Via App Artist Bio

Dylan Scheer became Via App three years ago, when she was living in one of Boston’s longest-running DIY venues. The vinyl-sided, three-story home sits on a back street in a dense neighborhood where unlicensed basement shows were once common—at least up until a few years ago, before the latest wave of gentrification. She and her roommates would book local noise and leftfield techno acts, though bigger names would swing through for secret shows after playing less-cool venues like The House Of Blues. “They would come by after their show and play to, like, ten people,” she tells me, sipping a can of Modelo at a desk scattered with blinking samplers and synthesizers. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in August and we’re sitting in the bedroom-slash-studio of her brownstone duplex in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. “East Coast noise and basement-show scenes are kind of what I know.” 



In 2013, their shabby show space, with its exposed piping and graffiti-covered walls, was the target of a bizarre police campaign to squeeze unlicensed residential venues out of the area. “He messaged us and said that he was ‘looking for the pit.’ His avatar was a guy with a green mohawk, and then in MS Paint letters on the side it said, ‘What’s the point?'” A team of Boston cops had created an embarrassingly bad fake profile to locate and infiltrate one of the shows. “He said he was ‘pissing something wicked’ from all of the green beer he drank on Saint Patrick’s Day the day before.” When one of her roommates naively sent out the address, an indignant cop, under the guise of fire concerns, showed up at their door step threatening to stake out the house if the gig went forward.
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