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An Evening with Dreamcrusher

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An Evening with Dreamcrusher

Two weeks ago, a crowd huddled in a posh brownstone in Williamsburg braced themselves for a noise show. Cups of oat, almond, and soy milk were served to accompany platters of vegan chocolate chip cookies, baked by the performer themselves. The small, square kitchen was transformed into a makeshift performance space: a giant amp sat in one corner, while hulking electronic equipment overtook a back counter and a microphone stand hovered over another. In the back room, a merch table offered tote bags, cassette tapes of a new EP titled Katatonia, and a limited edition of twenty t-shirts made for the occasion, with the words QUEER NIHILIST REVOLT MUSIK spelled out in a circular design, all created by the evening’s performer, Dreamcrusher. Julia Pelta Feldman, the proprietor and founder of Room & Board, the experimental artist’s residency that takes place in the apartment and host of the event, flitted from room to room, making sure everyone had refreshments and earplugs.

An elegant Brooklyn apartment and vegan pastries are understandably distant from what normally comes to mind when most people hear noise music, yet for Luwayne Glass, aka Dreamcrusher, it was a perfect venue. Unbeknown to the audience members chatting with each other before the show began, Glass sat beneath the island in the center of the kitchen, secretly DJing the party from underneath a black tablecloth.

"I don’t like talking to people at shows," he explained.

By 9:00 p.m. the lights were shut off and a strobe light began to flash from the back room, prompting the crowd to merge into the anterior living room to watch. Glass revealed himself from beneath the island, rising up during the dirge-like opener, "Mirror", off Katatonia. He climbed the island and moved catlike on top of it, each movement staggered from the strobe light. Later, during the pounding "Now I Am Become", he stripped his flannel shirt open to reveal a black leather harness stretched across his chest as he shrieked lyrics into the microphone, its cord wrapped tightly around his neck. Watching a Dreamcrusher show, with its high-decibel howls, crunched, digital soundscapes, and Glass’ equally standoffish and dynamic stage presence, is a spectacle like little else.



Though born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, 26-year-old Glass has been in New York for the past month and a half. After creating a Gofundme page to crowdsource enough money to take his Dreamcrusher project on the road, Glass joined a weeklong northeast tour with one-man Brooklyn noise artist Radio Shock. "[He] hit me up and was like, ‘I know what it’s like to come from a fucking small town, doing some noisy shit, and no one’s coming to your shows,’" Glass said of the tour. He later connected with Feldman’s Room & Board project through a friend in the band Middle Grey, and was surprised when she responded positively to his project. "They were like, we checked out your SoundCloud, this shit is fucking popping. Let’s do this," he said. "I was freaking out about it."

Dreamcrusher’s origins are in the annals of MySpace, but his earliest recordings currently available date back to 2006, with Glass’ characteristically crunched, deconstructed sound palette applied to remixes of everyone from Lady Gaga and Erykah Badu to Daft Punk and These New Puritans. Since then, he’s released a constant flow of new material, currently racking up 24 releases on his prolific Bandcamp. "I have weird spurts," he says about his creative output. "I’ll go six months without recording anything and then I’ll go another six months recording at least three songs a day."

Katatonia, while still smeared in chaotic feedback and screeching synths, hews closer to melodicism than some of Glass’ other works. "Imponderabilia" offers a stuttering back beat similar to some of Crystal Castles’ darker electronic impulses (one of Glass’ influences), while 13-minute closer "Mirror" starts with waves of undulating noise before dissolving into a bath of warm sounds and voices that altogether form something celestial, choral, and mesmerizing. It’s an impressive set of songs, showcasing Glass’ unique fusion of noise and electronic music.

After the show, once the strobe shut off and the regular lights turned on again, Glass threw himself into hugs with friends who came to see him perform. Enthusiastic and funny in person, he put on a host of accents and voices as he posed for pictures, simultaneously urging guests to buy his limited edition t-shirts and take cookies home with them as they left. I did both.

Pitchfork: Can you explain "nihilist queer revolt musik" to me?

Luwayne Glass: I was trying to come up with a counter to noise music that I liked but couldn’t personally connect with.

Pitchfork: What kind of noise do you feel that way about?

LG: Anything made past 2008. Seriously, it feels like sometimes it’s a competition of who can look like a Neo-Nazi. Everybody has the same fucking haircut, they all wear black, they don’t talk to anyone. Not that you have to force a sense of community into a music scene, you don’t have to do that, but you should at least not be an asshole. There’s a small noise community in Kansas, but we’re lit. If Torturing Nurse comes, we’re like, I’m coming out, I’m gonna shake my titties, I’m gonna get it poppin’.

When I first started playing shows I didn’t want to do it. It was 2012 and I had been making music for five years, and I was like, I can’t play here. Who the fuck’s gonna come? You have, what, 10% of the people that play [in Kansas] are noise people, 30% is indie rock, another 30% is metal, and another sub-genre is like, white boys with dreads rapping. Literally that’s it. Those are your choices. So I was like, no one’s gonna come to my shit. I’d just put out Death in the USAand most of the people that were buying it were in England. Then another person that was in town came to visit and he was like, "Are you Dreamcrusher?!" I had just barely gotten off of Myspace, I was still holding on to dear life to MySpace, but he was like, you have to perform here because think about the other kids who are in town who like the same shit but think there’s no outlet.

But the people I was booking with… ok, so you know the metal guy at the noise show? Those would be the kinds of people that I would be playing with. They were into my music but they weren’t into me, you know? I came out when I was 13. I’m not gonna hide myself, I’m not gonna do any of that. I’d be playing shows with these people who were like, eh, whatever. So it got to a point where I was just like, fuck this, I need to get the fuck out of here, so I started the fund.

Pitchfork: How did you start making music?

LG: When I came out I was trying to come out to keep from going to public high school. I was like, high school is scary, they’re gonna kill me. Literally, they’re gonna kill me. It could have fucking happened. I went to a magnet school and I was actually weird. I was fucking listening to Autechre in the computer lab and people would look at me like, ‘Did you break the computer?’ The first song I ever made was this weird, jungle-y, fucked up shit and I was like, ‘oh my God I want to keep making them!’ I kept adding compression to everything so it just sounded fucking ridiculous. Then my sister was like, you should put it on MySpace. I was using MySpace specifically to find music. That’s how I found out about HEALTH and Crystal Castles. And then I heard "Alice Practice" and I was like, I’m getting the shirt, I’m going to Canada, I’m gonna get lit, I’m gonna start drinking, smoking, moshing. I put a song up on MySpace that was terrible, and it got 1,000 plays in like a week. It was weird. I was like, they like that?

Pitchfork: Since you attach the queer label to your music, how much of your queerness do you feel impacts your music?

LG: It impacts all of it and none of it. The vessel I create out of is queer so anything I do is gonna be queer. But I don’t necessarily talk about… I mean, there are barely any words and if there are they’re like mad morbid, stupid, word vomit. But I don’t know, it’s unavoidable for it to be part of it, you know? It’s just kind of there. I’m debating whether I should include more of it in there. This time in the world is so weird because on the one hand you have infinite possibilities and it’s visible. You can see it. And then you still have those little bit of powerful people who are a smaller group and are older, who are like, we want strict this, that’s it. In the underground scene it’s really apparent and it’s really fucking annoying.


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