Listening to them is often intoxicating — which is why, in the last seven years, the group has developed quite an international avant-garde following. And yet, they are a very New York band. In jazz musicology, there is a vague construct known as “the New York sound”. Like all such fantasies, no one agrees on how to define it, but we know that it thrived in the 1970s and fused funk, jazz, and “primitive” world beats. Every LP conveyed the struggle played out between the rich history and traditions brought to New York by these musicians and the ghettoizing attitudes that viewed them as “primitive” settlers. It was a proto-disco sound, a proto-rap sound. It was the sound of the past and the future at the same time, and this is exactly the kind of science fiction rattled out in Gang Gang Dance’s music today.
     They bring the kind of turned-up lo-fi that churned out of Queens in the late ‘70s (back when Run D.M.C. and the Ramones were contemporaries) and flowed into New Wave, out of No Wave, and gelled into post-Pop.
     One signature of the New York sound was the clang of heavy reverb, and that is the defining feature of Gang Gang Dance’s music. But if the original New York sound brought the smooth melodies of Latin America and heralded the horizon of R&B, the new New York sound is an aural splinter — a kind of copy-and-paste cacophony that cries “go go go” even as everything falls to pieces, like a parody of fractured postmodern life in which everyone lives multiple identities: Art star. DJ. Fashion model. Old school. New school. It’s a frenetic existence in which creation is the only constant.
     As DeGraw says, “Staying busy with being creative is all I know how to do at this point. It has become my life and my life has become it. Even if I resigned myself to sitting on a beach all day every day, I would still subconsciously arrange whatever shells were lying next to me in the sand. I can’t escape it.”
     Just about any “cool kid” in New York who aspires to create, goes to art shows, and listens to music knows GGD, and the band is without a doubt experiencing what you might call a “moment”. When they aren’t playing together, they are DJing (for mayors, nonprofit benefits, museums, and hipsters), collaborating with other rising musicians, and helping to define the contemporary art scene.
     Earlier this year, Gang Gang Dance was included in the Whitney Biennial. The artists see very little separation between their music, art, and DJ work. Says DeGraw: “DJing is a good example of how one practice can sort of open itself up and bleed into other practices.”