GUNK Turns Three

On a windowsill at The Owl. Below a printout of Dwane the Rock Johnson telling Rubulad showgoers to “stay sweet.”  Next to an “Armed and Gelatinous” arcade game at Wonderville. These are just some of the places you may have encountered an artfully-printed publication listing indie music shows around the city. Over the past three years, GUNK has spread.

It may be free to grab a copy of GUNK at your local indie venue, but it’s far from free to design, print, and distribute. Last weekend, GUNK hosted a 12-hour-long show and fundraiser in celebration of its third year as the connective tissue of the NYC indie music scene. Attendees swarmed the colorful upper level of Secret Riso Club—buying raffle tickets for workshops, getting flash tattoos of flying birds, screenprinting their own shirts with a tasteful GUNK. Behind the frenzy loomed a thermometer documenting progress towards the fundraising goal of $12,000. Down a set of steps in the back, the basement hosted a revolving door of artists playing before a silver curtain that reflected a dim red halo around them, with an old television sporting a neon screensaver in the corner.

Since its inception in 2023, GUNK has served as a road map for New Yorkers to navigate the music scene, both physically and intellectually. GUNK features a gorgeous riso-printed magazine, publishing a local New York show calendar alongside critical writing. Though music criticism grounds much of this writing, the issues expand to press on vital topics that exceed melodies. GUNK founders Hannah Pruzinsky and Ceci Sturman articulated this seriousness directly: “We find it really important to publish writing about issues that matter in the community that are not just music: social issues, political activism, the genocide in Palestine. [GUNK] is multi-faceted.”

Pruzinsky and Sturman are long-time friends, musicians, and collaborators themselves, playing together in the trio Sister. in addition to running GUNK.  As artists, they listened to others in the music community lament the loss of the physical bi-weekly publication SHOWPAPER, which listed DIY all ages shows in the tristate area until 2015. GUNK was created to spackle that gap, enabling people to find shows again without having to sift through an algorithm.

As Pruzinsky and Sturman began GUNK, they reached out to those who created SHOWPAPER to build on the wisdom they’d garnered over the paper’s seven years of circulation. “They gave us do’s and don’ts. We just bought a printer and started printing in my bedroom,” Pruzinsky shared. When Pruzinsky and Sturman come up against an obstacle, their contacts from SHOWPAPER remain their first call. “We kind of struggled figuring out how to organize people. How do we get people engaged? How do we even figure out when people are available to collate?” In those moments, they’ll call up someone like Joe Ahearn, a former SHOWPAPER managing director, who will send over a suggestion based on what worked at SHOWPAPER — “and then we do that and the process is a hundred times better.”

As GUNK’s popularity grew, a copy fell into the hands of a different pair of friends. Tara Ridgedell and Gonzalo Guerrero are the co-owners of Secret Riso Club, an artist-run space & creative studio that serves as a resource for independent publishing, distribution, and much more. “Gonzalo came across GUNK at Honeymoon coffee shop when it was just one page folded, printed on Hannah’s laser printer,” Ridgedell told me. “We were excited about it because it spoke to so much of what we love about independent publishing.” Guerrero, too, is a musician, and showgoing had long been an important part of his and Ridgedell’s friendship. They emailed Pruzinsky and Sturman inquiring about a collaboration. Two and a half years later, Guerrero designs each issue of GUNK and Secret Riso Club prints every copy. The issues we held at the fundraiser, hosted in their space, were printed just behind the GUNK silk screens pasting ink on attendees’ shirts.