Death by Audio

Overview

Williamsburg DIY venue and guitar-pedal workshop co-founded by Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers, hosting noise, punk, and experimental all-ages shows from 2007 until Vice Media acquired the building in November 2014, an event documented in the 2016 film Goodnight Brooklyn.

Death by Audio occupied the first floor of a large industrial warehouse at 49 South 2nd Street in Williamsburg, in the same waterfront complex that housed 285 Kent and Glasslands Gallery, taken by Oliver Ackermann in 2005 for the Death by Audio guitar-pedal company he had founded in 2002. Ackermann was simultaneously the guitarist and vocalist of A Place to Bury Strangers, the Brooklyn noise-rock project widely described by critics as the loudest band in New York. When the music venue opened in spring 2007, run by Ackermann, Matt Conboy, and Edan Wilber, the floor served at once as a working pedal production facility, a recording studio, and living quarters for a rotating cast of artists and musicians; shows occupied whatever open space the workbenches permitted. The physical character of the room — unfinished walls, exposed industrial structure, a low stage without backstage separation from the floor, admission of a few dollars — reflected that live-work arrangement directly. The programming ran toward noise-rock, punk, and experimental acts, consistently all-ages. Ty Segall played his first New York City show on the DBA stage; 24-hour drone concerts and large group installations, one reported to involve more than 70 local artists, filled the calendar alongside standard bookings. The venue anchored the southern end of the late-2000s Williamsburg waterfront DIY cluster — 285 Kent and Glasslands occupied the same building — and connected through booking and artist networks to other Brooklyn DIY rooms (Monster Island Basement, Silent Barn, Market Hotel), of which Market Hotel and Monster Island Basement were Todd P–run. Cheap industrial rent and nominal admission kept the programming accessible to acts that licensed rooms would not book. By 2013, displacement pressure was gathering across the complex. 285 Kent played its final shows in January 2014, its booker citing the cost of legalizing an unpermitted space rather than a lease dispute; Glasslands announced its departure in October 2014 once it was confirmed that Vice Media — valued at $2.5 billion and in receipt of a $6.5 million New York City tax incentive to remain in Brooklyn — had struck a deal with the building's owner to clear all tenants and convert the warehouse into company headquarters. Death by Audio had received the same terms. Rather than fold immediately, the venue staged a month of farewell shows in October and November 2014: Thee Oh Sees, Future Islands, Ty Segall (returning to the stage where he had played his first New York City show), Dan Deacon, Parquet Courts, Protomartyr, JEFF the Brotherhood, A Place to Bury Strangers, Deerhoof, and METZ. The last show, on November 22, 2014, was headlined by Lightning Bolt. The displacement was widely covered as emblematic of commercial development erasing the DIY culture that had made the waterfront attractive to developers in the first place. Matt Conboy documented the arc in 'Goodnight Brooklyn: The Story of Death by Audio,' premiering at SXSW in 2016, the primary archival record of the venue; a companion live compilation LP drawn from the final-month recordings was also released. The building became Vice Media's Brooklyn headquarters; the Death by Audio pedal company continues to operate from a different Brooklyn location. The Williamsburg waterfront DIY cluster that DBA had anchored alongside 285 Kent and Glasslands Gallery was by early 2015 entirely closed.