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Empty Vessel drops its anchor where 1st Street dead-ends into the Gowanus Canal. The boat has not always been parked there and with exposed wires at the helm, it is not going anywhere easily. A tugboat pulled the WWII rescue boat from the Bronx, where she was a washed-up abandoned houseboat, to the Gowanus Canal. A permanent place to dock has been hard to find because even water space in New York has astronomical rents.

The boat is barely visible from the street behind the overgrowth of foliage on the bank of the canal. The Empty Vessel's deck is covered with plywood and piles of old tires, which makes it look like more of a junk barge than artist's space. But inside the vessel looks like a rustic cabin with wooden planks patching the floor and walls. One of the current projects is tacking the rest of a rusted tin ceiling, salvaged from an old building in Chinatown, to the roof of the boat. Old patio chairs and benches line the edges of the room but many people sat on the floor as the space filled up.

Peter and The Wolf, Castanets, and Jana Hunter all played a minimal acoustic set with only one amp for a sparsely used electric guitar and bass. There was no microphone but people were quiet enough to hear them sing without one. The show was a leveling of the three artists because each performance was just a singer with their guitar and not representative of their very different albums.

JANA HUNTER


CASTANETS


PETER AND THE WOLF


Jana Hunter's singing has a range and fragility that was so clear and unfiltered without the microphone. Rarely do you hear someone with a pretty voice just sing, with no amplification or manipulation. Raymond Raposa or Castanets was the most adamant about sound quality in the room. He paced the entire length of the boat with his guitar singing to the front and back of the crowd. He even enlisted Red Hunter or Peter and The Wolf (no relation to Jana) to whistle and sing a few verses in the middle of the crowd when he was bound to the "stage" by the electric guitar. Red sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the crowd to play his tunes and did not budge the entire set. He said he was out to find the smartest town in America and could do it by asking each audience one important question. "Why do they call them Spaghetti Westerns?" After almost everyone in the room raised their hand with the answer, he said the people of Brooklyn needed to spend less time learning and more time shootin' stuff off fences. Or maybe fixin'-up old boats.

That whole music crew plans to tour the eastern seaboard in a boat, but sadly it was not present at the show because of necessary repairs.

UPCOMING AT EMPTY VESSEL PROJECT
This Friday August 25th
Oil Slick Skies and a concert with
Extra Life
Matt Baldwin
Moth
Zeke Healy
9pm, free, cash bar

More pics after the jump.