Rayne Baron, the longtime party promoter who goes by the moniker Ladyfag, had lived in Greenpoint for over a decade and a half before she decided to take her annual, day-long music festival to her own backyard. In the time since, she has thrown ragers in East Village apartments, Fashion Week afterparties in Bushwick warehouses and, more prominently, an annual music festival called LadyLand, which had been taking place at the Brooklyn Mirage for almost as long as the East Williamsburg club has operated.
This year, however, the festival is going to take place on Friday, inside the somewhat recently-opened Under The K Bridge Park, which has slowly become a major venue for queer programming, like the Summer of Love concert series that’s being put on by the House of Yes.
“The park has these long pathways that continue along three separate zones,” she says, “all connected like a railroad apartment, which is very Greenpoint,” she says.
According to Ladyfag, she’s hoping that the move, outdoors and into a public park, will dramatically reinvent the festival she’s been putting on since 2018. “It’s a different vibe, and I think people will be able to feel that,” she says.
While she says the move out of the Mirage had taken her by surprise — she blames “capitalism” — the lineup had come together quickly. Since her festival’s very start, she had been trying to book the electroclash singer Peaches, of “Fuck the Pain Away” fame.
“I’m from Toronto and I saw her perform before she had her first album out, at a little theater, with just her and a little distortion pedal,” she remembers, adding in a clipped Canadian accent that Peaches is “the epitome of what LadyLand has always been about.”
Other notable newcomers to the festival include Rebecca Black, the singer who has been reinventing herself as a queer icon in the years since her teenage-era fame and Big Freedia, the New Orleans bounce singer whose sampled vocals animated the Beyonce hit “Break My Soul” last year. Honey Dijon, a Chicago DJ who was also another major collaborator from Renaissance, will close things off.
Tickets to LadyLand are available here.