For the fifth instalment of CENTER BOOTH’s second series, Brooklyn techno darling Concrete Husband extracts the communally felt frustration with modern society’s various ills and distills them into a purgative blend of fury and release.

The artist born Carlos Aguilar is a conservatory trained musician and composer whose credits include touring with Eartheater (as a flutist), scoring Dion Lee’s Shanghai Fashion Week show and providing the flute music for the A24 Ari Aster film Beau Is Afraid. He only turned to DJing and techno production during the pandemic, but five years later he became one of the most beloved figures in the New York scene; a BASEMENT and Bossa Nova Civic Club fixture and regular booking at forward-thinking parties such as MERGE and OOZE. In the same period, he’s also managed to put out a steady stream of atypical, highly refined productions, culminating in the release of his debut experimental/techno album Piel last year.

We're thrilled to host the multi-talented Aguilar at CENTER BOOTH, where a snippet from a James Baldwin speech about Western greed sets the tone for the full mind-and-body cleanse that follows. Early on, an excerpt from an ambient score that Aguilar composed for a friend’s short horror film reflects the unease currently felt by so many of us, an emotion sustained throughout the set as Aguilar oscillates between confronting our shared anxieties and providing intense somatic and cerebral respite. Tones are dissonant, melodies are off-kilter and the energy is unrelentingly dark and oppressive, qualities that direct the listener inwards to achieve deep, holistic catharsis. Strap in for a set that plays out like a psychological thriller, where narrative ebbs and flows are heightened by a delicious, knife’s-edge tension and the promise of a visceral payoff.