Underground city

>> Brooklyn’s Foreign Islands watch New York hotspots pass into history

FORGING FRESHNESS: Foreign Islands

by JACK OATMON

The world has long had a love affair with the renegade attitude of New York City’s ever-influential music scene. Whether you put it down to the unavoidable mixing and cross-pollination of immigrant cultures, or the town’s legendarily resolute character, there’s something undeniably badass about a lot of the music that’s come out of there over the decades. The Mirror spoke over the phone to Brooklyn resident and singer for incendiary electro-punk quintet Foreign Islands, Mark Ryan, about the ghosts in the walls and skeletons in the closets of NYC.

“He had this studio in Brooklyn and they just switched to one in Queens,” says Ryan, recounting the move of band member Dean Baltulonis’s recording studio, the Wild Arctic. “The one he took over, BDP had recorded there back in the day. It used to be a hip hop studio. I like recording there and knowing that some early hip hop went on there.”

Now the studio is home to an equally rebellious, if somewhat different sound, with artists like the Hold Steady, Sick of It All and Agnostic Front on its lengthy clientele roster. But Ryan says not everything in the city manages to retain its cultural capital.

“It’s becoming less and less. There’s a lot of stuff disappearing because they can’t afford the rent anymore. When I was a kid, it seemed like stuff stuck around for a while, but now it seems like anything could go. There’s even some landmark restaurants that have been around for like 100 years or more, and in the last year or two, they just disappeared. Places you thought would just have to be here forever, ’cause it’s been here since 1901 or whatever. I’m actually lookin’ at one right now that’s a Chase Manhattan Bank. It used to be called Second Avenue Deli. That was a really famous place. The rent started really going up in the early ’90s and, little by little, it got to the point where even CBGB’s wasn’t safe. Now it’s gone.”

True to form, though, a punk rocker’s perpetual thirst for change and renewal challenges Ryan’s desire to lament the defilement of such a symbol.

“But, you know, I don’t mean to sound selfish, but CBGB’s had kinda lost what it used to be anyway. It was just kind of a lot of shitty bar bands playing there. It wasn’t the newest, coolest bands playing there anymore. Sometimes I think maybe it’s better for places to… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I feel about it, actually.”

Ryan’s band itself is another indication of the forward charge to find fresh sounds while tipping the hat to the forefathers. Their cocktail of hoarse-throat political punk and red-blooded electro references a lot of things, from the Clash, Gang of Four and early Beastie Boys on through to the modern dance punk scene, but still stands up on its own.

“The bloated rock stuff had to end so that something more vibrant could come along,” says Ryan. “It’s a good time because people are realizing that you don’t have to be one way or another. It seems like people who are making music now are people who are into everything. A lot of people I talk to who do electronic music, they have a history of punk.”

With Mstrkrft, Shir Khan and
Jordan Dare at I Love Neon at SAT
on Saturday, Sept. 1, 9 p.m., $30