By Andy Beta – The Village Voice

FIn summer 2009, a concise little EP with the unwieldy title Representing NYC Presents: Da’ Brats From Da’ Ville Featuring the Fly Girlz appeared. Five teenage girls from the Brownsville section of East New York posed on the cover with hands on hips or middle and index fingers up; the music harkened back to the boxy beats and group-shouted raps of Run-D.M.C. and Roxanne Shanté, a strain of hip-hop that mostly disappeared well before the girlz were born. Yet it also had an undertow of weirdness to it, the queasy synth drones and fractured beats behind the boasts courtesy of producer Nathan Corbin (better known for his work with inscrutable Brooklyn noisemakers Excepter). Under the hip-hop aliases of Lady Millz, Pinky, Sophie, Princess, and Angel, these five hip-hop initiates were full up with attitude but also awareness; in a Fader TV video, it’s endearing to see these outspoken young teens turn shy as they peddle their wares to the clerks at Brooklyn’sAcademy Records Annex. Here were East New York teenagers ignoring the subjugating fantasies of mainstream rap and collaborating with outsider Brooklyn noisemakers to make something outside their comfort zones, suggesting a bigger force at work. [Read More]

As for her current in-store installation at Zakka in Brooklyn, Anastasia simply asked the store owner with earnest aplomb, ” I see you have a big white wall and it’s like a dream for me. Can I draw?” The 2 wall piece was drawn in ‘real time’, where people could see the progress over a month time span and was completed this past week. Last year she was invited to collaborate with 6 other artists at the Lucky Gallery in NYC, where she produced amazing work and clinched her love for New York with a vow to return. She’s back. Take definite notice! [Read More]

By COLIN MOYNIHAN – NY Times

For decades, the East Village has been home to countless avant-garde organizations and collectives, drawn to the area by its cultural vitality and low cost of living.

Those days of affordability, however, appear to have largely vanished, and over the last decade or so many of the creative groups that once had a home in the East Village have moved or become defunct.

The latest to announce its departure is one of the more unusual to spring up there. That group, an artists’ collective and burial society called the Uranian Phalanstery and First New York Gnostic Lyceum Temple, was started in the East Village in the late 1950s by the artists Richard Oviet Tyler and Dorothea Tyler. [Read More]

By Good Records NYC

As many have no doubt heard by this writing, the month of August was marked by the closing of two NYC vinyl landmarks, first The Sound Library and, as of last week, Fat Beats. Some have offered quiet congratulations to me on outlasting a couple of competitors; I take no joy in watching these institutions close their doors. [Read More]