and connection in a world that is so dark. Not utopian, as these are not utopias, but they’re moments that bring the freaks together to go deeper and for longer than we can in NYC – a city that is continually pushing out the people that give it its liveliness, the working class that keeps it functioning, and the spaces and the networks of neighbors, artists and citizens who care for the city and for each other. These festivals (we really think of them as carnivals), where the rules of the everyday are arrested and people should be able to be the wildest, most humane versions of themselves, where they can reset their soul for the return to the mundane that follows – don’t happen without the vision and endless labor of the workers and organizers.

There’s ambivalence about Sustain among our friends and little community. Its political silence, its eurocentrism (in lineups and in music), the cliquishness, are all factors against it. Being probably the pre-eminent techno festival on the East Coast and maybe this country, it’s necessary to critique it, to ask it to represent us and what we want raving to mean in a time when trans lives are being criminalized, when black men are being lynched to silence, while the nation mourns dead Nazis, when freedom of speech and dissent are being erased, when our friends and neighbors are being kidnapped from our streets by masked men, and when the promised future of freedom from toil, poverty, hunger, and ignorance is being replaced by bootlicking vampiric oligarchs with a system that watches our every breath and builds and profits from machines of death – physical, ecological, as well as spiritual. It’s worth deeply considering what it means to party in these times, and who we’re throwing our support behind and what they’re doing to make the world a better place – or if that’s even the right place to put our political energies.

There were moments of great magic at Camp Kennybrook: we don’t know how deep Donato Dozzy could’ve carried us into the woods had he not been told to wind things down at 6:30 (as we lazed nearby after his ending, and he received his well-wishers, he said if only he had a couple of more hours… and mimed a plane taking off with his hand; but we’re sensitive to the occasional need to prioritize the wellbeing of the group and the workers, and have had to pull the plug on things ourselves before, ending them before they’ve reached their fullest form). Nosedrip and Oko DJ played more dance musics than we have space to name or even know the names of: raga, cumbia, postpunk, the CCP anthem as interpreted by Holger from Can, Björk, dabke, rap, even techno, and blended genres like magicians: every track added to their collage elicited screams of surprise and joy. And Matük cried for so long after it was done that people started to worry, but it was that beautiful if you were there. We’re gonna check them out tonight at Signal again to shake our asses a little along with Cashu; see you there?

The Bossa Lounge closing, with its mats and trampolines and shoeless dancing to this music that was built slowly over hours for dancers edging exhaustion who can’t pull themselves away, is simply is one of the most iconic dance floors we’ve ever been on. The moments we had of transcendence, introspection, generosity between strangers, bonding and camaraderie, are to be cherished now more than ever, and we feel motivated and inspired to generate spaces in which we can nourish and support each other so that communal magic can happen in the belly of the beast.

LORE: POLITICAL READING CORNER

What does it mean to be safe? What does it mean to be a threat? In response to the criminalization of the poor, the non-white, the non-cis, and the non-civilian by the oligarchic class and their bootlicking lackeys in institutions and government, we wanted to bring a framework to understanding the logic of political speech and its goals, as well as understanding who the “elites” are in contrast to who they target. The following are excerpts from Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations from the University of Copenhagen who is well-known for their contributions to securitization theory, or in simple terms, why history repeats itself when narcissistic governance takes over:

“Reading the theoretical literature on security, one is often left without a good answer to a simple question: What really makes something a security problem? As I have suggested above, security problems are developments that threaten the sovereignty or independence of a state in a particularly rapid or dramatic fashion, and deprive it of the capacity to manage by itself. This, in turn, undercuts the political order. Such a threat must therefore be met with the mobilization of the maximum effort. Operationally, however, this means: In naming a certain development a security problem, the “state” can claim a special right, one that will, in the final instance, always be defined by the state and its elites. Trying to press the kind of unwanted fundamental political change on a ruling elite is similar to playing a game in which one’s opponent can change the rules at any time they like. Power holders can always try to use the instrument of securitization of an issue to gain control over it. By definition, something is a security problem when the elites declare it to be so:

And because the End of this Institution [the Leviathan, the Sovereign], is the Peace and Defense of them all; and whosoever has right to the End, has right to the Means; it belongeth of Right, to whatsoever Man, or Assembly that hath the Soveraignty, to be Judge both of the meanes of Peace and Defense; and also of the hindrances, and disturbances of the same; and to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both before hand, for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of Discord at home and Hostility from abroad; and, when Peace and Security are lost, for the recovery of the same.

Thus, that those who administer this order can easily use it for specific, self-serving purposes is something that cannot easily be avoided. What then is security? With the help of language theory, we can regard “security” as a speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering “security,” a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.”

LORE: ALINE RECOMMENDS

Folks, I’m not much of a writer. I used to be really into it when I was younger, but a previous life in academia sort of killed it for me. That said, I’m trying to sloooowly get back to it, especially because I feel that I should document some of my ideas and opinions instead of just yapping around. So here are two recs from my heart to yours.

I love rock. I grew up super connected to a punk scene and slowly migrated into electronic dance music via dance punk and electroclash. From then on, the focus on bass-forward music and a significant fatigue with guitars and higher-pitched sounds in general has become the norm in my realms. And I get it: rock, whatever the heck it stood for, simply does not represent us anymore – too straight, too mainstream, too dated perhaps. Despite all that, I’m deeply in love with the (often electric) guitar again. Its endless timbres, its expressiveness, the humanity of its melodies. Is bass-forward music starting to tire me out? Am I… not in the mood for dry, exclusively electronic timbres these days? Maybe! And I also do miss punk. More the attitude, granted, than the super simple chords that hypnotized me as a teen. I feel the urge to incorporate more punk elements in my life: from the way I cook to the music I listen to, to the way DIY guides my politics, my connections, and even my aesthetic and artistic leanings. And I’m sure I’m not alone! So let me recommend a very punk-ish, out-there, avant-garde, fearless, wall-of-soundesque record to you. It sounds like it came out yesterday, but it’s actually from the 80s. Ladies and gentlemen, this is O Ápice by Vzyadoq Moe. Thank me later (or better: recommend me a punk-yet-contemporary-sounding album, too).

Okay, the second recommendation is a bit more esoteric. A month or so ago I ran into a few photos of me as a baby. I turned one of them into a silly whatsapp sticker and became obsessed with the concept of me as a baby. It’s not as narcissistic as it sounds: there’s something very soothing about realizing that you were once a lovely baby! If you look at a photo of you as a baby for long enough, you’ll start catching glimpses of baby-you in the mirror, even. Curiously, these glimpses have been making me feel more compassion towards myself. If that baby deserved so much care and respect, and if in so many ways I’m still that same baby-person, shouldn’t I treat myself with more care and respect, too? All this to say: carry a photo of baby-you with you. Turn it into your phone wallpaper or something. Make a necklace if you’re crafty! It should make you feel good somehow.