Mechasonic is, to put it very simply, a multi-day experimental music festival of sorts that takes place in a working metal shop.
Organizers, however, bill it as a “sonic spectacle,” an “experimental mecha-musical sensory hyperstimulation” event, a theatrical and pneumatic recording session, interactive art piece and concert featuring “so many sounds you’ve never seen” and “so many sights you’ve never heard.”
The organizers are not exaggerating in their press release — it really is very hard to describe, and impossible to categorize. Ear plugs are available for sale at the event, which is now in its fourth year.
The genre-busting party performance will once again take place at a functioning fabrication studio sandwiched between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the elevated subway tracks about a block from the Smith-Ninth Street station. It’s a bizarre but charming pocket of Brooklyn: The industrial stretch includes low-density houses and a fuel oil depot all on the banks of the Gowanus Canal.
Jaclyn Atkinson puts on a sparking show.
Credit David Siffert
This year’s lineup reads like a talent show in hell: “Instrument abuse,” “showers of sparks,” “ethereal vocals in new languages,” “doomsex cabaret” and “a preponderance of chickens,” among other anarchic delights. Past years have included a motorcycle versus horns battle, a Tesla coil display, and, of course, several acts involving fire.
Mechasonic’s co-organizers — musicians Stefan Zeniuk and Chris Cortier and metal fabricator-slash-writer Dan Glass — insist that although the event may sound strange, it isn’t so special.
“There’s people that have made industrial noise in abandoned factories since the beginning of time, but I think this incorporates so many different unique aspects of our scene in New York,” said Zeniuk.
Indeed, Brooklyn’s increasingly expensive real estate has, in recent years, made such flame-heavy entertainment challenging to put on in the boroughs and especially out of place in a neighborhood that now contains a Whole Foods.
The event has so far sold out every single show it’s put on.
Photo credit: Tod Seelie
Perhaps because of these odds, Mechasonic is, in a way, proof that NYC can still be a haven for working artists. While this city can be eye-wateringly expensive and a playground for the uber rich, it’s also still one of the only places on Earth where you can find a whole subculture of people who want to set the night aflame in the exact same, strangely specific way that you do. Brooklyn is not burning, but many of this show’s participants and instruments literally are.
And there is a hunger for this. Every single previous performance of the event has sold out, with a number of attendees flying across the country and world just to attend and collaborate.
According to the organizers, many have been to Burning Man, and the crowd also reliably contains neighborhood kids, local performers, punks, pyros, makers, breakers and Manhattanites, among others.
There are performances at 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24 and Saturday, Jan. 25, and one all ages matinee on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Tickets are $45 for general admission and available for purchase online, while they last.