It’s late on a recent night out in Brooklyn, and I’m at an after-party in a large, empty space on Jefferson Avenue. The dance floor begins to fill up around six A.M. People snort drugs off their office keys and dance like it’s midnight under a shimmering disco ball. A man wearing a papal mitre smiles at me, his eyeliner a mess of smudged kohl. “What time does this end?,” I ask a man in a cowboy hat. “Who knows?” he says with a shrug. It would keep going until midday.
The party was organized by Aftermoth, a secretive “creative collective,” as they call themselves on Instagram, that throws events across the city. If you had to pinpoint the beating heart of New York nightlife right now, Aftermoth, and other traveling party collectives, would be it.
Some of Aftermoth’s parties start early and end at normal hours; others start and end late. Some are produced and marketed in advance on their Instagram, while others are last-minute, underground affairs promoted mostly through word of mouth. Tickets go for around $20 to $60 and sell out quickly.
The jump from venue to venue works a lot like Studio 54’s door policy used to, except it’s through natural selection: if you want to party, you come; if not, you won’t even know where to look.
“When friends visit New York, they’re always asking me where to go out,” says Sasha Peeters, 26. “I tell them it changes every time.”
The jump from venue to venue works a lot like Studio 54’s door policy used to, except it’s through natural selection: if you want to party, you come; if not, you won’t even know where to look.
The elusiveness, the feeling of being constantly onto the next … it makes sense that young party-goers would seek out this sort of thing in New York, a city whose nightlife is a subject so popular that the minute a new venue opens, social media is all over it. Then comes the requisite New York Times or New York magazine profile, and any remnants of cool disappear completely.
We’ve reached a point in which you have to stay up until 12 A.M. to make a restaurant reservation two weeks out, a time when nothing happens unless you’ve posted on Instagram about it. Traveling parties are a reaction to all of that.
“Nightclubs are about money,” says a 22-year-old D.J. who goes by the alias “Skinny M.,” “while these parties are all about music.” Gouranga is another one of New York’s transient-party organizers, and the brainchild of Bryan Ferry’s son Isaac, who started the project with friends almost 10 years ago.
Since then, every month or so, the group takes over a Manhattan venue, fits it with streamers and disco balls, and sells tickets to 500 or so friends. Last month, at Gouranga’s House of X takeover at the Public Hotel, descendants of Pablo Picasso and Lord Mountbatten partied with Sicilian princes and disco dancers in the basement.
Senza Fine, parties organized by D.J. Tennis and D.J. Carlita, draw a Fashion Week meets Burning Man crowd to venues across Manhattan and Brooklyn. (Carlita headlines for one of the festival’s biggest camps, Robot Heart.) Influencer Rosa Crespo and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels are among the attendees.
“It was [Carlita’s] dream to create a brand to bring a really sophisticated crowd together,” one of the Senza Fine co-founders, Ceren Arslan, explains. “We have individuals who are top-notch in their fields, from architecture to Web3 technology to other D.J.’s partying with us until the sunrise.”
Matte Black’s productions are on a larger scale. “We do such a wide range,” co-founder Brett Kincaid says, “from full-on electro-pop rock bands to D.J.’s all over the world, to 10,000-person music festivals on Governors Island, to raves in Mexico City.” The latest event, at the Knockdown Center, an art space in Queens, saw headlining D.J.’s such as Peggy Gou and Heron Preston playing in cavernous rooms with red-and-blue lighting and video installations by artists Iván Navarro and Jacolby Satterwhite.
But the itinerant New York party pioneer is ReSolute co-founder Nektarios Ioannidis, whose crew has operated within the city’s underground scene since the mid-2000s. Venues include precarious rooftops, abandoned oil rigs, and lofts in Two Bridges, and start time is often five A.M. The crowd is a mix of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and following them through the weekend is a challenge for the brave.
Two weeks ago, a 48-hour party hosted by ReSolute at Wyckoff Avenue in Bushwick went from sundown on Friday to sundown on Sunday. Attendees smoked cigarettes sprinkled with a layer of cocaine.
“It’s a constant evolution,” Ioannidis told MixMag. “Every three weekends [it’s] a completely different space. From a loft, to a basement … to a synagogue, to a church, to a roof, to a boat, to a garden—you name it.”
In some cases, tickets just about cover costs, and organizers run the parties in tandem with their day jobs. Other collectives, like Matte Black, are full-time, profit-making businesses.
Two weeks ago, a 48-hour party went from sundown on Friday to sundown on Sunday. Attendees smoked cigarettes sprinkled with a layer of cocaine.
The parties evoke the days of Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South, the 60s artists’ hangout where Jack Whitten shared gin-and-tonics with John Chamberlain. They’re spontaneous and inclusive—principles that club culture was born from but seems to have since done away with entirely.
“I feel like New York nightlife has just gotten pretty segregated,” says Kincaid. “If you want to listen to dance music, that’s a specific environment. If not, you go to a fancy club with horrible music and have a martini.”
Bottle service—starting in the mid-90s as a way to keep up with rising real-estate prices in New York—marked the beginning of the end of club culture in the city. Today’s downtown clubs, like the Box and the Fleur Room (which, according to Guest of a Guest, are where the “cool kids” go), serve bottles of Dom Pérignon with sparklers to rich finance guys and girls lured in by seedy promoters.
Even at “artsier” clubs, such as Gospel on Lafayette Street, exorbitantly priced tables mean that your chances of meeting anyone in a creative industry are low.
The current “It spot,” a stomping ground for the likes of actor Ansel Elgort and models Alexa Chung and Selah Marley, is the Nines, which Elle called “the sexiest bar in New York City.” The piano bar, opened by Jon Neidich above his nightclub, Acme, is decked out with red velvet interiors and serves potatoes topped with caviar, Caspian-style. Reservations are close to impossible to come by, and a single potato costs $95. By one A.M., the girls with Chanel candy bags have already gone home.
“Everyone just sits around and stares at what other people are doing,” says Jade Alexandre, 25. “Watch this become a tourist trap within six months.”
“You have to move venues,” says Skinny M., “otherwise it ends up with everyone just listening to shitty music, judging each other, and going home by two.” The city’s real nightlife has morphed into something you can’t google.
“Who says Studio 54 is dead?,” Peeters says. “Maybe you just need to know where to look.”
Elena Clavarino is an Associate Editor for AIR MAIL
