What is Antifolk? All Is Revealed

After Antimatters folded there was a gap of a few years before the appearance of Urban Folk, the next fan zine on the scene. It was started by Dave Cuomo who quickly drafted Jon Berger’s assistance. Urban Folk had a similar cross-section of interviews and articles as Antimatters but was somewhat less frenetic in style, although it certainly reflected its share of Antifolkian irreverence. Sixteen issues were published bimonthly from 2005 into 2008. Cuomo dropped out somewhere around halfway through its run and Berger once again carried on until he too pooped out. Fourteen of those issues are online at scribd.com.

Urban Folk was an entry point for me (yeah, me – Herb Scher, that is). Its publication generally coincided with my arrival on the scene at a time when my interest in photography was becoming revitalized. I became a regular contributor and, in particular, the portraits I took of artists like Somer, Timothy Dark, Andrew Hoepfner, Domino, Dan Costello, Debe Dalton and others gave me the chance to hone my skills, build a portfolio and form closer relationships with folks on the scene.

I soon learned that there were other active photographers among the Sidewalk crowd, chiefly around that time, Lippe, whose earliest shots in the club were taken in 2002. In an extensive series of live performance shots Lippe documented the vibrant period when artists like The Moldy Peaches, Major Matt, Regina Spektor, Diane Cluck, and Jeffrey Lewis, to name just a few, were most active at Sidewalk.

This past February a cross-section of 240 photos documenting almost the entire span of the 20-year history of music in Sidewalk’s back room were compiled and posted in a digital gallery on Sidewalk’s web site. These include photos by Lippe and myself as well as others like Anne Husick, Dina Levy, Yoko Kikuchi and Jon Berger.

Sidewalk’s “Gallery” site also includes a collection of fliers and posters drawn from the archive of Bernard King. “There was a golden age of fliers,”according to King. “Certainly the early to mid 2000s was a big part of it, and there was some competition for saving the best ones. Jeffrey Lewis, myself, or Brook Pridemore, might try to get a rare, handmade Diane Cluck or Barry Bliss poster before the others did. Since I collected just about anything that I came across for about ten years, there are boxes full of thousands of them that vary greatly as far as artist and quality, but they show a wide cross-section of acts from those times.”

An initial selection of items from King’s collection is on view via Sidewalk’s site. The gallery includes vivid promo pieces for The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, Barry Bliss, and Crazy and the Brains, for example. Pieces from this collection have also been enlarged and decorate the walls of the Sidewalk performance space. King says that he is working with the club on digitizing another batch of items.

Recently Bob Black and Kathleen King have documented numerous Sidewalk acts through live video recordings. King was able to tape almost the entire Fall 2012 Antifolk Festival, including acts like Phoebe Kreutz and Lance Romance, and Black has about 45 videos filmed at Sidewalk at the eyelovemediagroup Facebook page. Another resource for video is Gander TV, an outside company that has an arrangement to stream live performances from Sidewalk. Many of the performances are also archived at their site.

And, there’s more! Brad Willis’s extensive antifolkonline.com site, features intriguing interviews, reviews and other material starting in 2002 and Lach’s Antifolk.net site has extensive artists bios, years worth of news listings and much more. Deenah Vollmer, another Sidewalk regular, recently co-produced an hour-long radio documentary for NPR. Although in part it focuses on the popularity of Antifolk in Berlin, it also outlines the nature of the scene in New York.

To a large extent, these efforts to document the creative activities at Sidewalk Cafe stem from the same type of artistic impulses that drive the scene itself. While it’s the stage that is the central focus there, the club’s creative energy expands in many directions.

“I had started writing about the community before I became a performer in the community,” said Berger. “Back then, it was my main form of expression, There’s something about being in this artistic scene that makes people want to express themselves in whatever way they can. It worked that way for me, anyway.”

Links

Sidewalk Cafe Music Blog (by Jon Berger)
http://www.sidewalkny.com/music-blog/

Antimatters, 1995 to 2001
http://bit.ly/15cCHZW

Additional Antimatters
http://bit.ly/143Juif

Urban Folk
http://bit.ly/15qEU0Z

Photo Gallery
http://bit.ly/143JTBh

Poster/Flier Gallery
http://bit.ly/143KbrO

Berlin Stories Antifolk documentary on NPR
http://bit.ly/14WjCF2

eyelovemediagroup (videos)
https://www.facebook.com/eyemediagroup

Kathleen King’s Youtube Channel
http://bit.ly/15dxnyB

Lach’s News Archive
www.antifolk.net

Lach’s site has nuggets of information about the Antifolk scene all over the place, but digging through the old news items can be fun. Click on “Archives” in the lefthand navigation bar and then roll over the News/Interviews/Reviews icon. Also checkout the “Artists” section.

Brad Willis’s Antifolkonline.com
www.antifolkonline.com

Many interesting interviews with key figures from the 2002/2003 era, plus much more.

Gander TV
http://bit.ly/17Z8s4L