​It was just a month ago that NYC lost Ariel Panero, the audacious 25-year-old promoter and musician known for throwing shows Damon Dash's basement in Tribeca, performing in the band Tough Knuckles, managing Grooms, and generally being a warm and ubiquitous presence in the local DIY scene. Friends and family said their private farewells at a December remembrance in Park Slope; now comes the more public goodbye, in the fitting form of two nights of DIY shows at Death By Audio. Cyrus Lubin, who used to work with Ariel on the Famous Class label, passes along the details:

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Jay Reatard, gone but not forgotten.

​It is depressing but accurate to note how inexorably the internet bends toward death, and how much of the work of professional critics these days is announcing it, verifying it, and making sense of it (often in that order, unfortunately). Michael Jackson, as in so many other things, proved prophetic in this regard; as we wrote last year, "the TMZ-led, wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson's last hours proved to be an augur of what, by August, was being dubbed the 'Summer of Death'--a phenomenon abetted if not entirely created by the ascendance of Twitter, where user avatars tinted green in solidarity with Iran's dissenters solemnly announced the passing of everyone from David Carradine to DJ AM to Gidget the Chihuahua." That's as true as it ever was. But it also bears remembering at the end of the year--work aside--how many of our best that we've lost. Sometimes it's easy to forget, but let's not. A brief roll call:

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​The year in music, circa 2010, started at the Cake Shop, with a shred-down to the New Year courtesy of Siren Festival MVP-to-be Marissa Paternoster and her band Screaming Females. After a tour through the NYE fetes of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, that night ended amidst a marathon show at Bushwick's Shea Stadium, right around the time the Blastoids' drummer poured paint on his kit and started splattering away.

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​People are saying their own kind of goodbyes in the comments section here, but if you'd like to do it in real life, the memorial service for Ariel Panero will be held this Sunday, December 12, at the Montauk Club in Park Slope, Brooklyn (25 Eighth Avenue) at 1 p.m. "Please come out and show your love for our friend," write the Famous Class kids.

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Ariel Panero, doing what he did. Photo via Facebook.

​The news began to circulate on Tuesday--Ariel Panero, the audacious NYC promoter behind Less Artists More Condos, had passed away suddenly, at the age of 25. Two days later, the details of what exactly happened are still in part unknown. But the farewells have already begun. (A service, set for Sunday, will be held at the Montauk Club in Park Slope.) The Brooklyn-born Panero, young as he was, had fashioned himself into a New York institution, a bold promoter and a hard worker, a guy who in life earned the trust of both former Roc-a-Fella mogul Damon Dash and Brooklyn DIY institutions ranging from Death By Audio to Showpaper to Jelly NYC.

I didn't know him well, but I did know him--every once in while my phone would ring and it would be Ariel, calling either to castigate me for getting another outlandish show of his inadvertently shut down, or, more frequently, to tell me about the next one. The last time we spoke it was when he phoned to tell me that he had somehow persuaded Dipset's Jim Jones to make the trek over the East River to perform at Death By Audio with Philly art-rockers Snakes Say Hisss and Panero's own band, Tough Knuckles.

It was this kind of spectacle that he was best at. He managed the band Grooms. He helped out with the label Famous Class. He booked shows in Damon Dash's Tribeca basement, in parking lots and on boats, in churches, under bridges, and in condos in the West Village. Sometimes, his parents would come to his events. "If you told me two years ago that I would be doing this," he told Ben Westhoff last year. "I wouldn't have believed you." But he did it, and did it well, and over the past couple years, few in the DIY community have done more memorable things in New York City. Below, we've asked some friends of his--Dame Dash, members of These Are Powers, Cyrus from Famous Class, and others--to remember him. Their recollections of Ariel are below:

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