_nevs is a Brooklyn-based audiovisual project founded in 2023 that reframes how electronic music is documented. Each Electronic Sky Portrait is a single locked-camera recording of an artist working alone in open air on Sky Stage, a private rooftop installation in East Williamsburg. There is no live audience, no club, no spectacle. The artist follows the logic of the music rather than the logic of the room.
Recordings are color corrected by the project's in-house colorist Evelyn Zhang and audio mastered, then distributed free through _nevs's YouTube channel (32,400 subscribers) and Instagram (7,800+ followers) to a global audience concentrated in NYC, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, and Tokyo. The archive contains 181 recordings to date.
The form refuses the visual conventions that have come to dominate electronic music documentation: multi-camera spectacle, crowd shots cued to emotional response, festival-circuit aesthetics. What replaces those conventions is a cinematographic discipline closer to structuralist film and durational portraiture than to concert documentation. The visual language draws on Warhol's Screen Tests, the durational landscape film of James Benning, and the formal rigor of Hollis Frampton, alongside the avant-garde lineage of electronic music itself (Varèse, Stockhausen, Xenakis) and the Black communal traditions of Detroit techno and Chicago house.
Electronic Sky Portraits (2026-2027) produces 24 new portraits across two seasons, introducing artist honoraria for the first time under a new grant-supported funding structure. The self-funded pilot phase produced 181 recordings without compensating artists; the fiscally sponsored program transitions the project to a sustainable mix of grant support, individual contributions, and continued founder investment. The program culminates in a Q4 2027 public event at a Brooklyn venue featuring live performances by participating artists, with selected portraits projected on cinema-scale screens. The archive remains permanently free after the program's formal end date.
The project's roster centers queer, trans, and Black artists alongside international artists from Mexico, Paraguay, and across Western and Eastern Europe. Editorial reception to date includes a December 2025 feature interview in KEYI Magazine (Berlin), situating _nevs within international underground electronic discourse.
Learn More: http://nevstv.com