Hello again youuu guys! I am very excited to say that for this blog post, I thought a lot about it on my trip and made sure to take extra pictures for you guys, so this is the NYC photo dump special :P
I stumbled into the great city of New York from the womb of the van Alex and I drove across country together last year, in the blistering summer of 2020. In the brief two weeks between my Los Angeles trip and my arrival in nyc, I DJ'd two raves in Richmond with my friends down there, took my cat to the vet twice, landed a role in an indie film (more on that later!), and completed a leg of a super serious DND campaign. Basically, I was swamped from the moment I jumped on that West Coast-bound flight and I've hardly taken a breath since -- !
Anyways, this will be where I regale you with tales and images from the Death By Sheep Summer Jam 2021 >:3 also known as the PROLAPS EVENT!!! Since Dominic and I first heard Prolaps, we were determined to play a show with them... this all started because I (as a joke) asked Dominic if he wanted to come with me to New York, and then he said YES, which I never expected, and the rest is history......
Day 1!
Alex and I drove through probably three whole HOURS of traffic to get to JFK Airport, which was dumb, but Dominic is a bit of a diva (<3) and had to be picked up from the airport in the van. We got burritos from the burrito place down in the Far Rockaways (look up "burrito spot" on Google no joke, that's how we found it). We got there just before the rain and took some twins pics on the beach and ate the burritos >:3
It was Dominic's first time ever going to the East Coast, let alone New York City, so of course I had to take him to Times Square for some classic tourism behavior. Riding the train into the city late at night feels like just as important of an NYC tourism experience to me as the actual Times Square (which, honestly, is only cool for about ten minutes before it's time to leave).
Puppy Tapes gig (T-2 days until Summer Jam)
The next day Dominic and I completed highly secret ritual practice in order to align our energies with the high-frequency vibrations of the city (most important initial action when drawing on core energetic power in any location). After that, we were excited to wind down with little R&R...
JUST KIDDING! No rest for the wicked, they always say, and apparently no rest for two perfect and beautiful angels like Extinction Event either, because Thursday night was the Puppy Tapes euphoric hardtrance laser light rave event at H0L0! Aside from my dumb choice to wear platform flip-flops from the 90s to walk the 2 or 3 miles there and back from the airBNB, it was a lot of fun. DO NOT wear the flops to the rave though you will totally end up with blisters in a bad way!
Anyways, everyone who played was great, the track selection was impeccable, and I met some new DJ friends, so the night was a smashing success.
Day 3: Italian Americans are real????
Dominic and I take the train into the city on day 3 of our grandiose adventure because Dominic wants to reconnect with the patria, and what better place to take an Italian in the Windy Apple than a real Italian restaurant? We walked through Chinatown first, stopping in every cheap market to see what amazing souvenir finds we could make. I almost got a Tails the Hedgehog backpack, but the pocket inside was so ridiculously small that it wouldn't even hold my phone. That's fine, we press on. Dominic and I both get fans because of how swelteringly hot it was. Oh yeah, have I mentioned that yet? Anyone who lives in the city knows, I'm sure, but holy SHIT, it was like walking through a hot, stinky pudding the whole first half of the week. I would walk outside and immediately become damp and sticky like a frog.
Finally we decide we're hungry, but where to go...? We stop in Little Italy and hit the weed pen a few times, thinking... Dominic wants real pizza, not cheap pizza, so we're going to look for a place like that, when suddenly the veil is lifted behind him, and a beautiful, humble pizza restaurant reveals itself to us. Da Nicos.
Personally, I'm convinced that we only found this place because Dominic has Italian blood, so it revealed itself to us like the sword in the lake or that one door in the side of the mountain in The Hobbit. Laugh all you want, but the inside was like Artie Bucco's spot from The Sopranos or something. We were maybe the only people in there who weren't Italian. Someone's grandma (the matriarch, I presume) was seated at a little table by the kitchen, and all the waiters stopped one by one to have conversations in speedy Italian with her. The waiters were a perfect amount of rude. And the FOOD!
I got the caprese and a prosciutto pizza, and oh, were they good. The tomatoes and mozzarella were so fresh, and the pizzas were coal fired with the perfect mix of soft and crispy crust. Plus, everything was priced very reasonably and sized to fatten you up! (Not even a paid advertisement I just really liked Da Nico's.)
After we left Da Nico's we got paparazzi'd by some guy on the train platform, he told us we looked "so St. Mark's Place" and took a bunch of photos of us as the trains came in. Yeah, we're famous now ~
DAY 4: DEATH BY SHEEP SUMMER JAM 2021
SUMMER JAM FINALLY HERE! Have you ever seen a lineup more stacked with homies and hotties of musical talent??? Honestly, the photos and videos tell a better story than I can alone. (All of the following are taken by Jean, @jntza on instagram!)
Lots of friends showed up from all kinds of different places, I even reconnected with someone I haven't seen since high school (and didn't ever expect to see again) -- she didn't know I was playing and I didn't know she lived in NYC. Magic happens when the rave is good, okayyyy?
I was super nervous about playing live, and there were definitely a couple of hangups, but I'm glad about the new direction Extinction Event is moving in. We're looking to push more into a kind of abstract performance. The name of this set is Entropy. The name of the next one will evolve with the seconds, an eternal wave on the tide of our thought and experience.
MET MUSEUM
I ALMOST FORGOT that we went to the Met before the show! We went through the Egyptian sections and the ancient Greco Roman sections and coveted alllll of the beautiful golden jewelry with precious stone faces. Dominic told me recently that you can buy ancient rings from Sotheby's for like $1000. Who wants to chip in?
REST OF TRIP
Honestly this blog post has taken too long to write and get out into the world and I have even more new things to write about and share, so I'm going to end this here with some more photos. Suffice it to say that we had an amazing last couple of days of the trip... :)
BONUS: two collages that Dom made!
