Recently there was a lot of talk of us leaving Eris Evolution, our weekly residency, where we transitioned No Return Post Punk Society from Pyramid after word of their initial closing and eventually created Club Nihil ( a 2 floor party) with the partnership of DJ Grave. And, for good reason, we WERE going to leave. No issue with the venue, of course, but the weekly workload was overwhelming particularly as some of us started working full time again (we began there before many of our jobs were back) and Grave was leaving.

However, we worked a deal out with management and No Return will be staying at Eris and will be returning, the original crew, every 3rd Friday of the month. Eris ownership will continue a Friday dark dance party every other week. We’re NOT associated with those events even though they also go under the “Club Nihil” name, however we hope they do well and we appreciate that they’re building off of the foundation that we helped lay at Eris over the past year.

November 18th will be our first day back and it will be No Cover all night, a shift from our usual $10 presale and $12 before midnight. There will still be nights with a cover charge, and newsletter subscribers will get discounts for those evenings, when we have live musical performances. Otherwise, the nights will be free. Upstairs on the main floor will be Goth Rock, Darkwave, Post-punk and live performances such as bands and burlesque. In the champagne lounge will be a rotating mix of our sister party Friday I’m in Love (who joined us at Eris pre-Club Nihil) which is a dark-electro/italo disco party, Mesh & Lace new wave/80s, and Techno Vault with Ian Ford depending on the night. It’s our wildcard room and where the after hours takes place. The bunker is where we have Industrial, EBM, Dark EDM, Industrial Rock, and the like.

We hope you’re not disappointed in us taking a bit of a step back as far as frequency but I can assure you, had I not worked this out the party would have crashed totally, it was simply too much to keep up with at the previous pace. But we feel like we’re at a good place and this will also give us time to guest DJ at other parties and venues.

As always, we look forward to seeing you on the dance floor soon!

Best,

Ryan Walker & the NRPPS team

The Pyramid Promoters: moments after we removed the last of our things from Pyramid’s basement.

It’s hard to write what hasn’t already been written, especially trying to consume into a short blog post what Pyramid Club has meant to us, to many of you, and to NYC’s counterculture in general. So instead I’ll take this brief time to offer it, and Q (also known as DJ TM8), a thank you for being our home since 2015.

No Return Post Punk Society before Pyramid was a happy hour dive bar party. We were residents at Arrow Bar (before it closed), Arlene’s Grocery (before they let go of all of their daytime DJs), and then made guest appearances at Ottos and other lower east side dives. A friend, and regular of our happy hour parties, was leaving the city and I had decided to throw her a surprise going away party at Pyramid Club. After the party Q offered me a regular spot. Scrambling for another DJ I brought on another of our regulars, who many of you now know as The Maldic!on (who had only DJed one set previously), and shortly after had Alex Von Nihil introduced to me.

And that’s how we became what we are now. If it weren’t for Pyramid, who knows where we’d be. But now it’s time to look towards the future.

Tomorrow we will be looking at a new venue that has taken on two of Pyramid’s upstairs 80s parties and apparently hosts a vast basement space. If it checks out I will meet with the owner next week and continue to plan. Things are difficult with covid restrictions being as they are but once things open up we plan to have a new venue in place. We know Pyramid Club, the place, may be gone, but the people and the spirit live on and we look forward to seeing you in the future.

Whew! So I wanted to check in our Blog since it’s been…wait, how many years since we kept up with this? Particularly with some updates on how you can keep up with our music during the “dark days of Covid”.

Firstly, we hope that you’re all doing all right, Covid aside, we know that this has been a particularly difficult year. Lots of our friends and neighbors suffering from depression and really just trying to do whatever can be done to stay productive and stay social while staying safe/compliant isn’t easy for anyone. So, again, we hope that you and your loved ones are hanging tough right now.

As I type this Pyramid Club has still not reopened and if we were to guess our expectations are that it will not open until some point in 2021, and if I were a betting man I would put $20 on April. But I’m not and I don’t have $20 to throw away right now so I’m just openly speculating. As an alternative my DJ partner, Janssen, has taken to Twitch (as have many of the nightclub DJs) and does virtual club nights with live chat and requests.

You can find and subscribe to him on Twitch @ Twitch.tv/Cityasylum or just searching City Asylum should bring his page up.

I’ve been working on trying to put together a live internet radio broadcast, a project that had MANY more moving parts than I had originally anticipated, but am pretty much set up to go. Our player can be found right on our website at noreturnpostpunksociety.com/radio

My hope is to do sort of a 9-5 broadcast monday through friday, or possibly 12-5, and one of those days I’ll make it a live set, the rest being premixes. It’s figuring out those little details, like “when will I be reliably available to do broadcasts?” Ultimately I’d like to have something set up that you all reliably know will be playing on a day to day basis whenever you’re in the mood. And as always it’s a mix of new, classic, and obscure stuff.

But, anyhow, that’s what we’ve been working on and where you’ll be able to hear and see us. Currently we’re preparing for a Halloween live stream on twitch.tv/cityasylum on Halloween at 10pm until 4am. We’ll have lights, fog, and blue tooth speakers. It’ll be our first time DJing together since back in March at the Pyramid Club so we’re jazzed for it.

Stay safe out there friends!

— Ryan

You know, for a while I really couldn't figure out what to do with this blog. I initially planned to do show updates, and maybe some self-glamorizing, but we already covered that in our newsletter, instagram, and elsewhere. So we sort of just let this part of our website collect dust. Then it hit me - let's recommend music! (and books)

It'll save you some time asking us what song we're playing, or what album, etc, and it's a good way to support the artists. Win/win. 

This album wins the award, perhaps, for 'most played song of the season' with their EXCELLENT electronic cover of Sister of Mercy's classic track, 'Dominion'. I'm sure there's some skepticism, and maybe some purists who are shaking their heads at the very notion, but for anyone that's heard it at our sets we've received nothing but endorsements. 

Information Society is a fascinating band. Their one big hit, "Pure Energy", would seem to have confined them to the 80s (and 'American Psycho' soundtrack) and even then many people assume that track is done by New Order. But they've continued putting out quality music, especially recently, and unlike bands that try to relive the glory they achieved 30 years ago they're still actively evolving. Their tracks span from spritely electronic to darker, almost cynical, entries. Their cover of Dominion lands somewhere in between. It's accessible enough for people who hear the name Sisters of Mercy and think they're an all-girl ensemble, maybe with a little Monica Richards touch (though they would have NO IDEA who she is), as it is faithful enough for Sisters' die hards to enjoy and appreciate as well.

The rest of the album is well-crafted as well and, in case you're looking for something different (or just looking for where that song comes from),  I feel good recommending it. 

Back when we were beginning, in the way way way beginning at a now defunct dive called 'Arrow Bar', doing Sunday happy hours, our post-punk was much different from standard-fare and what we're known for in Pyramid Club. In fact, since we had such a small following to start, we purposely strayed away from Goth Rock, EBM, Goth Industrial, and anything of the sort, feeling like "we can't compete with what's already out there. Let's instead be post-punk 'historians'." 
So we played things like Kleenex, Pylon, Wire (post-Pink Flag, though we haven't abandoned them), early New Model Army, Ludus, Lizzy Mercier, and, without fail, The Slits. So it was to our delight when Slits guitarist Viv released her auto-biography. 
Even if you don't care for the more post-scene aspects of the book, which I highly recommend, it still provides enough insight and juice to the burgeoning punk/post-punk scene in the late 70s when the Sex Pistols were finding their identity, Malcolm Mclaren's store 'Sex' was in its heyday, and scene stalwarts Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, and Billy Idol were kicking around with other outcasts in the Bromley Contingent. Often romanticized as lightening in a barrel of artistic change and a shift to a youth movement that re-routed the culture of music and style forever. 
Viv, being in the midst of that change, provides a very visual account and one that I think anyone 'underground', post-punk, or culturally curious would find worthwhile. The entire book is fascinating, though, and I feel comfortable recommending it, as I do their music and the music listed above. You may not hear this stuff around as much due to the way it would confuse a dance floor, but for any music aficionado (or someone just curious what our roots were when Game of Thrones sabotaged our time slot every week), you should definitely check it out.  

We would like to extend a gracious hello and welcome to both newcomers of No Return Post Punk Society and old friends who are visiting our new site for the first time! 

We decided to go on a bit of a summer hiatus, until Friday August 5th, in many ways to take time off to build a proper online presence and create a lasting brand. Like many events, of all kinds, we were largely co-dependent on Facebook to draw our crowds and get the word out. Facebook, however, has become increasingly muddy for promoters to navigate through. For a time, there was not only no limit to the number of people you could invite to your events but you could invite people that signed up to your Facebook group page directly. First, the latter option was disbanded and then strict and seemingly arbitrary limits were put on invitations to events themselves. 

So Facebook fan pages were the go to method but instead Facebook decided that no more than 16% of the people that liked your page will see your posts unless you pay money to "boost" them. Of course, this is money ON TOP of the money you often spend to promote the fan page to get likes in the first place!

If you are running events as an act of love and passion, like we and many like us are, as opposed to events focused on heavy returns on investment this form of promotion was quite simply not economically feasible. And frustrating. 

But, for those of you that spend most of your time on Facebook or enjoy our presence there, don't worry as we are not abandoning the platform. We will continue to manage the fan and group pages and still intend to create Facebook events (and we will link you to them both in our email newsletters and in our "upcoming events" section). So it'll be easy for you to still invite friends and get notifications to remind you when our events are coming up. This is just a little back story on how we arrived here and why the time off. 

What we have on the site I think is pretty self explanatory at the moment. You have an about us page, which offers you links to external sites like our artist's official site (if you would like to contact her), our venue's site, our mixcloud site, and our official email address. 

Our media and gallery page is for videos and pictures from our events that our lovely hostess, Roe, has filmed or photographed. Due to site limitations we cannot post EVERY picture from the events, so we will continue to use both the Facebook Fan and Group pages for this if you would like to find and/or tag yourselves. Also, if you have pictures or videos you took at our shows and would like to contribute them simply email us and we'll see what we can do. 

Upcoming events are, well, exactly that. Once we have the Facebook event page listed we'll link it in the upcoming events description so you can easily navigate to it.

This will serve as both a blog, for meandering posts like this one, and news like you'll find if you squint and read through my wordiness. Really it's just meant to be a way to connect with you and hopefully build a community to interact in. 

And finally, subscribe to our newsletter on our home page to keep up to date on all of our happenings and get drink discounts emailed directly to you. We don't spam and we don't share your email address with anyone. 

I think that about sums things up for now. Explore around and keep in touch. "We love our audience, we love our audience!" 

-- Ryan & the Nrpps Crew