The Industrial poetry of Meserole Street is smudged when I sprint past by the warehouse where the guys from Navegante rehearse every day. “It’s all in your head”, Jean Shepherd, yells in my headphones. It feels like there is a fourth dimension to their music. Short breath, my feet are in monotone frequency touching and untouching the ground. Inhale, exhale, wet hair underneath my hood, I am driven by the energy and restlessness of We ridin’.
We keep rocking till the morning light, we don’t give a damn if you’re ready or not.
You’re tired and drunk when walking home late at night and/or early morning. Thoughtlessly, you take a short cut through the warehouse area in Bushwick. That’s not your habitual route home, but some inexplicable force is taking you there. Too tired to fight it, you just follow. Smell of dirt, rain is mixing with the smell of boiling rice. You take a peak through a large hole in the wall of the rice factory. There are a hundred people dancing, going insane, rough music rolling from a large speaker. Your ear canals are vibrating, your eyes stuck to the florescent photographs on the walls. You melt into the crowd… All my friends burn too fast.
Jean hands me a roll of toilet paper as I am sitting in their studio. “I strongly advise you to put it into your ears. Cause this might get loud…”, he smiles friendly. I briefly look at Wash Duke behind the drums waiting impatiently to start and obediently fill up my ears. Suddenly everything changes, the air vibrates, Navegante fills up their rented space to 120% percent with energy. I can’t stop looking at Wash smashing his drum set. I feel like I am observing some secret spiritual ritual, like I’m invading his intimacy.
Once the set is over, their faces change, just like nothing happened. I begin to be curious about why there are only two of them. Jean explains that they used to have more members, but as the time passed it turned out that it’s not entirely easy to find people who share their mind set. The people who are willing to put everything aside and focus just on music for a year and half. It takes time and self-discipline. “It’s all in your head.”, I am thinking about their song. They played for a year in a club in East Harlem. To find their sound and to practice. “Playing live makes you think quick. What do you do when something goes wrong? You have one second to fix it when on a stage.” I am asking about Brooklyn clubs. Jeans says that when he moved to Brooklyn, he was amazed by the quality of the bands playing in Brooklyn. The clubs would pay one band to play the whole night and they better be amazing. Nowadays, there are so many bands out there that the clubs are booking four or more bands per night and they don’t care how the band sounds like because the bands are basically required to pay for their own show. And the quality goes down rapidly.
The guys further explain that they have created this effective 30-minute long set to open Rye Rye’s show on Wednesday at Public Assembly. This will be their last show for some time now. They plan to disappear for the winter in their Meserole studio and finish their second album. To taste a hint of what is coming, you can download their EP for free here or come to Public Assembly on Wednesday.
