Picture standing in a room just big enough to cram in a couple couches, a TV, an arcade machine, a player piano and a kitchen complete with a refrigerator, stove and sink. Now picture the same room with a rock band playing in the kitchen area, the drummer’s back scrapping against the dish drying rack and the guitarist’s elbows rubbing against the refrigerator door. Now picture two hundred other people right beside you. Welcome to the Silent Barn, a converted warehouse turned by its five inhabitants into one of New York’s most popular underground music venues. Being in the living room/kitchen/stage, you might have trouble wading through the throngs of sweaty hipsters, but don’t worry. Tired of standing, you can always take refuge on a coach or a washing machine – provided someone isn’t already standing on it. Kids line the walls and even spill onto the roof, the club’s unofficial smoking lounge. Swimming all the way through the crowd will get you face to face with the band – no guard rails or security guards separate the madness. Some bands – like Crash Diet Crew, a three piece wall of sound from Williamsburg, don’t even set up a stage, they just play toe to toe with the audience. “I think it makes it accessible for both audience and performer,” said David, the band’s drummer. “It’s kind of this symbiotic thing, where you give [the crowd] energy and they give it back to you.” WIth no vocals, just a guitar, a drum set and a battery of keyboards, the band can galvanize the entire barn with a sound that, to a certain extent, defies explanation. The band winces when you call them psychedelic; their Myspace page jokes that they’re “surf rock” influenced. Veterans of another underground venue, Monkey Town, they played the Silent Barn for the first time in September. They had quite a ways to travel, even from Williamsburg To get to the Silent Barn, you need to ride the L train 10 stops into Brooklyn. From the outside, the building is completely unimpressive; across the street from a junkyard, with graffiti-clad metal railings bolted over the windows, you’d probably walk right past it, never realizing that inside is one of Brooklyn’s premier underground music venues. The only sign advertising the place consists of “(…)” followed by a drawing of a barn. Both are written in black sharpie on the dented metal door that acts as the Barn’s front entrance. When the door is locked, you get the sense that a couple swift kicks would topple it over, and that size 13 SWAT boots already have in the not too distance past. Once you talk, pay or sneak your way into the Silent Barn, the industrial air of Ridgewood and the general gloominess of its denizens fade into the collective madness of the Barn’s interior. Massive drawings and murals cover the walls – their subjects ranging from hoodie-clad headless monsters to seagulls eating bowls of spaghetti. Directly above the front door is a mattress with blankets and a pillow encased in a steel cage – the “guest room.” A makeshift bar where $3 Budweiser cans and Dixie cup mixed drinks are served flanks the hallway, with bedroom doors on either side leading into the five roommate’s quarters. You’re as likely to bump into someone playing in the night’s show as someone watching it, and that’s how the organizers like it. “The thing with the Silent Barn is, the people are hanging out,” said Todd P, one of Brooklyn’s busiest underground promoters. “There’s no artificial divide. You go to a big fancy club, the band is back in a sanctuary the whole time, they’re cloistered away.” Todd hosts almost half a dozen shows a week at the Barn and places like it. Taking on New York’s collective club monstrosity is one of his principle reasons for doing what he does. The Silent Barn, Todd’s venue of choice, is the ideal counterpoint to the Manhattan-centric club attitude: throngs of people, all ages, jammed into a living room. It’s a far cry from the velvet ropes and 300 pound bouncers of mega clubs like Webster Hall and Crobar. Give him all day, and Todd can rattle off a horde of reasons to stay away from those places. “Everything is regulated. The fans basically are being overcharged and treated like cows, herded in and herded out. The moment the show is over, the big bouncer goon comes up and tells everybody to get the fuck out. How does that in any way foster the community?”
His goal to beating those kinds of places lies in changing the club owning mentality -The Silent Barn might not get the same ticket sales as The Knitting Factory, but Todd is looking to win over his customers hearts and minds as well as their well-earned wallet candy. The Barn itself has gone through some alterations in the brief time its been around – if you look at the dozen or so webzines and blogs that publicize underground music in Brooklyn – like New York Night Train, Going or Oh My Rockness, you might find it referred to as the Raven’s Den or Club Krib. Walking down the Barn’s central hallway, the padlocked bedroom doors house an ever-changing cast of dwellers. Of the roommates, Lucas and John originally leased the place in Spring of 2007, however the other rooms have been occupied by various tenants over the course of the venues short history. Admittedly, according to original lease signer and former roommate Josh Brown, it takes a certain type of person to be able to live at the party 24 hours a day. He says he started promoting live music shows in his home state of Connecticut before moving to Brooklyn to go to college. Like Lucas and John, he wanted to continue promoting in the Big Apple. The Silent Barn was already being used as a venue, by the bands Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys. Lucas, Jon and Josh were promoting shows there, and when they heard that the previous tenants were leaving, they saw their opportunity to have full control of the place. And that’s when the space morphed into the amalgamation that it is. The end of the hallway is where most visitors end up; a massive room that functions as a kitchen and living room by day and a stage, equipment closet, and mixing room by night. Typically, it takes about three hours for Todd and his staff of interns to transform the kitchen into an area suitable for live music, by setting up the drums, speakers, amps and other various wires and electronics. Todd’s been doing this kind of work ever since he moved into Brooklyn seven years ago from Portland, Oregon. Todd P (short for Patrick) promotes underground music shows all over Brooklyn, from converted warehouses like the Silent Barn to more traditional venues, like local bars and nightclubs. As a general rule, he won’t work with a venue unless they lower their drink prices to an amount he finds suitable. In the case of the Silent Barn, the three buck cans of Bud certainly aren’t going to break your wallet. Still, Todd knows that’s where the revenue is . “No, no, let the girls work the bar,” he directs a skin-tight jeans clad intern with a Flock of Seagulls hairdo. “They’ll get a lot more tips then you. Work the door.” Throughout the course of a night’s show, Todd P won’t stop moving. Typically, he arrives about three hours before the doors open at a venue, to begin setting up the bar, the front door, the stage area and to meet the bands that will be performing. Seemingly in a constant state of raveling and unraveling audio cables, he will stop only briefly to instruct an intern, eat a quick slice of pizza or survey the room, hands on his hips and a slight beer gut protruding from whatever worn tee shirt he’s wearing that night. Todd nets 10 percent of the door for each night’s work – about 70 cents a customer at the Silent Barn. Todd’s staff collectively get 5 percent of the door and whatever tips they can siphon out of the barflies. The venue gets the bar, and the bands pocket 80 percent of the door – one of the best percentages in the city. Todd factors in 5 percent to cover the cost of putting the whole thing on. His wages, along with renting out rehearsal space for bands, keeps him stocked enough for pizza and beer money, as well as his rent-controlled, Long Island City apartment.
The bands that eventually play Todd’s set up and sound checked stages come from all over the place, geographically and sonically. In a single week, he’ll showcase a 60’s throwback band, complete with long frizzy hair and tranquilized female vocals, a hip hop DJ, a “death country” outfit and a noise rock band consisting of two members screaming in microphones and throwing themselves at each other. That very band, called Pillow Fight Fight, came all the way from Seattle to play. They showed up to the Silent Barn without talking to either Todd P or the roommates. Todd fit them into the bill by putting them on the basement stage – a dense, low-ceiling subterranean zoo where crowd members have as good a chance bumping into a support beam as another human being. The environment was perfect for Pillow Fight Fight: the drummer, wearing a modified crash helmet with a microphone wired into it, delivered staccato shrieks as the guitar player mashed himself around a corner of the room. The sound produced by the band was condensed into such a small space that there was a feeling that it was coming from everywhere, and audience members reacted by jaggedly flailing about as if in some pagan religious ceremony. Pillow Fight Fight is far from the only band to travel longer than just the L train to get to the Barn. When the female Japanese duo Kiiiii!!!! began their first tour of America some months ago – a trip that spanned both coasts and almost a dozen cities – they made a point to stop in Ridgewood, where they got some of their most enthusiastic admirers. The question then is, why do these bands make such an effort to play places like the Silent Barn. The answer is that commercial success has a history of catching up to DIY acts. Bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah!, and Interpol all have multiple major label albums and international tours set up, and they all got their start playing in venues similar to the Barn. The newest band to get critical attention out of the scene, called Animal Collective, embodies the current sound being developed here: audio samples from 80’s-style mix tapes combined jagged melodies and aloof, trance-like vocals. Many bands, with a comparably incomparable sound but not yet a blip on the pop culture radar, are hoping to follow Animal Collective’s lead. “That’s where I want to be,” David said, reflecting on the sound of his band, Crash Diet Crew. “To be doing stuff I can’t really articulate myself. That’s exciting to me, to not be able to characterize it.” As for Todd, he’s got no problem with his bands getting famous – he just wants to change how they are famously presented to the masses. “We are doing it in terms of, if music were invented yesterday,” he said. “You create a space, where people can come in and sit down at the same grubby chair at the Silent Barn every weekend, and they start to feel ownership. They start to feel comfortable…’this is a place, I can feel like it’s my place.”
