It’s a tall task to try and compete with St. Fratty’s Day, but the organizers of B-Side’s Boiler Room night were not deterred. Featuring five DJs, both budding and full-fledged, the night was anything but smooth and nothing less than enthralling. While the party’s stated theme attempts to embody the hedonist and brash environment of Berlin nightclubs, the sets stood belligerently against adherence to any single genre and were rich with creative experimentation and play.
It was a slow start to the evening, marred by a plethora of technical issues but to a near-empty room, Justin Wong and Gia Caudillo debuted their DJ personas: DJ Leche and DJ Glenn K, respectively. Wearing a black T-shirt reading “virgin,” apt for a career premiere, Wong paid tribute to the oft-neglected Latin part of his heritage. While playing music from the sexually empowered subgenre of reggaeton, neoperreo, he could be seen by those trickling in dancing and giggling with the crowd from across the booth. He looked collected and prepared and his amateur status would likely surprise anyone.
The night was young, so you could give Wong a pass for the music not being ear-splittingly loud yet. But luckily, around 9:30 p.m., partygoers found themselves attempting to dance on the Oscar Wilde co-op’s defiantly non-rotary stripper pole — a clear sign that things were beginning to pick up.
Caudillo took the stage to a crowd that was beginning to fill with punks, chain smokers and dancers with sweaty palms wielding incandescent jello shots. Going by DJ Glenn K (short for Killer), she shares a name and love of jazz with Glenn Miller. Having previously cut her teeth on KALX, she appeared confident as she spun hypnotically looping techno dance tracks, fighting the urge to go full avant garde.
The producer and DJ Yash Gupta, also known as Yash!, marked the midway point of the show and the foray into professional DJ territory. Above all else Yash! worships at the altar of originality, and his background as producer gives him the unique opportunity to play his own original music at sets like this. Filled with glitchy electronic-based, hyper-pop influences he quickly switched from song to song to keep his crowd engaged. He did reserve the rare moment to slow things down though, emphasizing his belief that sometimes you just have to stand and take in the music.
DJ hotnerd did no such thing however. Hyped through and through, Jeff Lin first sought out DJing to rework tracks from prevalent DJs such as A.G. Cook and Arca, layering the music in the way he thought it should sound. As such, he stands 10 toes down that anyone can become a DJ with 30 minutes of YouTube videos. That night he jumped and danced around the booth, his fingers perpetually tied to the knobs on his controller, making it look like that very contact is the only thing tethering him to the ground.
The most experienced of the bunch, Fantine Mpacko Priso was adorned with the nom de plume Fantiflex in high school for her reputation as, admittedly, “such a stoner.” It was also around this time that she started going to raves in the woods, tunnels and the catacombs and met her two best friends. By age 16, they had formed the collective UFO Recordz and were organizing and playing events all around Paris. Not originally planning on doing anything revolutionary, the three of them have since grown UFO into a crusade for more affordable and inclusive rave spaces. European techno and Afropop influences characterized her set, which demonstrated a level of mastery that kept the crowd pumped even as they stumbled out the door past midnight.
Sonically overwhelming in the best way possible, the event marked the start and continuation of many promising DJ careers. And although there was a disappointing lack of adherence to the “sloppy and sexy Berlin nightclub” theme, the results don’t lie — everyone went home drunk, safe and sufficiently danced-out.