Everyday we're channeling: Objekt b2b Skee Mask at the Ruins

Objekt and Skee Mask take Knockdown Center back to the 90s on a rainy Saturday evening

Oct 02, 2024

How did the word “channel” come to be overloaded with so many meanings? Just off the top of my head, as a noun, it can refer to a length of water, a unit of broadcast television, or any number of forms of connecting two things. Here however, I am primarily interested in its usage as a verb, which per Oxford, may refer to the action of directing something towards a particular goal or object, but in the context of a person, means to “serve as a medium for (a spirit).”

I chose my outfit for the afternoon while on the tail end of a luxurious wine hangover courtesy of the wine lunch we’d had with our friend M, who works as a sommelier. Because I was operating on barely any sleep after staying late at Nowadays, the hangover began from the moment we left our seats. But the flip side is that due in part to the quality of the wines consumed, it passed almost as quickly as it came. We had parted ways with M after our meal to get ready for the party and planned to reunite at our place in about 2 hours. My wife and I spent most of that time napping on the living room sofa while softly rinsing Oasis’ Definitely Maybe on the kitchen Sonos.

Upon waking up, I feel restored and ready to meet the rest of the day. I made some tea, brushed my teeth, and checked Instagram to see if Knockdown Center had decided to move this thing inside on account of the persistent rain and whipping winds, which only seemed to worsen as the day wore on. Eventually, our other friend B arrives at our door. He is a lurker in some NYC raver Discord server, which has boots on the ground investigating the matter. The report is that the DJ remains outside, but the music is being simulcast into the Studio—which is the smaller house music stage within the larger Basement club space situated in the literal basement of the Knockdown Center. Whatever the solution ended up being, we weren’t eager to stand around in the rain waiting to find out. We can see the locally-based opening act some other time.

Oh, Knockdown Center, how I loathe your strict door searches, surly security, and overall corporate-feeling style of operation. And yet, you have been host to some of my best rave experiences in New York—including the yearly T4T Luv NRG gatherings. I attribute this to a combination of factors of which the sound is a big part. Upstairs and outside is a massive, site-specific L-Acoustics array, whose logo I recognize from some of the best festivals I’ve attended in Europe and seen videos of on Instagram. Downstairs, it’s all Funktion One (same as Berghain and Sustain Release), which is not my favorite sound profile, but gets the job done consistently well. That said, I am never really sure who to blame when the levels aren’t quite right, which is often. It seems like the more experienced DJs have ways of EQing things into the zone on their own, but more often than not, the decibel meter app on my phone reads at about 95-97 decibels (dB), which is fine for a bar, but not loud enough to discourage talking on the dance floor. More importantly, that is the volume where wearing earplugs feels too quiet, yet leaving them out risks hearing damage. That’s why most dance music clubs try to keep things at around 102 dB, which is too loud to talk over, but loud enough to overcome hearing protection by just the right amount.1

The other thing that makes this space special, and also often unbearable, is that it serves as an estuarine, where the freshwater rivulets comprising the city’s various rave scenes mix with the vast ocean of those who cosplay as ravers to be seen alongside the normies attracted by big names like Four Tet, Honey Dijon, Jeff Mills, Floating Points, etc. By now, Objekt is now probably too big of a name for a smaller club like Nowadays—or Basement—but not yet big enough to sell the 3000 tickets needed to fill the entire Knockdown Center. So he gets booked outdoors in the Ruins, which has about half the capacity.

With the exception of the aforementioned annual T4T Luv NRG pride party, which sells out early to the heads who know, it’s hard to say what the mix of the crowd will be for any given event until you arrive. I keep this in mind as I get dressed and opt for raver drag: a black Homme Plissé tank, black washed straight leg jeans, and a pair of vintage gray, black, and blue New Balance sneakers from the 90s. Looking the part, but not enough to stand out.

M arrives at our place right as Oasis ends and we share our tea and continue lounging for a bit, enjoying the album and each other’s company. The rain continues to fall outside so we are in no rush. Eventually, it’s confirmed that the event is staying outdoors regardless of the forecast, which precipitates some outfit adjustments.

I add my black nylon Prada bucket hat—the one with the extended brim, chin strap, and zippered triangular pouch on the back from the SS22 runway show—to keep my head dry in case the rain worsens and tuck a pair of wraparound cycling glasses with blue-mirror lenses on top. Incognito no more.

Now fully dressed and antsy to leave, I don a navy, waxed cotton duster to protect against the weather and summon a Wait-and-Save Lyft, but even with the discount, surge pricing is sitting at about 50% higher than normal. But when Navpriet rolls up in the white Chevy Equinox, we are pleased to learn that she is worth every penny. Hot 97 on the radio, guru talisman on the dash, it’s the perfect place to come up as we make our way through traffic, bopping along to “Nice for What” (volume up) which transitions seamlessly into “Nasty Girl” by Tinashe, a hot remix of which opened Moxie’s return to her NTS slot a couple of weeks ago.

As we step out of the car around 6:30 PM, the rain has all but stopped, never to return for the rest of the evening but for the occasional sprinkle. Despite my extensive preparations, security consists only of a quick wave of the metal detector wand accompanied by an off-color joke asking after the number of grenades I’m carrying. It was then that I knew this would be a good party, a hunch confirmed as B and I turned the corner and came face to face with a rave in full swing.

Despite the weather, it felt like the whole crowd was locked in as Skee Mask was thrashing behind the decks, whipping himself and the whole damp audience—especially the 20 or so dancers in the very front—into collective delirium with track after track of hard, groovy techno and electro bangers. He was channeling his inner demons to make it so that the partygoers could no longer tell the difference between wetness caused by the rain and their sweat and he appeared to be succeeding. It was a beautiful sight to behold and I was eager to get into the mix.

I grab an ice-cold Japanese beer at the bar to help kick what remained of my lunch hangover as the rest of our crew convenes around me. Everyone who gets a sip ends up going to buy their own as I’m left to admire the weatherproofing treatment, which consists of black PVC tarps, loosely wrapped and gaffed over all sides of the DJ booth to protect the electronics, billowing slightly with the breeze. You would never guess that this was the best way to protect thousands of dollars of sensitive electronics but it turned out to be just enough for the circumstances.

The sound is ok from where we are, albeit too quiet, and I am standing in a puddle on the gravel. I survey the group about going further into the crowd and they’re all game. I tie my jacket on the damp security fence, as many others have done, and begin bouncing my way towards the middle. Based on how things were shaping up, I was pretty sure that would be the last time I saw it until the end of the last song.

Standing on dry concrete, almost directly in front of the right speaker with my earplugs in, I am still finding it hard to lock in. I opened my decibel meter app and it reads about 95 dBA. The worst volume level. I take my earplugs back out and am greeted by the sound of chatter all around me. I turn around and, to my surprise, greet H, who looks fresh as a daisy after chopping off his once-unruly mane of chest-length, wiry brown hair. Slightly ahead of us is the group of die-hards leaving it all on the floor. I aspire to their energy but it’s just not here for me yet. Nor can it be until this sound situation improves. Fortunately, the sun sets around 6:50 PM these days and as soon as dusk takes hold and the lights get brighter, the music gets louder in equal proportion. This is more felt than heard as the bass begins to shake my organs in the familiar and comforting way that only good speakers are capable of doing. Earplugs back in.

Now I’m ready, but the others are happy with their current lot, so I set off alone across the crowd to my rave home, at the front left in front of the speakers. Like at most parties, among the 20 or so dancers currently doing the most, there’s a clear divide between the majority in the middle—beautiful people, moving unencumbered by karmic baggage, exorcising what demons remain through dance—and those at the front left—the demons themselves who are expressing their truest selves and dancing as if they are the music because they are. This is their home and they are happy to share with anyone who enters, but only those who match their freak can stay. Not because they’ll kick you out, but at some point, unless you’re one of them, you probably get turned off by watching a stranger with neon green pigtails wagging their pierced tongue in your general direction as they slither their body, casting spells with their hands in your general direction as their eyes stare not at you, but through you to whatever is on the other side of this world. I say “them” as if I am not one of them, but I think in my heart of hearts, these are my people. So I will use the first-person plural to refer to us from here on out. Those in the front right are just there to see what happens.

At the front left, we feast on each other’s freak and share party favors freely. I feel my energy building as doppelgängers start appearing all over the place. Some of them are real though. Like the speaker demon from last Sunday morning during Identified Patient and Djrum’s sets at Nowadays. She’s totally in the zone, eyes closed, directly in front of the speaker, physically here, but mentally surfing the astral plane. When I tap her to say hi later on, her face alights and we embrace as old friends, even though neither of us learned each other’s name and didn’t bother to ask this time either.

I’m fully here now, but I had drifted away from the left and more towards the middle, grooving among the trad hotties who were doing their own thing. At one point, a tall and muscular man appears along the fence at the front and pulls the attention of one of the dancers. They get to talking and they keep on talking. I shoot occasional glances in their direction over the next ten minutes or so and each successive glance reveals a more subdued scene than the one preceding it. The dancers around them were becoming visibly agitated, dancing with less intensity and throwing glares in their direction. Finally, I spot another woman just fuming at this guy from just a few feet away but he and his non-dancing partner remain blissfully unaware, so, upon remembering that I am actually 6’2”—albeit only 150 lbs—I decide to say something.

Dancing my way into the middle, I tap his shoulder and say, “Hey man, take a look around,” gesturing at the dancers behind him and to either side, “and match this vibe, or else please take this convo elsewhere.” He looked a bit shocked but seemed to take this advice at face value. However, his partner in chat took much offense, yelling “Hey fuck you motherfucker!” as I danced back over to the left. Looking back, I saw that he had decided to start dancing his face off rather than leave. I came back for a second just to affirm his decision, which he took with a smile and a hand to the heart. I return the gesture as I back away.

For the next hour or so, breaks notwithstanding, I dance at the border of front left and the middle among the myriad other ravers in various states of losing and finding themselves in the frenetic energy of the pit. Skee Mask is once again doing Skee Mask things. He pulls every trick he’s rehearsed (and maybe a few he hasn’t) out of the bag. Around 7:30, which is when Objekt is supposed to appear, he cuts the music for just one beat like he’s Eminem in “Lose It” to see if anyone notices, and, of course, everyone does. It was as if everyone in the crowd took a collective gasp but before we could exhale, it was over even quicker than it began.

Soon after, Objekt appears out of the fog wearing some kind of blocky-striped, black-and-white, oversized cotton sweater with baggy sleeves like a wizard’s robes, his unruly mullet looking like it’s about to leave his head and take on a life of its own like a Tribble from Star Trek. The last time I saw him was when he was just another guest on the main floor at Berghain during a Friday night Reef party in the spring of 2023. At the time, his mullet was a long way away from his bald-head days, but still a far cry from the mane he now possessed.2 I couldn’t wait to hear what tricks he had hiding up those sleeves because, to be honest, it was hard to imagine following up on what Skee Mask had been throwing down for the last two hours.

As a headliner, what do you do if your opener is shining so brightly that he might be on the verge of conjuring a second sun in the sky? The only possible answer was to go B2B, which was not part of the bill as originally marketed but had been announced ahead of time on Objekt’s Instagram stories. This was unusual. Now having witnessed what Skee Mask was up to, I imagine they had a conversation about it ahead of time that went something like this:

Skee Mask: Hey man, I am going to absolutely murder this crowd and there will be nothing left for you by the time I am done with them and there’s nothing you can stop me.

Objekt: Sounds tight. Let’s do it together.

End of discussion.

And thus was conceived a plan for mutually assured destruction in a world currently swirling with all too many literal interpretations of this doctrine. But for this party, in this setting, it was the only conceivable path forward. Never mind that it was meant to go from 3 PM to 10:30 PM and that many of the attendees probably had plans and tickets to attend other parties afterward. This was not their problem.

Objekt spent maybe the first 15 minutes or so of the B2B theatrically futzing around with cables and plugging in gear from behind the black tarp, out of view of the audience, which confused me because usually this stuff is done by techs, well in advance of the performance. Unless he was preparing a live set of some sort? But he wasn’t. I guess we will never know. In any case, his mere presence was motivation enough for Skee Mask to kick it up a notch, which would have been difficult to imagine minutes ago. This crowd was as ready for Objekt as it could possibly be, but he paid us no attention, continuing to futz with his cables. Then he left for a bit.

When Objekt finally returned with headphones in hand, we were in a full-on frenzy brought on by Skee Mask’s relentless concatenation of breakbeats and searing acid house bangers, crashing violently into each other, channeling the very best of what I imagine the 90s rave scene had to offer. These are the vinyl-only treasures that exist only on Discogs for $100+ per single and in the form of YouTube rips, where the comments are full of nostalgic Gen Xers recounting the magic they experienced once upon a time in a warehouse on the outskirts of town, but never since. At moments, it felt like we had fully gone back in time and were dancing in a different era.

This tracks completely with my understanding of Objekt as a DJ and musician, which is that he is both a brilliant student of 90s rave music and a masterful troll. Although I’d heard his 2016 breakout single “Theme from Q” many times before, he didn’t come to my attention until 2019, when at Primavera Sound, I saw him play a tight DJ set in a converted parking garage cum club, followed by a live set on one of the performance stages. During both sets, he dropped a track that lives rent-free in my head to this day.

It started with a generic-sounding breakbeat, followed by a swelling siren sound, which is joined by an even higher-pitched siren. As both sirens crescendo at about a minute in, the whole thing comes to a screeching halt with a vinyl spinback as a vocal sample interjects: “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute, drop an old school beat!” A video game sound effect cues up a comically aggressive jock jam-inspired two-chord alternating synth progression. The siren restarts and some more scratching happens in the backdrop for a few seconds when another vocal sample commands calmly without a trace of emotion: “Free your body and your mind.” Then the swirling bass synth hits and the siren returns louder than ever before cutting out yet again to make room for one final, heavily reverberated vocal sample. “Are you ready?!” echoes through the brief silence as it all comes crashing into the mix together with the breakbeat breaking harder than ever before, commanding your full attention to stop what you’re doing and start shaking your body. If the song I just described sounds like it is compiled from a veritable greatest hits of 90s rave music cliches and must be some kind of joke, that’s because it is.

It would be several months before it was finally released, and during this interim period, the track followed me throughout clubs from Berlin to Belgrade and back west to America. When it finally did become available, it was released on Bandcamp under the alias “DJ Bogdan” as “Love Inna Basement (Midnite XTC). The liner notes describe Bogdan as a club owner and DJ at the heart of the 90s Berlin rave scene whose smash hit, once lost to time, was rediscovered on a reel-to-reel tape and restored to its original glory for digital and vinyl release. In admirable commitment to the bit, Objekt still insists to this day that DJ Bogdan is real and that this was his song.

When Objekt started playing his first track in the B2B at around 7:40, I went to check in on my friends, having no idea where they might be. So I went up to the balcony and took in the sight of the entire crowd and snapped a quick picture. When I finally found them in the middle left, about 20 feet back from where I had been dancing this whole time, I was surprised and delighted to see that our numbers had swelled. Wifey, M, B, and H were now joined by J, D, and also K, all from our Sustain camp crew. “This is unbelievably good,” a phrase I both uttered and heard many times throughout the evening. I asked if anyone else wanted to join me up front and J and D decided to join. But when I get to the front and turn around, they’re not there. Oh well.

Keying back in on the music, there’s a distinct tension between the two DJs as Skee Mask continues to reach deep into his chest of ripped-vinyl treasures while Objekt counters with more contemporarily produced and mastered tracks that sound much cleaner while paying homage to that same era.

At one point, a young man with long, bleached-blonde hair and visible roots appears in front of me wearing knee-length cargo shorts and a light blue tank—the spitting image of Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi from Point Break. He begins doing what I can only describe as “rave dancing” by gyrating and flailing in opposite directions as if he’s trying to stomp a vat of grapes while picking new bunches off of the surrounding vines and also hula hooping, all at the same time. It is a whole vibe that I love and I try to match his energy for a bit, meeting his eyes and mirroring his moves for a while before resorting to verbally expressing my appreciation for his style. He asks how I know this other guy who he’s friends with whom I’d greeted earlier with a hug. I informed him that I just had a chance encounter with him last weekend at Nowadays and barely remembered his name. We talk briefly about our plans for the coming month and express mutual exhaustion at the incredible bounty of upcoming parties during this time when all we truly need is to rest at the end of a long festival season. In any case, we got back to dancing on our own and he eventually drifted his way over to the middle.

Speaking of Point Break, navigating a dance floor in America often feels a lot like managing a surf lineup, insofar as there’s a mutually enforced, unwritten, and constantly updating hierarchy of who gets to go where and with how much ease. If people recognize you as having been locked in at the front, you can glide by them with no resistance beyond a polite touch to the shoulder. By this point in the evening, people part for me before I even get to them. I conclude that the Prada hat has something to do with it. It may feel like a costume to me, but it is a distinctive part of the reality I am creating for those who perceive me wearing it. The clothes make the man and tonight, that man is a rave god who wears designer clothes and gets to come and go as he pleases to the front of the floor.

At around 9 PM, after multiple attempts, Objekt finally managed to banish Skee Mask from his perch at the B2B for the last and final time—about half an hour past his originally scheduled exit. The last 90 minutes of the evening started in ecstasy and ended in a blur as the music shifted away from the melodic electro, acid house, and breakbeat territory we’d been exploring in the B2B and into the deep-cut rhythmic DnB and dubstep zone where Shazam is of no use. That, and my lack of sleep from the night before, was finally catching up with me, blurring the lines between intoxication and exhaustion. At one point, he cuts the beat as menacing laser sounds and electric crash cymbals fill the floor, accompanied by violent attacking strobes as if we all of a sudden found ourselves amid a sci-fi war movie set. Every time I looked at the booth, however, Objekt was completely calm and collected, eyes locked on the mixer while dancing only subtly from side to side.

At some point near the end, when the crowd was beginning to thin out, B and M came up to join me and were floored by what a difference 15 feet could make in the level of energy one experiences. M asked why he hadn’t come up earlier, to which I could only remind him that he was invited on several occasions. There’s always next time.

By the end of the set, we had reached 170BPM and I had left it all on the floor. I vaguely remember participating in a round of applause, which was received by only the slightest smile of acknowledgment on the part of Objekt. Then he disappeared, leaving us to grapple with what remained of our minds and bodies as we gathered our coats and bags off of the security fencing. We, the locked-in said our thanks to each other, made the requisite exchanges of follows, and hugged it out amongst ourselves.

My wife, friends, and I found each other and made our way towards the exits with heavy limbs, tired necks, and the swift encouragement of venue security. As we walked, I reflected on what we’d just witnessed. The music was truly excellent, but that alone does not a rave make. Everywhere I looked in the pit, I saw bleached blond hair, vintage Oakleys, cargo pants, motocross jerseys, stomping boots, industrial jewelry, skintight mesh tops of every shade and color… While I didn’t clock any pukka shell necklaces, I bet there were some to be found had I looked more closely. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who put on a little raver costume for this party.

You’ve seen the camcorder footage on YouTube and read the comments. You’ve heard the music, perhaps even in a club. Perhaps like me, you have felt nostalgic for this once-thriving 90s rave scene you never had the chance to participate in. Maybe it makes you sad to think about this bygone era because you think its time has passed and that it’s gone from this Earth. Fear not, dear reader. Every day we wake up and consciously or not, step into a reality we create for ourselves and each other. That reality can be anything we want it to be and it often starts with finding the right fit and striking a pose until it feels natural. That raves can exist at all is proof that when enough of us have the same idea and congregate in the same place at the same time under the right circumstances, we can collectively channel any vibe we want into existence. It’s a tremendous power and privilege we all share as humans. Let’s not let it go to waste.

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