Finding Harmony in Dystopia

Harmony and I are sitting in a concrete backyard. We crawled through the other side of a locker at a pest control store to get here.

We’re at The Shop: my friends Matt Weinberger and Avery Hunsberger’s new studio. Outside, the storefront sells wares for Avery’s Pest Control company. If you shimmy through a storage locker behind the counter, you arrive at a sprawling arts space. In some Southeast Asian countries, there are perpetual stews: pots that boil for years as stew is spooned out and new ingredients added round the clock. The Shop is the perpetual party. Instruments, cameras, ladies shoes are scattered around. The locker is always opening to the crawl of some downtown persona. Other than that, not a pest in sight, but also no A/C. Harmony and I are in the backyard, on an unusually hot day, melting, the surrounding walls high octane blue, freshly painted and already tagged again.

Originally, I had planned for us to meet at the Yoko Ono installation at Faurschou Gallery, Greenpoint’s hidden treasure, where a hundred dogwood and evergreen trees were planted in wooden coffins in a long white hall. Digitally modulated birdsong played overhead on a loop, eerie in its stripped-down even keel. A sedate realm, redolent of technological singularity. Perfect backdrop to talk about Harmony’s new solo project Dystopia Girl. 

But when I called that morning, a staffer said the exhibition had closed ahead of schedule. Some of the trees weren’t faring well and they were taken out of sweet eternal zazen to be planted in the Under the K Bridge Park. They were removed from their coffins a la Lazarus and planted amidst birds sans autotune and the commuter thrum of the BQE, bearing witness to the vastness and discomfort and yearning and lightning encounters of the people of the 21st century. 

Dystopia Girl is also about being swirled in the madness of it all, continuously inventing the levity to keep your magic alive.