To psych ourselves up for next month’s RAMP performance by Glass Ghost, we’re looping the eerie pop gem “Like A Diamond” from Glass Ghost’s record Idol Omen. Call PS122 at 212-477-5829 and select an extension to hear it or check out the video below. And don’t forget to grab your tickets for Glass Ghost’s show on March 28 and 29, 2014.
Here’s the whole hold music back story:
When I first became the IT guy at PS122 there were some real eccentricities in the way the 100+ year-old building was hooked up. Our phone and internet came in on a frail wire which stretched perilously from a building on East 10th Street across a wide courtyard, ending up in a a rusty metal box outside the downstairs theater. Snow and wind storms were cause for week-long outages. Inside the building there were nests of phone and ethernet cables stretching to the various homemade treehouses we called our offices.
I discovered my favorite IT oddity one day when I came across a dusty discman hooked up to the PBX phone switch via an 1/8th inch cord. There was no disc in in it but i surmised that this had been the method PS122 had used to play hold music for callers. I dropped in a Tiger Lillies CD, leftover from their show back in 1999, and when I called 212-477-5829 and dialed my own extension I could indeed hear the music from the cd combined with a strange metallic echo.
Now with our renovation underway at PS122 East Village we are working out of a satellite office in Brooklyn. Most of our IT is in the cloud but we still like to curate the hold music.
-Alex Reeves