Interview: Joe Ahearn on Silent Barn’s Return

by Erik Erikson

“Home is about support, and community… They found a place that was for them, to take care of them. In a way that wasn’t just providing a PA system and a stage.”

Recently, Bushwick, Brooklyn-based DIY venue Silent Barn was broken into and looted of all its equipment. Thousands of dollars’ worth of items were taken or destroyed beyond repair, forcing the space to close its doors. Since that day, many supporters have gotten involved in trying to get Silent Barn back up and running.

HOLY DIVER attended the latest benefit show, hosted in a loft apartment on Wyckoff avenue (aptly named CHEAP STORAGE), to document the music in pictures — and more importantly, to have a word with one of the prime movers behind the revered venue and ubiquitous event listings-focused Showpaper.

 

Ahearn at Silent Barn.

 

HOLY DIVER: First, tell us a little about Showpaper and what exactly you do for it.

Joe Ahearn: Showpaper is an all-ages music listing, it covers pretty much all of the underground music events, all the rooftop, warehouse, backyard, awesome summer-ness. As well as DIY shows… [we are] primarily focused on listing all-ages music events.

I do everything, as far as coordinating is concerned. I don’t do everything, but I’m responsible for making sure that everything gets done. If that makes any sense.

HD: What exactly is Silent Barn, and what role does it play for Showpaper, and music in Brooklyn in general?

JA: Silent Barn is my home. By extension, Showpaper is one of the many projects that functions within the space… So, Silent Barn does music events. Or, did… it’s tricky using the tense here. But, the goal is doing events pretty much every single night. And we don’t necessarily do huge events, because the purpose of doing these events is to make sure that there’s a certain fuzziness between what is music, and what is a group of people working together.

And so part of that being put in action is the fact that pretty much everybody that [is a part of] the Silent Barn are people who are actively involved in socially-oriented art projects. If that wasn’t the sort of thing you do, it wouldn’t make very much sense for you to live in as crazy an apartment as Silent Barn is.

Showpaper has no direct function within the space, outside of the fact that I work at the space, and it’s another project that I work on. As does everybody that works in the space. We do do Showpaper fundraisers relatively frequently; we have a pretty nice back catalog of papers that are there, for people to check out. And we have a number of Showpaper collages muralled throughout the space.

Outside of that, there’s no official link.

HD: So you guys basically just happen to operate there.

JA: Yeah, but then again, in the whole DIY-ness, there’s rarely anything official. You know, it’s all these amorphous overlapping projects, and it’s only once you start digging beneath the surface that it starts to become apparent that it’s a small group of people running most of these things.

Well, small group of people is not what I mean to say. It’s a relatively… trackable, definite — the group of people that are organizing these things are all connected to one another.

CHEAP STORAGE towers over the quiet Jefferson St. stop on the L train.

HD: On the Kickstarter page for Rebuilding the Silent Barn, it says you guys have already raised (as of 8/21) more than $36,000 of the $40,000 goal. Are you surprised by that?

JA: I am completely blown away. Totally, completely blown away. But the thing that’s really amazing is that I’m honored to be in the position where, when people donate money to that, I… there’s six of us, actually, who were all the original housemates. We all get emails when people donate to that Kickstarter. We can trace almost every single person that’s donated to that Kickstarter… like, it’s more than six hundred people at this point, but every single one of those people, one of the six of us, knows the show they came to, or what band they’re in, or that night we let them stay at our house, or that time we booked their show two weeks ahead of time, or when they were touring and we found them a place to stay.

I’m surprised that there’s that much optimism in the community maybe, but it’s not this amorphous group of strangers. And that’s the most incredible thing… it really is everyone that we’ve helped. It’s all people who, none of them were ever expecting to repay us. This is the sort of thing, you know, if you’re working hard and others are working hard, and you’re like “If there’s anything I can do to make it easier, I will.” And suddenly now we’re in this position where we’re fucked, and we reached out, and all of those people came back to help. It’s amazing.

I’m surprised, but I’m also like, Yes, this is how it’s supposed to work! It makes sense to me… I’m humbled and inspired by it at the same time.