Over the weekend, Catalpa Fest came to Randall's Island in an attempt to become the New York music festival. Festivals are, by nature, learning experiences (Because if you aren't learning anything, why the hell are you subjecting yourself to a festival?). We've documented a series of important lessons we learned from the weekend. Take these to heart, they may save your life one day. [All GIFs by Loren Wohl]

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Instagram user linehamm

You are so talented. We're not being facetious; we saw your photos from 4Knots and were blown away by them. You've never taken a class? Not even in college? You're kidding! Well, we were so impressed, we've decided to publish our favorite Instagram shots from yesterday's festival at South Street Seaport.

See more: Our 4Knots Coverage | The Beautiful Faces of 4Knots | The Pier 17 Fire: As Told by a Drunk 4Knots Attendee | 4Knots: A Moshing, Crowd-Surfer's-Eye View

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C.S. Muncy

I've attended a healthy number of concerts in my day, but there's one thing that I've never done: Crowdsurfed. Blame it on a fear of heights, or a vague distrust of other people, or whatever, but riding the wave of fellow concert-goers has never been an activity for me. However, thanks to the efforts of Voice photographer C.S. Muncy, who has as part of his arsenal the wearable camera known as the GoPro, I can now sort of figure out what the experience is like, at least from a sight perspective. Below, a lovely gif chronicling his surfing of yesterday's 4Knots Music Festival crowd during the set by Crocodiles. Grab some sunscreen and spray it right in your face before you look at it, so you can at least get some of the sensory experience offered by riding a throng of humanity. (Maybe if you have a friend or two nearby you could ask them to lightly grapple your backside? Only if you're comfortable with them, of course!)More »

Dylan Wilson

Today is the beginning of the CBGB Festival, a series of shows, panel discussions, and movie screenings that will stretch on into the weekend. The festival just so happens to coincide with the filming of a movie about the storied Bowery rock haven starring Alan Rickman as CBGB impresario Hilly Kristal; the East Village of yore is being recreated not in New York (not even in a Long Island City soundstage!), but in Savannah, Georgia. We had photographer Dylan Wilson take some shots of the set to see if the spirit of the once-grungy strip can be recreated in The Peach State.

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Maura Johnston

This mural was painted over the course of the weekend on the outside of the Metallica Museum.

I spent the past two days at Atlantic City's Bader Field, which played host to the inaugural Orion Music + More Festival, a two-day "music, arts and lifestyle" bonanza put together by the thrash kings in Metallica. It was pretty great all around—James Hetfield kept referring to the bash as a "backyard party," and while things weren't that intimate, the way that the band left its stamp on all aspects of the festival (particularly the big-tent aspect of the musical lineup) gave it a charge of intimacy and care that was much more present than at other multi-band, multi-day extravaganzas I've attended in recent years. A detailed report will come later, but for now, please enjoy these pictures of various scenes from the past two days.

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Nate "Igor" Smith

And Nate "Igor" Smith took both photos. Your move, Fake Das Racist. [Driven By Boredom's Tumblr]

"Wave goodbye to your former selves."

Prince Rama
Issue Project Room
Sunday, February 20

The Hare Krishna-bred, Animal Collective-produced crew Prince Rama are the Brooklyn-based band you previously might've seen performing alongside a homemade vacuum-cleaner-powered organ during Body Actualized Control's dusk "Evil Yoga" class on the Market Hotel rooftop last summer, "getting weird" with Deakin at the New Museum, or, more recently, ladling soup at the Clocktower while nude under fur, with a prayer-bell-clad cat in tow. Sunday, they kicked off a three-month artist residency at the Issue Project Room in Gowanus.

For this performance, titled UTOPIA=NO PERSON (the first in their three-part series examining "musical performance as ritual"), sister bandmates Taraka and Nimai Larson present themselves as members of a "pseudo-utopian cult" called "THE NOW AGE." Sporting leotards and headsets, they invited willing "initiates" to follow them in a clever 20-minute routine (repeated hourly), which explores the similarities between exercising and exorcising. In their own words: "UTOPIA=NO PERSON focuses on the body as a vehicle for utopian experimentation, encouraging willing participants to undergo a confrontation with personal demons and shedding of individual identity through the physical exhaustion of the body." And so on.

The immersive setting included a bar offering rainbow-colored "chakra water"; smoky incense; video projections and monitors; altars with skulls, feathers, and a disco ball; metallic sheets covering the walls; bunches of garlic hung over the door; colored flashing lights; and, of course, a transcendental soundtrack of distorted synthesizers, bells, and chirping birds. See photos and quotes from the routine below, along with a short video clip of the "burn" moments preceding the mid-set "transformation" of the participants.

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all photos by Paul Quitoriano

Guitarist Tim Maybury and singer Tanya Horo of Sherlock's Daughter, at their Queens kitchen table

Last April, Sherlock's Daughter frontwoman Tanya Horo told YIMBY columnist Christopher Weingarten that she resided in "an Olympic swimming pool in Long Island City." That was a bit of hyperbole meant to describe the loft downstairs from the one we visited recently for this week's cover, where Horo was living at the time. (Olympic swimming pools are typically over 13000 square feet.) What she could say accurately is that their 3500 square feet space is the same size of the world's smallest Wal-Mart. (Fun fact: the world's largest Wal-Mart apparently squats in Albany.)

Horo shares the place with guitarist Tim Maybury, band manager David Benge (who also manages Brisbane's Violent Soho and coordinates tours for Civil Society/Handsome Tours), and two other friends. With the help of Home Depot, they've not only set up four bedrooms, a makeshift office, and a living area (the kitchen was already installed), but a home studio for Sherlock's Daughter. "It set a pretty high bar for what you can make possible in your own house," says Maybury. "If we have to get out of here and move into some smaller apartment somewhere and not have this, it's going to be quite an adjustment."

The band doesn't practice in the loft, though. "A lot of people imagine that because we're a band and we live together, and we have this big warehouse, that we just practice here as well," says Maybury. They actually rehearse two blocks away, in a rented basement studio. "I wouldn't really want to practice in here, or where I live, because practice spaces tend to stay quite messy." Their home is not, as you can see:

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Guardian Alien's Greg Fox, in the house that Parts and Labor built. Pics by Rebecca.

On a quiet residential block near the BQE in Greenpoint, a vacant former convent and schoolhouse came alive on Saturday thanks to a collective called Rabid Handsand 60 or so artists they invited to collaborate with them on an exhibition utilizing "sound as the organizing and uniting principle." The four-story, single-day show, called "Sequence of Waves," had almost as many rooms as artists, with no bathroom, broom closet, or dishwasher left uninvolved. Most of the works were site-specific installations invoking both sonic and visual concepts; many were interactive and could be "played."

The seven hours during which the exhibit was open to the public also included a full schedule of musical performances, and huge crowds turned out, at times creating gridlock. The budget for this spectacle, according to Rabid Hands' Nick Chatfield-Taylor -- who dutifully manned the door all day, politely soliciting donations -- was nonexistent; artists relied at least partly on salvaged materials.

It would be hard to call the combined show of effort and creativity on display (and the overall sensory experience of exploring the sprawling exhibit) anything less than epic. Even if some rooms disappointed, the exhibit as a whole was still above and beyond, certainly not the kind of thing that happens every week even around here, the center of the cultural universe. That this affair was one-day-only is a shame, but so it goes -- a film crew is moving into the freshly de-installed space first thing Tuesday morning.

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Please, touch the bears. All pics by Rebecca.

Happy New Year/Dan Friel
Showpaper 42nd St. Gallery
Saturday, January 22

Since October, nestled among imposing buildings like Pfizer headquarters and the Helmsley Hotel, an East 42nd Street storefront has hosted an unlikely tenant: the Showpaper 42nd St. Gallery, a nonprofit, diy, all-ages performance and exhibition arena with a full-on "indie video arcade," open to the public six days a week.

Even more unusual is the source of the venture's funding. Showpaper secured the midtown space through a Chashama program, which gives artists steeply discounted access to unused commercial spaces. "Showpaper applied to use the space as a place for cover artists to expand their ideas into a physical space," said coordinator Joe Ahearn. They then invited cracked indie video-game connoisseurs Babycastles, their collaborators from the Silent Barn, to use part of the space for an arcade. Babycastles then turned to Kickstarter and quickly raised $13,000 toward that effort. The space is staffed by volunteers and takes donations at the door.

Alas, this is all temporary; on January 28th, the space will close their doors with a final blow-out dance party, courtesy of DJs Dirty Finger, Anton Glamb, and Hiro Tha Jap. But the shows held here so far have been immense: Brooklyn bands like Ducktails and the So So Glos -- and out-of-towners like Quiet Hooves -- have graced the stage, and the art installations changed each month. In the Babycastles Arcade, games have been rotated every two weeks, each set a well-curated and and esoteric selection. About 50 games total were featured, some of them re-coded versions of mainstream games, others completely independent creations, each housed in a custom artist-made cabinet (or in some cases, a teddy bear).

Saturday night was one of the final live shows in the space. Dan Friel and the homemade spaghetti of wires in his suitcase headlined, along with bands Happy New Year, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (no, not that one), and attachedhands.

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