I went to Brooklyn’s new immersive club and danced my heart out…
Editing Note: This was originally set to published in May 2023. Sorry for the delay!
The whole weekend it was raining in NYC. It was Friday night on the last weekend of April 2023. Dreary drudgery. But this shitty weather awakened a new sense of purpose in me and my friend: we will have a good time in spite of this rain. And the streets of New York City were bustling like usual. In my mind I was basking in the warm soft sunlight of Miami Beach. That’s the magic about NYC–it will become anything you want it to be but it is also always the same.
We forged ahead in the night as we got pelted with rain. We were on a mission to get to SILO, an East Williamsburg dance club that opened in February, the creation of NYC promoters Alex Neuhausen and Lilly Wolfson.
“We get it!” my friend shouted aimlessly at the gray glowing skies. I laughed and peeled soppy strands of hair away from my eyes. Our outer layers were slowly collecting rain droplets as if this was the last rain on earth. My platform white combat boots were really putting in work, plunging into puddles and rubbing at my ankles.
I looked up and saw the curved silhouette and blue glowing letters that I recognized from Google images. I cheer, “We made it!”
Built out of an old auto-garage hangar, SILO is a continuation of an underground rave called Secret Loft, which started in 2012. The capacity is 500.
Although just a few months old, SILO has already gotten much action–christening the dance floor with a secret Fred Again and Joy Anonymous pop-up on April 14, leaving unattended fans with a serious case of FOMO.
We step inside the already iconic spot. The long, hemisphere shaped space gave me the impression of being inside an endless snowglobe, with lasers and subwoofers in place of snow.
It was the Nervous Records Showcase at SILO. The bill included Bodysync (Ryan Hemsworth and Giraffage), sillygirlcarmen and jackLNDN. I previously did not know any of these artists but I knew that it would have a house music vibe because the show was filtered under “house music” in the dice app. I craved a good dance party sesh.
And BOY was I in for a good dance party sesh. I asked and SILO delivered. A lone disco ball stood guard above the congregation.
The crowd was intense, present, joyful, and polite. No toe-steppers or aggressive walkers in the house. There were people of many ages at the show. It felt inclusive and respectful.
One of SILO’s website FAQ answers solidified my suspicion that SILO is the absolute top-tier-best-kind of club around: “SILO is a space for people to dance, to hear music, and to express themselves. While you are here, we want you to feel safe, comfortable, and at home. We do not tolerate violence, harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or bigotry of any kind. We do not allow unwanted contact. This includes leering, staring, and cutting off someone else’s ability to move freely.”
SILO is only exclusive in the sense that only the people who seek out the PLUR vibes would ever go to an event like this. It’s exclusive only because not everyone is into house and techno music. It wasn’t the type of exclusive like the clubs with VIP tables and bottle service or anything like that. But it definitely felt like an exclusive, curated party.
The scaffolding around the stage and all the light mechanics were painted a shade of white to match the inside walls. The soft color scheme added an element of air to the club. It was a club in the clouds. It was whatever you wanted it to be.
The hazy fog was extremely well-controlled and this careful attunement produced an intriguing effect throughout the night: one moment I was floating alone on a soft blanket of haze, heads bobbing quietly somewhere below, and then suddenly, the fog was sucked away as if it was all in a dream and I was gently lowered back down to earth, falling into the sea of a rippin’ dance party. I became vaguely aware of my hands splashing around above me.
I felt unified with the audience – we were all spinning around in this globe of a club, on this globe of an earth, flying through space and time at ridiculous speeds.
It was like Frankie Knuckles, godfather of house music, once said, “There is a point in the evening…if you have been to any great party, you know when the whole room becomes one.”
The haze contributed to the airy element to the production, elevating the stage in a way, since the stage was not very elevated and to my vantage point the DJ booth was at floor level.
The low DJ booth gave the place an intimate underground feel, fusing the off-hand with the extraordinary.
The eerie, calm, hypnotic combination of lights, sounds, shapes and fog shifted and morphed, lifting us off our feet and urging us to dance even harder.
The feverish beat was the only constant. Everything else swam by us and was washed away in the serene, tepid surf: people, places, ideas, forgotten things, all lost to the dance floor.
At one point there was even a lone aerialist in a black-and-white checkered jumpsuit caught in ropes, slowly releasing herself down towards the DJ booth and then arduously climbing back up again, pulsing and paralyzed in her motions above the stage rig. These bare-bones acrobatics added an element of absurdity that somehow eased the tension.
“I don’t want it to feel like a club. I want people to forget where they are,” Wolfson told Thrillist.
Mission accomplished, honestly. It was like, am I on a rocketship orbiting a planet, about to land? Am I in a faraway cloud castle? Am I just on drugs?
There were bleacher-like steps just behind the doors to the dance floor. We sat at the bottom seats and talked about boys, self-confidence, and other musings as the music bumped behind us. We finished our conversation and stood up, stepping through the majestic, wavy doors, back onto the dance floor. Welcome to SILO.
