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. This month when you are waiting for us to pick up at 212-477-5829, you can hear the found-sound genius of Efterklang, a Danish trio who just released their 4th Album last week. The song “Hollow Mountain” is so haunting you might find yourself calling back during off hours just to hear more. (song recommended by Laura Nicoll).