Being from Philadelphia, I admittedly don’t have a lot of love in my heart for New York.
It’s in my DNA as a Philadelphian underdog to snarl at “The Big Apple” (which is the corniest nickname for city I’ve ever heard.)
Last time I checked apples don’t smell like pee, sell $15 packs of cigarettes or charge thousands of dollars in rent for a closet.
Still, I gotta respect it. If you wanna make it, you have to find your grind.
My dad and his dad were Nuyoricans. And Taxi Driver is the greatest movie of all time (after Die Hard.)
And New York’s musical legacy is frankly, for lack of a better word, absolutely unf*ckablewith. The Brill Building to Studio 54, Wild Style to CBGBs, Trecherous Three to LCD...it’s all good. ALL GOOD.
Dan Selzer is good New York.
As a club/radio DJ and head of the Acute label (that traffics in reissuing post-punk and no wave classics,) Selzer has tirelessly championed the good. And Selzer has now become the good via a music project called New York Endless, out on NY’s fine Golf Channel imprint.
Strategies splits the difference between the obvious hallmarks of Selzer’s favored moments in music. Echoes of CAN, Kraftwerk, OMD, Aphex Twin, Robotnick and a decade of DFA appear on the 3 track EP, but as indebted as it may be, it’s his distilling that results in something truly remarkable and worthy of praise on it’s own merits.
This love letter to New York is so good, it warms my heart to the idea of New York…Hell, it’s so good next time I might even buy a t-shirt.