Tee Pee Records Brings The Heavy Underground Back To Brooklyn With Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous
Tee Pee Records started in New York City in 1993 and somehow still feels like the kind of label you would find by accident in the back room of a record shop, where the good stuff lives.
Heavy rock, psych, doom, garage, underground guitar music. Loud records with brains, records with weird sleeves, records made by people who clearly spent too much time thinking about amps, riffs and the outer limits.
That has always been the label’s thing. Not just heavy for the sake of it. Not just retro dress-up either. Tee Pee has always been good at finding bands with a real shape to them. Bands that can riff, yeah, but also drift, burn, swing, brood and occasionally sound like they might have been beamed in from a better basement.
Kenny Sehgal says it best: guitars, riffs, underrated players and bands that mean it. That is the point. The best Tee Pee records have mystery, but they also have feeling. You can hear the art in them, but you can also imagine the floor shaking. That is why the label’s early 2000s run, and its connection to the wider world of Roadburn, Desertfest and heavy psych culture, does not feel like some sealed-off old scene. It still works. It still moves.
Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous is that idea made loud and physical. Presented by Tee Pee Records and United Sounds NYC, the 2026 Brooklyn edition takes place May 23 and 24 across The Brooklyn Monarch, The Meadows and The Woodshop. There is also a May 22 pre-festival show at Sleepwalk NYC with Sphaéros Possession, White Hills and Qiujiang Levi Lu.
The line-up is a proper gathering: Pentagram, Eyehategod, The Obsessed, Dead Meadow, The Atomic Bitchwax, Electric Citizen, Sacri Monti, Al Qasar, Satan’s Satyrs, Sun Voyager, Worshipper, Carousel, Sphaéros Possession and more. In a city that has lost plenty of rooms but not its appetite for volume, Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous is not nostalgia. It’s proof that underground rock is still a living thing!
Tickets and more information are available at cosmicsonicfest.com.
“The hard rock underground scene here can feel a bit disjointed… my mantra is ‘the more the merrier.’”
Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you first got interested in underground music?
Kenny Sehgal: I grew up in the American Midwest and caught the tail end of independent AOR and DJ driven FM radio. I hated most 80s American metal, so I drifted into blues and album rock of the 60s and 70s. Underground music didn’t enter my awareness until college radio bands like early R.E.M., The Replacements, or whoever was playing live in 85 to 87 or so. I also made the drinking age grandfather clause, so I was in clubs legally ahead of my peers.
When you hear “Tee Pee Records” said aloud, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Guitars and riffs, and lots of underrated guitarists playing in bands that stay true to their visions. It’s underground music but with a large amount of feeling and art. And I don’t think of the bands as retro at all.
Kenny, what was your first actual contact with the label? Was it as a fan, a musician, a New York scene person, or did all those things overlap?
A buddy and I had another label, Rubric, that put out Woronzow releases like The Bevis Frond, Tony Hill, Green Pajamas, great albums which Nick from the Frond and his partners were championing. We also put out downtown stuff like Gogol Bordello and The Heroine Sheiks, and some roots artists. But I always loved heavy rock, and it seemed like there was more of it starting in the late 90s, some of it on Tee Pee, with which we merged.
Tee Pee started in 1993, and a lot of people connect the label with Sleep, High on Fire, Earthless, Graveyard, Witch, Nebula, The Atomic Bitchwax, that whole heavy psych and stoner rock family. When you look at that run, what still feels alive about it rather than nostalgic?
That run was mostly early to late 2000s, when we were merged and the scene was starting to cook. This is pre Roadburn and the like, so seeing the scene ferment at gatherings like Roadburn, Desertfests and so on, and seeing all those bands and the heads in one place didn’t feel nostalgic. Rather, it felt vibrant and still does. And now there are lots of bands such as Sacri Monti and Elder flying the flag, which get me excited as a fan.
What do people usually get wrong about the label?
That we, or any underground label, can simply break a band. The industry has shrunk, and the bands gotta hit the road.
Was there a record where you thought, “Okay, this is the sound of Tee Pee changing,” even if nobody noticed at the time?
Huh, let’s revisit this question in a few years!
What makes something feel like a Tee Pee release to you? Is it riffs, attitude, artwork, or something harder to name?
In a very general way, hard rock or psych that is not just all attitude, or heavy for the sake of being heavy, is what catches our ears. A little bit of mystery is attractive, and for some of the bands, smoking guitar solos complete the picture.
Kenny, you also play in Mirror Queen. Does being in a band make you more patient with bands, or less?
More sympathetic, for sure!
Tee Pee is a New York label, and now Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous is happening across a North Brooklyn block. Does the location feel like part of the point?
Absolutely. The hard rock underground scene here can feel a bit disjointed, and we lost the flagship club for heavy, Saint Vitus. My mantra is “the more the merrier,” so if we pull this off and, as expected, Desertfest NYC returns soon during autumn, and Vitus too, well then, now we’re talking.
In the early 2000s, Brooklyn was being talked about as this live music pressure cooker. Now it’s a very different city. What does it mean to put a heavy rock and psych festival there in 2026?
Fests like this have not been attempted here too often, and historically, NYC has never had a plethora of heavy rock clubs, usually one or two at a time. But I feel like there are more bands in this vein nowadays, so the timing feels right.
Are there still enough real rooms, real freaks and real lifers in New York to make something like this work?
We shall see! And of course, we’re hoping for out of towners to help fill out the crowd.
This has been a few years in the making. What kept it from happening earlier? What was the first band you knew had to be on it?
Our friend Dave passed away, so that took the spark out of our eyes regarding this for a while. And I didn’t really think that way about the ideal band. There are a few overseas bands that Americans need to see more. Maybe we’ll try that when the political climate and visa hassles change. This lineup has Pentagram, Eyehategod, The Obsessed, Dead Meadow, The Atomic Bitchwax, Sacri Monti, Electric Citizen, Al Qasar, Satan’s Satyrs, Sun Voyager, Worshipper, Carousel and a lot more.
Did you want the festival to tell the story of the label, or did that happen by accident once the names started filling in?
Didn’t have to go terribly far from the roster or people we know for this first one, so I guess it is a story of the label and the last twenty years or so.
Running an underground label now is different from running one in 1998, 2005 or 2015. What part has become easier, and what part has become stupidly harder?
Less sales and higher costs, natch!
Does streaming help this music, or does the real connection still happen through records, shirts, shows and word of mouth?
Streaming is helping by providing us with a small baseline operating income, but the real show is still on the road. Although it’s tougher out there too.
How do you sign a band now? Is it demos, friends tipping you off, seeing them live, Bandcamp rabbit holes, Instagram clips, all of it?
All of it, but more often a tip or old fashioned A&R, which is catching a band live and talking to them and their fans.
What record would you play for someone at 2am, after the festival ends?
Allmans, blues, maybe some jazz. Depends on if we’re catching a nightcap. In that case, also Lizzy, ha.
Could you also share some upcoming plans for the label beyond this exciting festival?
Hopefully, we’ll start planning the next one ASAP and building the roster up as always. I do feel like we’re in the mood to add slightly more psych and cool prog to the Tee Pee mix.
Klemen Breznikar
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