It’s a Saturday night in November on the ragged northern edge of Brooklyn, past where row houses give way to auto body shops and storage warehouses, and where they in turn give way to a sewage treatment plant, a lumberyard, an empty lot strewn with scrap metal. A ghost town after the plants close for the day, there are no streetlights and the city’s sidewalks are ground down to dirt and sand. A young woman meanders by on her bicycle, lost.

            “Hey,” she shouts to two passersby. “Do you guys know where the Todd P show is?” They point in the direction they’re going, and she pedals past their outstretched fingers. “See you there!”

            Todd P is Todd Patrick, but no one uses anything but Todd P, and everyone who knows anything about punk, psych-punk, avant-noise, art-pop, or any other kind of music that screams, slashes, and distorts and is too much rock to make into the Goings on About Town section of the New Yorker knows Todd P. His “Todd P NYC” email newsletter goes out to over 10,000 people, and two years ago the Village Voice awarded him the title of Best Thrower of No-Bullshit Far Flung Indie Rock Shows in its annual “Best of NYC” issue for his unique ability to fill abandoned warehouses, Greenpoint dive bars and waterfront wharves with sweaty music nerds.

            There are, in fact, two Todd P shows on that November night, and Todd is a model of steady industriousness. The show the bicyclist sped off to is at Uncle Paulie’s, a former bus shelter that—with some tarp and poured concrete—became a breakfast and lunch diner and that closes afternoons when the workmen go home. Headlining that night is Black Dice, a power-punk art-noise trio who contacted Todd on short notice before heading out on a South American tour.  They usually play places like the Bowery Ballroom or Irving Plaza, much larger venues in downtown Manhattan, but wanted the no-hassle, short-notice-type space that only Todd can provide.

            The other Todd P show that night is in the basement of an old industrial space on the Williamsburg waterfront called Glasslands Gallery, and it’s the record release party for Your Job Will Kill You, by the indie power-pop trio Grey Does Matter. Todd spends about an hour at Uncle Paulie’s, setting up speakers and plugging in wires and turntables before getting in the van he rented for the night and speeding through the streets of Brooklyn toward the second show. The seat next to the driver’s, the only other one in the van, is stacked with 12-can packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Todd’s worried that the Black Dice concert will mean that Grey Does Matter will be playing just for the door staff at Glasslands, so he added the beer as a giveaway. On the way Todd stops to pick up Jason Racine, the former drummer of !!!, who’s a friend from his days in Portland, Ore., in the late ’90s.  Todd got his start as a concert promoter there with a tiny club called 17 Nautical Miles, a converted Laundromat famous for bringing people of all ages to the outskirts of town to hear the best live music in town. Todd, now 31, calls it his, “late, defunct, little shithole I ran during some alcohol-soaked years in my early 20s.”

            A half-dozen people are already setting up at Glasslands or lying on some of the makeshift risers that form the back of the tiny gallery, and Todd goes immediately to work. All the people there are working for him in one way or another, but he hardly speaks to them, keeping his head lowered while he goes about unpacking, screwing in, testing levels. One of the mics is messed up, but he twiddles with the soundboard until it is good enough.  When all is good, or good enough, Todd gets back in the van and hurtles across town again to finish with the Black Dice set up. He stops only to pick up last minute essentials like candles and Christmas lights to put around Uncle Paulie’s. “I’m really into Christmas lights,” Todd says.