Sixty bands and a slew of DJs will be featured in a one-day rager at Paper Box on Saturday, Sept 7. Simultaneous performances will take place on three separate stages, including one outside, starting at 3pm and running ’til 3am. Music ranges from rap to rock. Headlining bands include Brooklyn rapper Buckshot of the group Black Moon, electronic songstress Suzi Analogue, and string composers Charly and Margaux.

This festival represents the best of Brooklyn’s independent talent with a heavy focus on Bushwick, and its cultural mix. Bands on the rise include I am the Third with a neo soul sound. Rebelmatic, just having played the Afropunk Fest, come with their “unrelenting, brutal and touching” hip hop skater punk noise, and released their second album Elephant Amnesia this year.

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I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE, NIRVANA, TONIGHT!

MONDAY, AUGUST 19 @ 10:00 pm at Spectacle Theatre, 124 South 3rd Street, between Bedford and Berry.

Tonight at 10 p.m., Williamsburg’s Spectacle Theatre re-screens the Nirvana ‘biography film’ I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, in celebration of the 20th anniversary re-issue of the band’s third and final studio record, In Utero, slated for September 24.

This 40-minute essay is described as “the biographical story of Nirvana told through the media detritus left in Kurt Cobain’s wake” created from “lost interviews, rabid fan tributes, insensitive true-crime shows, crushing live footage, and even Kurt’s long-lost 1984 homemade horror film, Horror Movies (Kurt’s Bloody Suicide).

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Sam Cohen’s post-Apollo Sunshine solo project, Yellowbirds, returns as a four-member band with the release of Songs from the Vanished Frontier.

Since the release of his 2011 Yellowbirds debut The Color, Sam Cohen has added drummer Brian Kantor, vocalist/bassist Annie Nero, and her multi-instrumentalist husband Josh Kaufman. Their brand of psych-pop combines vibes that Cohen describes as “…psychedelic, but less aggressive.”

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It’s held only every other summer, so try and make it this year. We know this weekend is super-crowded, what with Bushwick Open Studios, and beer, plus beekeeping and chicken-tending, and whatever else ya’ll are up to, but try and make this!

Trinity Lutheran Church in Astoria / Long Island City
3118 37th Street, Astoria, New York 11103

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[portfolio_slideshow id=23956]Seasick Mama performs Friday, May 24th at Glasslands Gallery

I met up with 27-year-old Marial Maher, better known as Seasick Mama, to talk about her debut EP Dead Like Money, a few days before her upcoming gig at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg. We sat down at Variety Cafe on Graham Avenue to get her take on Brooklyn, music, and her life as an artist.

Marial, a visual arts grad, told me about how she spent her Cinco de Mayo birthday in the Dominican Republic, shooting a music video. “I thought doing this music video was going to be a small production, maybe me and four more people. But I showed up and was like: holy shit! There were about fifty people on the team, all there to work for me. I was blown away.”

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