By Harold Goldberg

When I first heard Shilpa Ray, the awesome Lower East Side musician who once worked the door at Pianos, I wanted to be a music critic again. I felt that because her music encapsulates and honors the deep musical history that’s happened downtown during the last 70 years.

Shilpa Ray’s blend of doo-wop and punk attitude is beautiful yet gritty. She creates the kind of song that not only washes over you like alcohol-infused, caffeine-rattled ocean waves, it shakes you up before spitting you up on your rough-sand beach. Back in your reality with the jackhammers and boisterous drunks looming outside, you want to listen again. You just want to dive in to dance in that tsunami of dirty martinis and lush life of downtown nightmares filled with rats and roaches. Because it’s honest and real and melodic and poetic.

Of her new record, NPR’s All Songs Considered said, “Door Girl captures New York nightlife in all its sordid, sweaty chaos and supplies caustic commentary on life in the unfeeling city.”  Need proof? Just listen to “Morning Terrors Nights Of Dread.

We’re proud to have Shilpa Ray on board to play at the New York Game Awards. In fact, each year we feature talented musicians who have some relation to the Lower East Side. Musicians to grace our stages from years past include Tom Clark, Handsome Dick Manitoba, the Main Squeeze Orchestra downtown mainstays.

And Shilpa’s music will fit nicely into a surprise we have for New York Game Awards attendees.

We can’t wait to listen and rock to Shilpa Ray when she sings her heart out on January 24th at the New York Game Awards. Get your tickets, which include our after party with Skyy Vodka, now!

Journalist/author Harold Goldberg is the Founder of the New York Videogame Critics Circle and the New York Game Awards.

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