We’re partnering with MoMA PS1’s iconic outdoor music series, Warm Up, for two special evenings featuring talks, film screenings, and the sounds and spirit of our festival.
Co-organized with MoMA PS1, the weekend centres on a landmark Wackies Showcase featuring Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes, founder of the legendary Bronx reggae label Wackies, alongside Mark Ernestus, founding member of Basic Channel, with vocalists Claudette “Lovejoy” Brown and Wayne Jarrett, for the opening of Warm Up 2026 on July 24.

Join us for a rare screening of Bullwackie in New York (1985; Dir. Christopher Coy), a documentary featuring interviews, performances, and fly-on-the-wall footage recorded in and around the White Plains Road studio of the reggae label Wackies, in the North Bronx, which highlights the artist community behind the independent label. After the film, founder Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes will be joined by singers Claudette “Lovejoy” Brown and Wayne Jarrett, and Basic Channel co-founder Mark Ernestus, in a conversation moderated by writer and tonal geologist Ryan C. Clarke.

This program follows the opening date of Warm Up 2026 at MoMA PS1 on July 24, featuring a Wackies showcase with Bullwackie, Ernestus, Lovejoy, and Jarrett. The live ensemble performance marks the 50th anniversary of both Wackies and MoMA PS1, and is organized in collaboration with experimental music platform Terraforma EXO.

Wackies is an independent record label founded in the Bronx in 1976 by Kingston-born Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes. The label’s take on dub and reggae during the era of rock and disco in New York was distinctive and idiosyncratic, with textually lo-fi productions emblematic of the Wackies aesthetic. A protégé of Prince Buster and a former engineer at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle label, Barnes’ touch can be felt across dozens of records including sides from Wayne Jarrett, Sugar Minott, Prince Douglas, Horace Andy, Love Joys, and fellow producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. Early releases through the mid 1980s were pressed in editions of 500-1000, and despite modest circulation had a strong influence on the music of Massive Attack and Rhythm & Sound.

Mark Ernestus is the founder of Hard Wax, Ndagga Rhythm Force, and one half of the pioneering duo behind Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound, and Maurizio. His nearly four-decade career traces an arc from techno’s birthplace in Detroit back to Berlin, where he established that nexus in 1989 with the founding of Hard Wax. As Basic Channel, Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald pioneered the genre known as dub techno, and through their eponymous label spearheaded the reissue of the Bronx-based Wackies label catalog, returning its long-out-of-print roots and dub recordings to circulation. Today, Mark leads Ndagga Rhythm Force — the latest chapter from one of modern electronic music’s most quietly influential figures.

Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of Mississippi. His work in the field of Expanded Earth Sciences is informed by his experience as an Oceanographer and Ethnomusicologist that proposes counter-architectures of sociality based on deltaic processes that build the land his home resides on. His writings and lectures have been published by e-flux, Rhizome, Triple Canopy, Terraforma, Harvard, Warp Records, and Dweller Electronics where he is a co-editor and curator.