DANCE LIKE
EVERYBODY’S WATCHING With its new record label and weekly dance party, Maison Fauna wants to hold down the middle of Durham’s growing but scattered electronic club-music scene BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com
UNRIVALED GROOVE Friday, March 6, 10 p.m., $10 The Fruit, Durham
DECIDUUS
Friday, March 13, 10 p.m., $10 The Fruit, Durham
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arah Damsky, who deejays and makes electronic music as Kir, deleted her Facebook page several years ago. She prefers to hear about events by word of mouth. “I sniff out people at coffee shops,” she says, laughing. “Anyone who smells like patchouli, I’m like, ‘What are you doing tonight?’” This sensibility is reflected in Fauna, an underground dance party that last popped up at The Fruit on February 8. It updates an old-school rave experience—to get in, you have to know the hosts, who’ll text you the location a couple of hours before it starts—with new-school Durham’s distinct art-and-magic vibe. Today Damsky is gathered with her three
Fauna cofounders at Manufactur, a creative agency on Ramseur Street. It’s a very Durham space, with high windows pouring creamy natural light onto exposed rafters, tall brick walls, and raw concrete floors. A new decal is affixed next to Manufactur’s on the glass door. It’s the logo of Maison Fauna, the Fauna party founders’ new record label, which they are launching in tandem with DECIDUUS, a new weekly party that will bring national house and techno DJs to The Fruit’s basement every Friday starting on March 13. Though all four principals stress their hive-minded collaboration, it’s expedient to meet them in pairs. First, there’s Damsky and Simon Briggs, art-school kids and hardware-heads who moved to Durham together after study-
Left to right: Sarah Damsky, Nick DeNitto, Joe Bell, and Simon Briggs at Maison Fauna PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
ing electronic music at the Art Institute of Chicago, and who deejay together as Kir & Swung. They’re a contrasting couple: She—short, short-haired, with expressive gestures—is Maison Fauna’s de facto mouthpiece, timepiece, art director, and UK garage zealot. He—tall, long-haired, all but silent, with a penetrating gaze—is the technical light-and-sound whiz who holds it down for ambient music. Then there’s Nick DeNitto and Joe Bell, who bring the deep music-industry background. Though not a couple, they, too, make a contrasting pair, with Bell’s manner as muted as DeNitto’s is extroverted. Born a day apart, DeNitto favors European techno, while Bell is a former rock musician who doesn’t shy away from booking bigtent trance music. But they share a certain club-kid polish, which you can glimpse in DeNitto’s fitted black T-shirt and thin gold chain, or the elegant way Bell crosses his legs and drapes his hands when he sits. It almost takes a flowchart to map the relationships of all the enterprises brewing in these bright, unfinished rooms. Manufactur is DeNitto’s thing, an agency he cofounded in Los Angeles, where it’s still headquartered. Ephemeral is Bell’s, a yearold effort to bring music-nerd-famous DJs to The Fruit; he books them through his event-production company, Morning Choir. But Fauna, Maison Fauna, and DECIDUUS are the group’s thing. OK, fine: DECIDUUS is technically a co-production of Morning Choir and Maison Fauna, but this is about to break our flow chart, and you get the gist: lots of brave little brands with fluid borders. What matters is that maison is French for house, which refers to both the music of choice and the ambition to build an ark for Durham’s gentle dance animals. “DECIDUUS” is a Latinization of deciduous, filling in the flora around the fauna to emphasize warmth, beauty, and invitingness in the organizational persona. To strengthen both their internal commitment and their pitch to partygoers, DeNitto and Bell went in on a world-class sound system, on par with—indeed, designed by the same guy as—those at clubs like DC10 in Ibiza and Fabrik in Madrid. “I play UK garage, which has super high highs and super low lows, and the mids are like, plink, a stab every 10 seconds,” KeepItINDY.com
March 4, 2020
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