9_21. WEIRD NIGHT W/ DAWN OF HUMANS, PHARMAKON @ HOME SWEET HOME, NYC

PHARMAKON: was easy to photograph



DAWN OF HUMANS: fuck it, I got a video of their set to make up for this.



To my chagrin, meeting up with friends at Weird after gallery hopping in TriBeca was a challenge. Home Sweet Home, a bar/venue on Chrystie Street in which the most beautiful and most explicit of hell broke loose, was all fog and dismal lighting. Second, it's in the basement. So not only was my attempt to cell communicate one fat failure, but closing in towards the stage meant you couldn't see shit. Thankfully I've been to enough goth/darkwave club nights to fine-tune my capability of recognizing silhouettes in a smokey, dark basement and all was scarlet cherries and penciled-in eyebrows.

The night's bill was lacking in number, but the energy accumulation of Pharmakon and Dawn of Humans was on level to a four-band show. When it's past midnight and you're one of the surprising few who have to clock in at 9 a.m. in mere hours, all you really want is a happy meal show with a super-sized sensation. My friend Nick told me that Pharmakon, stage alias for Far Rockaway's Margaret Chardiet, was feeling very nervous about the performance tonight - but if anything, I was nervous about possibly being post-bewitched by her noise set!

The precedent atmosphere left an unusual playing field for Dawn of Humans, mostly because it was unusual to see someone monkey-scaling-the-ceiling-water-pipes action in the foreground of fog and strobe lights. I didn't whip out my camera fast enough to capture that, but I hope you can get my drift on how maddening this set was in the video posted above. I need someone from the show to confirm for me whether those are his real (purple) balls, or whether it's some rubber toy.

The show was not a usual one for Home Sweet Home's Weird Nights, which, in the past, has headline the label's rosters including Automelodi, Led Er Est, and Xeno and Oaklander. The inevitable finally happened during Dawn of Humans and the Weird disco ball on the low ceiling was knocked off and torn to pieces. I don't think there's any need to add words to that metaphorical gesture.