Bowery Electric were a New York duo, Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener, formed in late 1993, first show in January 1994. They started as Kranky-style shoegaze and drone and steadily mutated into something else entirely: samplers, loops and deep dub bass under the guitars, landing on a trip-hop-inflected downtempo nobody else was quite making. The records are Bowery Electric (1995), Beat (1996, the landmark), the Vertigo remix album (1997) and Lushlife (2000), where 'Floating World' lives. In 2016 Pitchfork ranked that 1995 debut No. 36 on its list of the greatest shoegaze albums of all time, and Beat got a 20th-anniversary vinyl reissue on Kranky the same year, a record that essentially predicted a whole later lineage of beat-driven shoegaze. Lushlife was their last release as Bowery Electric.
From the notes for Episode 07 · fact-checked Oct 4, 2026.
