To mark the occasion of Ronen Givony’s new book, Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004–2014), Roulette presents a two-night event highlighting the Brooklyn music scene and DIY community of the early aughts.
Night two features indie rock duo The Fiery Furnaces, Oneida, and a rare opening set by Brooklyn group Skeletons Big Band, who will perform in an expanded iteration for the first time in a decade.
Presented by Wordless Music and BrooklynVegan.
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
The Fiery Furnaces are Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger’s rock ‘n’ roll band. A younger sister and an older brother, once called Pop’s New Prairie School by The New York Times, one assumes as a joke, being natives of Oak Park, IL, marooned in and around New York City the better or worse part of three decades, they write songs, record songs, and perform songs in a relatively distinctive manner. Between 2003 and 2009 TFF put out 8 albums of various lengths with various outfits, a highlight being the quadruple LP Bitter Tea/Rehearsing My Choir (unfortunately not released together). Since the pandemic they have played a number of shows in a number of configurations, sometimes with two drummers and as many synthesizers as possible, sometimes with just piano-playing and singing, and now: guitar, bass, and drums. For further information, ask HAL 9000. Their dad did!
Oneida has long straddled gray-area boundaries between the NYC punk/psych/rock world and the art/experimental world, playing at gritty rock clubs and elevated cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim, MoMA PS1, ICA London, MassMOCA and the Knoxville Museum of Art. The band has been known for extended live improvisational performances, collaborating onstage with Mike Watt, members of Flaming Lips, Portishead, Boredoms, Yo La Tengo, Dead C, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and many others. Oneida’s members juggle a wide variety of other music projects. Drummer Kid Millions has played with Spiritualized, Royal Trux and Boredoms and releases solo compositions under his own name and as Man Forever. Shahin Motia founded noise-punk’s Ex Models and currently plays in Knyfe Hits. Kid and Fat Bobby perform and release music as People of the North, and Bobby’s outside projects include New Pope and Nurse & Soldier.
Skeletons (also known as Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys, Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities, Skeletons Big Band, and Skeleton$) is an American entertainment unit, formed in 2002, in Oberlin, Ohio. In its various forms, the band has toured around the world, and recorded for Ghostly International, Tomlab, Crammed Discs, Altin Village and Mine, and Shinkoyo — the imprint they co-founded.
Us v. Them The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004-2014) In the tradition of Just Kids and Our Band Could Be Your Life, Ronen Givony’s Us v. Them chronicles the generation of young artists who came to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s: a small but seismic scene that coalesced under a billionaire mayor, a series of forever wars, and a music industry in free fall. Through reporting, research, and interviews with musicians, industry insiders, and individuals from Pitchfork, Vice, Scion, and the Red Bull Music Academy, Us v. Them examines the rise and fall of indie music in a post-Napster landscape, marked by vast disruption in technology, politics, economics, journalism, and patronage.
