By Travis Johnson
There’s value in uniqueness, and Death by Audio was a pretty unique place. Perhaps not from a distance – all live music venues have commonalities that make them blurry and homogeneous to the outside observer – but certainly in its specifics, and to the people who spent their time there. Named for Oliver Ackermann’s custom effects pedal company, Death by Audio was a Williamsburg warehouse space that came to serve as a rehearsal and recording studio, artist space, gallery and band room, hosting performances from the likes of Ty Segall, Dirty Projectors, A Place to Bury Strangers (Ackermann’s band), and Famous Amos.
Director, Matthew Conboy, co-founded the venue along with Ackermann and Jason Amos in 2007. Conboy made a habit of filming live performances at the venue – “I filmed shows off and on with no real plan for years.” – with no idea that his concert footage would go on to be part of the record when Death by Audio faced an existential threat in the form of the Canadian pop culture empire, Vice Media.
“The movie actually came together in June of 2014,” Conboy recalls of the genesis of Goodnight Brooklyn, which documents DBA’s Sisyphean battle against their new neighbours. “I had a meeting with Amanda Schultz our producer and told her about the whole situation of us having to move, that Vice was responsible, and that we were going to throw a bunch of crazy shows, she said, ‘We need to start filming immediately.’ Our Director of Photography, Jonathan Yi, hit me up shortly thereafter and he came by and did some preliminary shooting not long after.”
What prompted the sudden call to action was Vice taking over the lease of the building. The new tenants undertook a series of renovations that eventually forced Death by Audio to cease operating as avenue, such was the structural damage and disruption. There’s a certain irony in the ostensible counterculture bible that is Vice acting as a force of gentrification, but any comedy inherent in that quickly disappears when you see the sheer destruction wrought upon the scrappy Brooklyn DIYers by the multimedia giant, which ranges from passive aggressive intimidation tactics to the actual flooding of the venue when a water main is broken by construction workers.
“I had a camera more or less ready at all times,” Conboy tells us. “It was a really stressful time, but as bad things started to happen, threats and floods, I definitely had brief moments of thinking ‘This is going to be good for the movie’ but I would quickly snap back into reality and have to deal with the crisis of that moment. It was very stressful. We didn’t really know if we had a film on our hands until we put together the rough cut and got the loose structure sorted out.”
The resulting film combines candid interviews shot while the face-off was going on with electrifying live footage captured at DBA gigs. “I wanted to document everything in a way that would be unobtrusive,” Conboy continues. “We ended up having our Executive Producer Jeffrey Kornberg set up an interview station in the recording studio at DBA, that way we could get people talking in a relatively isolated environment while parties and crazy stuff was going on. Jon, our DP, spent many days following Oliver, Edan (Wilber, another DBA bod) or myself around and getting really good verite footage, both of those were essential to the story. We decided on using these really powerful, tiny digital cinema cameras for the concert footage. They work really well in low light and I wanted to avoid having to make any changes to the space to film there. DBA is lit for kids to come and see shows. It’s not a film set, so it was important to document that without ruining the vibe. I think, all things considered, that went off pretty perfectly.
Of course, being a Death by Audio co-founder means that Conboy was not exactly an impartial observer, but he maintains his intimacy with the unfolding events gave him an edge. “I think if I was just an outside filmmaker I would have made a million little decisions differently. I had a huge advantage by knowing and living with all of these people for years. I think that definitely colored my approach. I felt that we were all doing interesting things, if we could have some cameras document that, but not get in the way, something authentic and special could be captured.”
Conboy is extremely happy with the response to Goodnight Brooklyn – “It feels pretty awesome to get a hug from a stranger who says they connected with your film,” he says – but time and distance have not softened his views on Vice. “They’re a giant company, so I don’t know if I feel one way or another about any specific employees, but as an entity they have been a negative and destructive force on my life and the life of my community. It would be easier to let it go if they paid for any of the damage they did to our belongings, but that would require them to acknowledge they did something shitty, and they don’t seem to want to do that.”
Still, the future seems hopeful for the culture war veteran. I’m working on several scripts for film and TV. Hoping to shoot some stuff later this year and just keep making stuff.”
Goodnight Brooklyn screens at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image from February 11 as part of their Summer Doco Program. For tickets, session times and info, head to the official site.
