September GUNK
what have you lost in the mosh pit?
flip flops in the mosh
Julia Harrison
My love for this kind of music (electropop, rave, trance? I don’t want to say any of these things out loud) crept up on me—a girl who once attended three Ingrid Michaelson concerts in a year. The sound, visually, has almost nothing to do with me, who wears Aritzia trousers maybe three days a week and packs a cucumber salad to work. I, like so many of us, dream of the day that one Tik Toker stops me on the street in New York to ask me what I’m listening to, and I can bat my eyelashes and redeem my Everlane pants by saying “Doss <3” or Mongolian throat singing.
The others here, in this reliably, criminally over-capacity mob at Baby’s All Right, are in Eckahus Latta, double grommet belts, grown out cowgirl cuts. I am wearing a (not even sponsored, y’all, just the truth) Gunk t-shirt over green Speedo shorts and a pair of busted Gap flip flops. Row dupes. I have told my boyfriend: Tonight, I Will Not Mosh.
Maybe it started with how i’m feeling now in 2020, when I lived in my empty college town in Tennessee without a job for a month and had nothing to do but hang around outside by myself. I listened to the album while I broke up spiderwebs on fury-fueled trail runs. I’d never listened to anything pop-ish or electronic with any intention before. I was so baby-girl indie to alt rock to ‘70s prog rock to shoegaze pipeline, equating my late teens self-touted emotional depth to Beach House and Nico. But when I heard detonate I realized: Wait—what the fuck have I been doing? This is the sound of my mind and heart and life! This is the modern woman’s experience of pain and sex and insecurity, her desire for validation, parties, men, women, value, eternal youth!
Charli begot everything else—Sky Ferreira, SOPHIE, Romy, Mandaworld, Uffie, BICEP begot Shygirl begot Skee Mask begot that one sardonic Sally Spitz song begot, finally—have I name dropped enough? Are you still here?—Bassvictim.
The vibes are mullet, paranormal, very
, who’s collaborating on the event. My boyfriend Did Not Do Coke In The Bathroom, But Someone Offered. Bassvictim rolled out at 1:45am to a full floor of people too drunk from obsequiously bobbing to the openers, including me who was mostly asleep from two IPA’s and a preceding fish dinner.Bassvictim is one English guy and one Polish girl and I read from the un-paywalled part of a byline article that when they met they hated each other, and when they met a second time they decided to make music. The result is aggressively sexy grinding tracks with a blasé attitude and ironic 2009 Tumblr digital aesthetic (from my favorite track, Air on a G-String: L-l-looking at your face with my G-String / Poking / I’m not joking / I’m being hella serious). Their complete disinterest in emotive lyrics does exactly the opposite of what, for example, Charli does for me, which motivates me to run about 10 miles screaming into the setting sun about everything and everyone that has hurt me.
Bassvictim instead makes me want to try a new drug without any of the anxiety of trying a new drug and buy fast fashion shimmering hot pants and leave my tongue out and be really nice to girls in the bathroom. From the second their set started, with their new track Alice (this track’s chorus is: I’m like (boom) / Fuck you mean bitch? / Fuck you mean? / Boom boom / Fuck you mean bitch?), the mosh began. I obviously, at 5’3” was immediately subsumed, and also immediately lost both my flip flops. My bare feet scanned the wet floor, my toes gripping for the toe strap of my flip flop while my feet were crushed by a thousand pairs of cowboy boots and collab sneakers. I picked up—my big toe a fugitive worm in the crowd—crushed plastic cups and a key someone had lost in the grime, before, miraculously, recovering one shoe, then the other. And with that success came an elbow to the jaw while my hair was caught in someone else’s bracelet and I lost my boyfriend completely in the crowd.
I’m pro-mosh—what a way to feel the music—I’m just anti-pain, which reasonably cannot live in the same space. To mosh, here, in the reverberating and humid sound of crusty electronic music, is to love. And I find, as I increasingly enjoy this kind of music, seeing it live and loud requires that I callous my demeanor, I prepare for war. (Minus this time when I wore flip flops.) My brother and I, at a Jockstrap concert, were completely overrun by the mosh. Where one second he was beside me holding two tall boy Bud Lights, the next I saw his body, beerless, being thrown between the undulating limbs of the beat-frenzy, like fettuccine against the wall.
The mosh at Bassvictim lasted for the whole set, and, as these things do, got increasingly violent as time went on: people starting to spit and scream at each other over the bass. Use their elbows, pull hair. A series of three people fell on top of me and I helped the last one up before she ever even turned around. Heaven is hell here: our bodies and broken toes, victim to the bass.
Your September Shows (the first few weeks of em…)
you can reliably find GUNK at: ♡ secret riso club (bushwick) honeymoon coffee shop (ridgewood) topos (ridgewood) normas (ridgewood) milk&pull (ridgewood), little roy (bed stuy), playground zine box (bed stuy) prima (clinton hill) the lot zine box (greenpoint). baby’s all right (williamsburg), billy’s record salon (east williamsburg) lagoon (bedstuy), bike plant (bedstuy), swallow (bushwick), East One (carroll gardens) orphan (carroll gardens).
our september issue will be a few days later than usual, so use this digital guide in lieu of our physical copy if you haven’t been able to find the zine just yet!
Do you want to be a distro lead? or part of the distro team at large? we want you! hit our line :)
You can get GUNK mailed to you!
To ensure you secure a copy, we’ll mail SEPTEMBER GUNK to you (or do local delivery for NYC heads) for $10. You can become a subscriber on Substack, or if you’re a paid subscriber, up your monthly donation to get this guy. Please make sure to send us your mailing address (either thru email or substack dm), if you up the subscription and you’ll get a GUNK asap. We are sooo grateful for the extra support and love from our paid subscribers! We can print beautiful zines because of u :)
★ You can always still find GUNK in the wild for yourself, for free. ★
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The September GUNK playlist features a few new releases that have really caught our ear (hemlock, Closebye) as well as a bunch of different bands I encountered on a recent h. pruz x Colin Miller tour (Space Heater, Budge, Lamplight, & more). Check it out. ˚ ✦ . . ˚ . . ✦ ˚ . ★⋆.
ˋ°•*⁀➷ GUNK CLASSIFIEDSˋ°•*⁀➷
is your band (or solo act) looking to connect with other bands or performers to put together a bill for an upcoming show? send GUNK a little intro to your music (no links sorry) including an email address for a reply and we’ll publish the listings!
—> thegunkyard@gmail.com **if you’d rather your email address not listed let us know and we can get you in touch with interested parties**thank you for coming to our birthday party if you did <3 september GUNK will be out to you soon, and we thank you for your patience. september always feels so exciting because you can buy fresh new pencils and re-invent yourself in small ways (or at least that is the lingering feeling I get), so maybe there are new ways the NYC DIY music scene can kinda do that too? what are our new pencils? who’s showing up with the new lisa frank folder?
see u at the gig or maybe we’ll see someone completely new…
xoxo
Hannah & Ceci
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