lineup

• fuge
• Nema Hän
• aka-Sol

menu

appetizers

• Corn Cuzcuz Bread
• Mutabbal Shamandar (Beet and Tahini Dip)
• Tkemali (Georgian Fermented Green Plum Sauce)

mains

• Roasted and Poached Spring Vegetables with Field Garlic Pesto
• Vegetarian Plov (Uzbek Rice Pilaf)
• Lobio (Georgian Bean and Walnut Dish)
• Creamy Zucchini Pie
• Pizza with Artichokes and Spinach Pesto

desserts

• Chinese Five-spice Pear Cake with Bourbon Glaze
• Apple Cake

lore

We’re moving towards more limited modes of exposure to divest from big tech and keep these sold-out parties cute and intimate. We’ll also use this space to talk about some minor themes we’ve been thinking about, and are curious about your feedback.

Our boilerplate for this party is directly below, so start here, but if you’re curious there is a discursive section of party lore beneath that and more to say about the artists at this party.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 6p

Fresh from travel in Ecuador and Mexico, the night features sets from multidisciplinary artists Nema Hän and aka-Sol, both of whom are particularly adept in weaving disparate sonic elements into poetic, psychedelic, tapestries, and resident, Fuge, back from carnaval in Bahia, will set the vibe for the night.

Doors at 6pm, with food as long as it lasts, and music through midnight, or for as long as we’re all locked in.

LORE

We’ll have everything you need to feed mind, body, and soul. People come early for the food and the rangy foreplay first act of the music. It’s comfy and you can lay around and smoke a joint. What a great thing it is to EAT at a dance party – at your will, without having to order or pay or wait, as much or as little as you want. Food that is fresh, homemade by people whose names you know, whom you party with week in and week out. At Fiber, we lay out a good part of the food early in the evening: it softens people. And it can’t just be any food: it has to be flavorful, varied, elaborate even – party food. Nourishing yourself with food that feels special relaxes you; you feel more ready to dance together with openness and respect. Nobody wants to be an asshole after eating Angee’s many different noodle dishes, or whatever Aline is baking, and there will be cake later!

Food is a great conversation starter and conversation keeper – isn’t now such an important time to talk to your friends, or to your future friends? We need each other so much, y’all. With everything that’s going on in the world, we see the offering of food as more than a simple act of generosity, or as fuel for dancing: food is a tribute to sensual beauty, something that everybody should have access to frequently in their lives. The people who come are smart and good to talk to, and they share your struggles – we’re in this shit together, and shit has been shittier than usual – and we’re all music people, so after everyone has caught up with each other we get lost in the sauce.

As the night goes on the food keeps coming out, proving that opulence can also be fraternal, all the more grand when shared. People dance, stretch, respond to the music with every muscle, articulate but without words – and the most romantic nights are these ones coming up, when a sundown splits the party evenly in two, adding change and drama to a three act evening. The winter parties are deeper, then even the early music gives nocturnal, and the crowd is more conspiratorial.

The city is lousy with talent: there are more countries in Queens than in Europe. The music at LSD is some of the best you’ll hear, and you don’t have to cross any picket lines to get here. DJs feel comfortable and that changes things: they can take risks and they’ll be followed wherever they go, people actually come to listen. There’s an organic flow and on the best nights you might hear a song from every genre on the list. Sometimes parties in New York get too professional, and then they’re only about partying. Fiber is more informal, you can bring your friends, siblings. Pull in more parts of life. Not just music, not just a trip, bring more parts of life into it, what is the life of the party if not life in the party? Birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, protest, sleep, flirting. It’s like Rauschenberg said: I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.

A friend once told Aline and Chris something that is very true: the best food in Brazil is often eaten at people’s houses, where the cooks are known by their names. That’s not always the case in New York – it’s the public that is really game here – but we’re honoring another tradition. Our cooks are Angee and Aline, and Chris helps, and other people do too. You can, too! Get a work slot and come help lay out the spread, or let us know if you wanna bring a dish in exchange for entry.

ARTISTS

When you look up our two featured artists for our April edition, Nema Hän and aka-Sol, the word that comes up again and again is psychedelic, and we know that everyone already knows that it means trippy, but its original coinage (in a 1956 letter written from psychiatrist Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley) is a portmanteau from the Greek, meaning to make the soul manifest, to bare the mind and spirit. We’ll get as psychedelic as your ass will follow.

Fiber resident Fuge has been collecting records for decades. Now he mostly digs into contemporary music coming from the Panamerican undergrounds – to see where they overlap and where they don’t – with particular attention on Brooklyn and Brazil. He looks for music evoking other fictions, timewarps, places we can’t otherwise get to, futurist stuff. Lazy but hard music, not hard but lazy. He’s drawn towards understanding things that he doesn’t already.

Nema Hän is a multimedia artist whose turntable wizardry, and pursuit of groove is agnostic to genre or historical time, and seeded with records they’ve dug across many continents to find correlations and juxtapositions never before made, subliminal radiowave communications in our war against the satellite people. With soaring, funking sounds that glide across shifting tonal planes (much like our lovely fliers by Angee), their sets are stylish, intuitive, fun, sensual, cheeky, and emotive (how many adjectives do artists’ statements need? Well, for an artist who contains multitudes like this, apparently many). In addition to being a certified party starter, Nema does handpoke tattoos and cooks S(e)oul Food, and is exactly the type of well rounded artist we love to host at Fiber, one with a deeply personal touch and a real, holistic point of view.

Sol León, multi-hyphenate artist, runs the label Acacia Baila, specializing in sophisticated polyrhythmic music really unlike any other label in the country. The liner notes are poems, and the releases are bubbling and synthy, with voices emerging deep out of tropical matrices, featuring some wandering exploratory prog compositions longer than many entire EPs. Sol recently released their debut EP under the aka-Sol moniker, Ta Kish Kan, and co-curates the futuristic Dripping club night, one of Fiber’s lodestars. Sol has a delicate way of moving a crowd into a gauzy and far out place, and their hybrid Gaze set at dripping with Relaxer was a beautiful introduction to a club weekend in a renn faire, a prefiguration fairy tale, slinky, reptilian, green as a drummier Henri Rousseau. If you listen back you can hear cunty crowd noise like you can when you follow the Grateful Dead around. When we were talking about the party to Sol they said “let’s make it beautiful” and we knew there was nothing more to say.