With the Coming Closing of Death By Audio, Many NYC DIYs Are Going Legit

Photo by Travis Rix

Hunters at Death By Audio

There's confetti embedded in the stage at Death By Audio, the latest off-the-books venue and nightclub in Williamsburg to announce its closure, set for November 22. It's the last gasp of the "Do-It-Yourself" wave that helped bring much attention to the neighborhood's music and scene in the last 10 or 15 years. The confetti ground into the stage, by the feet of thousands of bands, is from a 2008 Monotonix and Dark Meat show that also featured garbage on fire.

See also: "DIY Will Never Die": An Exit Interview with 285 Kent's Ric Leichtung

That's according to Dorie Van Dercreek. She's worked the door at DBA for seven years, since the place opened, and probably has seen more shows there than anyone: bar mitzvah music video shoots, wedding receptions for people in noise bands, performance art based on the Jonestown massacre, and, once, her own art show (the 31-year-old has a degree in painting from the School of Visual Arts).

"The hardest thing I've done as the door person was trying to tell the entourage of Jim Jones, the rapper, that they couldn't stand in the street," she says. "That was before we had a curfew, though." She's referring to another 2008 show, where Dipset's Jones and Damon Dash crashed a Das Racist, Snakes Say Hisss, Lionshare, and Tough Knuckles bill.

The curfew she's referring to was imposed by the venue following the construction of a condo across South 2nd Street (completed in 2011), and was perhaps the first sign that things at Death By Audio wouldn't last for much longer. It's just one of a number of new and prospective luxury buildings on the Williamsburg Waterfront, including the massive Two Trees development slated to replace the aging Domino Sugar Factory around the corner. Though the specifics of the venue's shutdown have yet to be disclosed, sources say it is related to the rising price of real estate.

"I feel like as the neighborhood has changed, the crowds have changed as well," Van Dercreek says.

"The fact is people with money are coming to these neighborhoods and we have to adapt," says Todd Patrick — a/k/a Todd P, a central apparatus of North Brooklyn DIY music productions of the last 13 years, including, sometimes, at Death By Audio. "That concept of flying under the radar just is no longer viable here. New York was uniquely lax in enforcement for a long time. What was possible in New York in 2005, or 1995, or 1975, just isn't possible anymore. We have to quit clinging to an arbitrary set of standards that ends with the romanticization of things being shitty."

DIY venues as we know them, Patrick says, are finished. And that's been obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the man's actions of late. He's going legit, and he's not alone.

Patrick's (very legal, above board) Market Hotel Project is slated to open very soon. He's opened his new Trans Pecos venue where the old Silent Barn once stood. And Silent Barn's new, totally legal location features rules no one would've followed at the old haunt, like not drinking in the yard.

Beyond that, onetime 285 Kent head honcho Ric Leichtung is now booking shows at the completely legit Webster Hall and Baby's All Right, which makes sense. The nature of running a DIY space, he told us earlier this year when 285 Kent closed, "is transient and frustrating. It's very trying."

"All-ages DIY music venues are almost by definition temporary, and we feel fortunate to have lasted in this space for this long," read the official statement released by Death By Audio on September 8. "We knew from the beginning that it couldn't last forever and we are extremely grateful to everyone who has performed or attended any of our shows."