Crisis Public Relations – a NYC-based band that’s playing the Ali Forney Benefit show co-hosted by AC this Friday, 1/30, at Baby’s All Right – provided us a list of a few of their favorite things … bringing back the good ‘ol, iconic roundup series we’ve been doing for years. CPR, according to its website, is: “a new New York-based firm consisting of a former Migos labelmate, a Nashville-to-Brooklyn transplant, a pseudonymous music critic, a food content creator, and two sister-poets.” The six-piece most recently released Life Rights EP on December 12, 2025. It’s some of the most intriguing experimental pop going around town, which you can be sure to hear at Friday’s gig.
To hold you over until Friday, the band shared with us a few of their favorite things to get to know them a little better. Check out their responses below:
1. Fort Tilden
This is where Crisis Public Relations is headquartered, as depicted on the cover of our EP. Be sure to stop by, no matter what the signs say! There may or may not be a youth soccer league game going on, but there will definitely be lights and sounds emanating from the office. That’s how you know we’re at work.
2. Omnichord
This Suzuki synthesizer from the 1980s is the glue that holds the CPR live sound together. You might have recently seen and heard one at Mayor Mamdani’s inauguration. Isa now has a station that includes Omnichord, a toy phone microphone, and bongos.
3. Tuna Salad
(The perfect working lunch) Crisis Public Relations includes the food content creator, Noah Tanen. Just this past weekend, most of us were at Noah’s apartment and made the best desk lunch of all time – tuna salad with homemade mayo, a radicchio and shallot salad, and onion tapenade, on a crusty baguette. Serve with Hal’s potato chips.
4. Recording on an iPhone
So much of Life Rights was recorded on the humble iPhone mic. It’s all about capturing the magic in the room. With this thing, Isa, our singer and producer, can get close quick. We’ve grown to love the distinct character of the iPhone mic sound. It’s intimate, overcompressed, and squashed – and we squeeze everything we can out of it.
5. Jet’s Pizza
We asked Noah to join the band at a meeting over this Detroit-style fast food pizzeria on Flatbush Avenue. We got pepperoni with the flavor-blasted crust with parmesan cheese, garlic, and whatever else was on there.
6. Air ducts
The piano in “You’ll Be Fine” was recorded in a brownstone that some of the band used to live in together, where CPR was started. We had a piano on the first floor, and then recorded the sound of the piano coming through the heating vent in Isa’s bedroom upstairs.
7. www.pianoadoption.com
The aforementioned piano was from pianoadoption.com. What a gift! Our little Baldwin came from a nice man in Jackson Heights, where he had inherited it from his parents. He did not play it, and so after splitting the moving costs with him, we got it to our place. When Isa brought a piano tuner in, it took him all day to tune it from 3 steps out. Inside was a record of every time it had been tuned – the last time was 1993.
Catch Crisis Public Relations this Friday Jan 30 for the Ali Forney Benefit @ Baby’s performing live with singer/songwriter/performer/DJ Sofia D’Angelo, cool kid experimental quartet pets, and BK-based sound artist and composer OHYUNG. More info here. See you there !