Producer and cultural critic Terre Thaemlitz has spent her career interrogating the irreconcilable contradictions concealed by the electronic music marketplace. Under his DJ Sprinkles alias, in 2008 she released the watershed album 120 Midtown Blues, a critique of the dominant narratives of house music from deep within the genre’s very bowels whose opening lines witheringly propose that “the House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here with us.” It would be generous to call the fintech bro infested Public Records an oasis; but while its outdoor Nursery space might seem an odd venue for an artist concerned with the historically queer sociomaterial contexts of his music, it does boast a robust sound system primed for subversion. At the same site in August of 2025—less than a year after Public Records hosted a night programmed by Israeli radio station ROVR—Sprinkles followed an extended edit of Ten City’s gorgeous “All Loved Out” with lengthy, unaccompanied playback of Jewish anti-Zionists Norman Finkelstein and Gabor Maté criticizing Israel’s daily crimes and ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. A sobering reminder that house music can hardly be considered a universal language while homes are being occupied and demolished, Sprinkles’ gesture cleared the dancefloor while also clearing the air. After those who stuck around as the music returned picked their jaws up off the floor, there was—for once—space to dance as well as an opportunity for discourse. —Adrian Rew

Deep house and Hindustani classical music are infrequently associated, yet they might be the two forms of music that most explicitly insist upon the specific time of day during which they are heard. Roger Sanchez’s classic 1991 After Hours EP features three mixes of “Waterfalls”—subtitled “3 a.m.,” “4 a.m.,” and “Daybreak”—each tailored to a progressive juncture in dancers’ states of consciousness and exhaustion. Likewise, for maximum effect, Hindustani ragas are intended to be performed during one of eight praharas, the Sanskrit term for the three-hour subdivisions of the day.

Both traditions inform the work of Max in the World & Kroba—the local duo of producer Maxwell Reid and saxophonist Zachary Koeber—who approach live performance with exceptional consideration for temporal set and setting. As part of a showcase for Reid’s Bliss Point label, they promise to draw from their excellent recent (and recently DJ Sprinkles-approved) Structures Of Feeling 1 EP for an improvised set running from 9 to 10 p.m. This falls at the beginning of the seventh prahara, often associated with deep, meditative devotion and inward reflection. Give in to the duo’s profound sub-bass grooves and patient modal reed phrasing and you just might forget you’re at Public Records. —Adrian Rew

A youthful encounter and subsequent friendship with Karen Brookman Bailey—widow of free improv pioneer Derek Bailey—proved formative for Joanne Robertson, whose ethereal, melancholic songs are rooted in improvised expression. While approaching composition via improvisation is hardly uncommon, Robertson is among the rare musicians successful at holding the twin poles in suspension. The gossamer threads of her gorgeous, amorphous airs depart from the slipstream of memory as effortlessly as they first penetrate. Lyrically, she thrives in obfuscation, lassoing emotion in the moments before it has been calcified by clear articulation and repetition. Although her music is undeniably steeped in UK folk, these ephemeral qualities might seem at odds with the intergenerational oral transmission that is the folk tradition’s hallmark. Nevertheless, while touring as part of Dean Blunt in 2014, Robertson invited Loren Connors—another painter-guitarist adept at conjuring forth meandering idiomatic melodies—to open their Webster Hall show in an event that now feels like a passing of the baton among a chosen kin of outsiders. Tuesday’s bill at Pioneer Works skews more pop, but it would be remiss of even the most dyed-in-the-wool folkies and uncompromising avant-gardists to deprive themselves of an opportunity to hear a major voice still reaching her prime. —Adrian Rew

Sarah Cohen’s wetdogg project released one of last year’s standout debut LPs in pssssssp…, a collection of instant earworm music wedding stuttered downtempo bedroom pop to the lysergic electro favored by her native Detroit’s fellow eccentrics Drexciya and Carlos Souffront. Whereas club music has always sought some kind of rapture through identification with—and surrender to—the technology it assimilates, wetdogg acknowledges twenty-first century surveillance and control while turning away from it, instead choosing intimacy and imperfection without resorting to the retro genre revivalism endemic to her generation. A recent wetdogg radio session effervesces with the mantra “turn my wi-fi off / turn my swag on,” and an insert for pssssssp… containing a wetdogg manifesto of sorts suggests, “I don’t want an infinite scroll / I want an infinite stroll.” On March 20th, Cohen takes the dogg for a walk, promising mostly new material for her New York debut as part of a night organized by Lifesavers at evergreen Bushwick techno watering hole Bossa Nova Civic Club. wetdogg plays live around 11:30 pm, but it’s worth sticking around for former Nowadays booker JADALAREIGN, one of few jocks who can pull off playing steamy XXX deep house. —Adrian Rew