Juniper Rising, Ski Mask, Natural Child at Death By Audio (Photo: Dylan Johnson/@giantclick)
First 285 Kent bit the bullet and now its neighbor, Death By Audio, has announced that it’ll close in November.
Though DBA has changed very little since it opened in March of 2007, the area around it has changed immensely, as operators Edan Wilber and Matt Conboy note in their announcement of the closing:
When we first moved onto south 2nd street the only things on our block were a used police car lot and several empty buildings. Now there are a half dozen expensive restaurants, bars, a daycare center and a new condo building (that was an empty lot when we moved in). All ages DIY music venues are almost by definition temporary, and we feel fortunate to have lasted in this space for this long. We knew from the beginning that it couldn’t last forever and we are extremely grateful to everyone who has preformed or attended any of our shows. We are still weighing options about what happens next and will let everyone know more about the future of Death By Audio as soon as we can.
The announcement concludes with a promise of “great programing for these last 75 days.”
In a Facebook message, Wilber — who lost the Death By Audio radio show when another institution, East Village Radio, signed off earlier this summer — described this latest hit as “absolutely sad news that ive only known about for a few weeks,” and said it “came about so suddenly.” He continued, “we arent sure what the future holds but well be trying to do something new in the future, its just came about so quickly we really cant nail anything down, and this town is everchanging, want to make sure that when we do it again we do it the right way on our own terms.”
Aside from a host of local and touring noise/indie acts, larger artists who’ve played the all-ages venue — a fixture of our Good Shows column — include Dan Deacon, Big Ups, Dirty Projectors, Beach Fossils, Ty Segall, OBN III, Thurston Moore, Thee Oh Sees, Future Islands, Deer Tick, Widowspeak, Tim Harrington, Hunters, and JEFF the Brotherhood, who’ll be back for a show Oct. 12. Other goodbye shows are still being booked.
Back in January, when we spoke to Wilber about Brooklyn’s DIY scene, he acknowledged that the closing of 285 Kent — which opened three years after DBA — was “a big blow to DIY in Williamsburg”: “It was nice to have 285 around the corner. When us, them and Glasslands all had good shows, we would be the center of the musical universe in the city, and it would be funny to look across the river to New York City and realize, musically, that block had more important things going on than probably the rest of the whole city in terms of the fruit it would bear.”