INTERVIEW: TEMPORARY STATE UNIVERSITY

NYC DIY SOLUTIONS FOR 2024

Those with even a passing interest in the past two decades of underground music in Brooklyn likely have an idea of the scene’s narrative outline. It’s a story that has been told many times by many self-aggrandizing New Yorkers. You know what I’m talking about here, people: The warehouse shows and ad-hoc parties that defined Brooklyn indie in the 2000s slowly morphed into a robust network of DIY venues, which led to a more calcified, professional ecosystem of clubs. Obviously, it’s a more complicated story than that, as much about New York real estate as it is about some noisy band who played with a single floor tom covered in neon painter's tape, but this is John’s Music Blog and this paragraph is already getting pretty long.

Temporary State University is a new project that, in its own way, is attempting to reset that narrative. Started by longtime DIY mover Jordan Michael Iannucci alongside Ceci Sturman and Hannah Pruzinsky—who play in the band Sister and do the next-generation show listings paper Gunk—Temporary State provides classes and resources for people interested in throwing DIY shows in New York City. I recently chatted with Sturman and Iannucci about both Temporary State and NYC DIY at large. This Saturday, they are throwing a 12-hour marathon fundraising show. In old-school fashion, it is at a rental hall in Ridgewood, Queens that is usually used for birthday parties. 

Before we get into the new project, I wanted to start with a big, annoying question: What is the general state of DIY in New York City in 2024?

Ceci: It's a really good question. Hannah and I are in a music project, but we also started a DIY show paper called Gunk to create a resource for a community that we had only been a part of musically. We were interested in bringing some elements of the original Showpaper, and I know that Hannah and Jordan talked a ton in the beginning about stuff that used to happen before we were involved.

In my time here over the past decade, I've seen a certain kind of DIY space become rarer and rarer. Something like Chaos Computer, which somehow existed in Greenpoint over the past few years, felt like an outlier to me.

Ceci: I think that is a true observation and I think that a lot of the go-to DIY spaces are not around as much and in replacement there are a lot of… 

Jordan: Small businesses. 

Ceci: Yeah. Small businesses. 

Jordan: Yeah, just regular small businesses trying to make it work. 

What’s an example of that?

Jordan: The new Knitting Factory. That is a really good example of how hard it is to make things work. The Knitting Factory is a legitimate independent promoter that has actual resources over decades of being around, and Andy from Cakeshop is a very experienced booker with great taste, and that room is historic, but it's still just a business, and when you go in there it feels like a business, and the way people interact with a business versus the way they interact with a Chaos Computer is fundamentally different. 

And John, to what you were saying about how Chaos Computer felt like an outlier, I think Chaos Computer was kind of the last descendant of generations of DIY that stems back to the late ‘90s, early 2000s. Bloomberg-era gentrification made it harder for all these places to continue, and then Ghost Ship fire was the final nail in the coffin for that generation of DIY. And then the pandemic just fully severed the social connection between the old school and the new school. The knowledge that's passed down for how you do this felt like it broke pretty significantly. 

Like, that interview you did with the Helltekk kids. They're so young and they're figuring out for themselves how to do all this. And it became very clear reading that—people will figure out how to do this stuff regardless. But it feels like people in New York who want to do DIY now are like on their own more than ever, certainly more than I ever was because I had people like Eden from Death By Audio teaching me how to do shit. 

Ceci, with Gunk, have you found that most of your listings are in proper venues?

Ceci: Yeah, a lot of them are in venues, but we're very interested in finding things that are happening outside of venues and I've noticed a lot of house, backyard shows. That's not new to right now, but I do think that there is a huge craving for alternative spaces. There’s a handful of known spaces that are not venues but none of them are really set scenes or anything yet. 

There's a lot of interest and a lot of excitement and I think clearly with Temporary State, people are really hungry for something like this. Oh, I wanted to give one example—people are really excited about this church nearby, Stone Circle, that is an amazing venue, and really cool to play, but just has an extremely high room fee. I think people are just super bummed, like, this is cool, but it's really out of touch. And now it's not even used as much as a DIY space. I heard that Soccer Mommy did an acoustic set there or something. 

Yeah, the financial side of this stuff is crazy in New York.

Jordan: Yeah, the market kind of turns all good-intentioned artistic projects that have some sort of mindset for longevity into businesses that have to charge people exorbitant room fees. If you want to open up a venue, you probably are doing it because you love art and want to support artists and played a bunch of shitty fucking rooms and you're like, I want to open up a good room. So you sign a lease and open up a venue. 

And then you get hit with, you have to get insurance, that's a lot of money, and you have to probably sign a lease where you cover the property tax and all this shit. Just by necessity you're like, OK, well this can only work if I make X amount of dollars every time I open up the doors, which is a 450 dollar room fee, probably. And then through no fault of your own, you've just become the person running the shitty venue who's burnt out and isn't excited when the bands get there and they're like, Why the fuck is this guy doing this, it seems like he's not having a good time. 

It’s hard, I've noticed a lot of these rooms have to be booked up all the time. I have memories of going into certain spaces and it will be like 10 in the morning and there's a yoga class happening. 

Jordan: Yeah.

And I fully understand it—if you have a space in New York and you want to keep it working, it has to be going constantly; you have to be turning multiple shows a night. There's a lot of realities. 

Jordan: My day job is an accountant. And the rent these places have to pay in New York, you are forced to look at your calendar like real estate, and any block where you're not doing something is like undeveloped land. 

It does lead to certain dynamics when a space opens itself up that way, and the programming varies wildly.

Jordan: I had this interesting call yesterday with an old friend of mine in Austin who runs a pretty affordable venue and he's like, “We get so many emails for events that we can't do because it can't fit in our calendar. We physically don't have the resources or the time or the space to do all this. And we try to divide up our calendar so that we are meeting the needs of as many communities as we can, and it ends up creating a situation where even to the people who you are helping and doing their shows, they're like, Yeah, they turned down most of our shit.” 

I think these more all-encompassing spaces can be a beautiful thing. It’s important that there’s a community hub that brings together a lot of different subcultures. But there's also something that can be great about a very targeted venue or promoter that doesn't do that many shows and is kind of into their thing and that's it. I'm curious about how this new project started and if one goal is to help incubate these more niche operations?

Jordan: I was pretty heavily involved in Silent Barn from 2009 to when it closed in 2018. And it was pretty traumatic for me when it ended, both because I was financially attached to it, so it kind of ruined my life significantly, but also it was just the most important thing in my life up until that point. I lived there, and the process of it falling apart was so dragged out and dramatic that I was totally consumed by this failing project, both emotionally and mentally, but also physically. And when it closed, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would achieve the same goals I had with that project, but in a different way. But I was too depressed by it to really pull the trigger on it. 

And then Hannah reached out to me last year when they were starting Gunk, because I used to do all the listings for this thing called Showpaper. And we ended up talking about this stuff and that conversation and also meeting Hannah, I was kind of like, I need to do this and I need to do it with this person. And then Hannah brought in Ceci because they do Gunk together and it's just been the three of us since. 

And do you wanna break down the goals with this project? 

Jordan: Yeah, I don't want people to rely on one person with all the knowledge and resources to make their thing happen or rely on small businesses to give their artistic project a voice. I love all these venues I came up in and I'm not against DIY spaces or venues, but I feel like the model of taking all the information and taking all the resources and trying to make a place stay open forever has not worked. And I feel like it's better if you take the information, aggregate it, and then just give it to as many people as possible so that they can maybe not open up a venue to stay open for years, but can make any place a venue for one day. And that way, if a Shea Stadium closes, it's not irreversible damage to the community, because you have all the information to make that happen somewhere else. 

The model you're talking about reminds me of when I was very young and I first started coming to New York to play shows. There wasn't that DIY infrastructure built up, so it was more like, okay, Todd P is going to find a temporary diner for construction workers next to the sanitation domes in Greenpoint and it's gonna be a thing for three months. 

Jordan: There's something really empowering about going to an event where you can see all of the stitching. The thing about those early Todd P shows before it kind of consolidated around a few DIY venues is you could see the exact border between the organizer and the artists and the venues perfectly. And you were able to reverse engineer the shows in your head, it became so clear that this was a thing you could do tomorrow. And I think that's really empowering—you show people how they can be the producers of culture on their own and not passive participants in it. 

What does the structure of this organization look like when it’s fully built out? What's the goal? 

Jordan: We're still figuring out a lot of that stuff. We definitely need more people to help us because right now it's just the three of us and it's definitely more than a three person project. We're going to be doing workshops once a season starting in the fall. And then once the first round of workshops are completed, for the people who attend all three of them and prove that they're not going to be totally irresponsible with all of our shit—you take all the workshops, you can just use our PA system for free. 

We teach you how to do shows. Once we know that you know how to do it, you could just take the sound system and use it to do a show. We're kind of like camp counselors. We show you how to do archery, and we make sure you don't kill anyone while you're shooting arrows for the first time. It’s quarterly or seasonal, but also there's an ongoing component where we're helping these kids. I think the end goal is to mostly just be dealing with people who are learning. It could be through dealing with them in the workshops or it could be through helping them with their first shows. But long term, I guess, the goal is obsolescence. You don't need a group of people to teach information because it's just out there and people are teaching each other and we don't need to be doing it. 

So what are the next steps? So you're throwing a marathon concert, right? 

Jordan: I really regret this, Ceci. I'm so stressed about this show. 

Ceci: Are you really? I feel like we figured it all out. 

Jordan: We did, but now I'm just like, Oh my god, I'm going to be awake for 20 hours. 

Ceci: Oh, you just need to catch up on sleep before. 

Somehow in my mind, the concert was 12 hours, but it's longer than that. 

Jordan: It's 12 hours, but it's in a rental hall that normally does birthday parties. So realistically, I'm going to have to get there four hours early with the PA system, because it takes two hours to set up a PA system from scratch. There's the hour before the show where we're doing line checks, and I'm going to want to give myself an hour buffer in case the person who has to let me in is late or the place is totally trashed, so that brings it up to 16 hours. And there's the hour before that that I'm going to have to wake up. Show ends at midnight, it's going to take me like two hours to take down the PA system and then clean. So now we're up to 18 hours. And then I need to bring the PA system to wherever I'm going to store it and then go to wherever I'm sleeping. That's 20 hours. I have no idea where I'm going to poop during the day. It's really stressing me out. 

Ceci: Is there not a bathroom? 

Jordan: There is, but it's like, I don't fucking know what it's going to be like. Who knows? 

Ceci: I think it's going to be amazing. I was feeling stressed about it, but I feel like we have all the pieces. So, it just needs to happen. And you know, this just feels like an eternal work in progress.

It’s at a party rental center. Will there be balloons? 

Jordan: We never finished the balloon conversation. I spent like an hour trying to find the best balloons online because I didn't want to do my day job. But we haven't purchased them yet. But I have some balloons on eyeballing, if that answers your question. 

Temporary State University on Instagram