Clubs

If you book it, they will come...

The team behind the techrotastic Minimoo parties is counting on a slew of top DJs to bring the crowds to the first ever Minitek fest.

By Bruce Tantum

Clockwise from top: Richie Hawtin, Heartthrob, Ambivalent and Magda

It was in last year’s Fall Preview issue that we bemoaned the lack of dance-music festivals in NYC, while hailing nightlife impresario Larry Tee’s attempt to rectify that situation by tossing the big Dance Music Invasion 2007 confab. “Dance music is as big as ever,” he said, “and the time is totally right for this.” But even the high-energy Mr. Tee couldn’t quite pull off the feat. The weeklong gala came and went with a whimper, and Dance Music Invasion 2008…well, there isn’t one.

But hope springs eternal, and this season—if all goes according to plan—the city will be treated to not one but two clubbing carnivals. First up is Made Event’s big Sunday School for Degenerates weekend, based on the Miami party of the same name (see this week’s Clubs section for more on that). The other, and perhaps more ambitious, is Minitek, a three-day, all-star techno hoedown slated to run September 12–14. The nighttime parties will be held in the massive Penn Plaza Pavilion; by day, Minitek takes place in the shadow of the Cyclone, in the large empty lot north of Astroland Park on Coney Island.

Minitek’s producers, Jenny Tan and Daniele Laudonio, are known to New York’s electronic-music community as the team behind Minimoo, the semisecret parties (rooftops, warehouses and Ping-Pong parlors are favored venues) that have been stoking the city’s techno fires for the past two years. “When I moved here in 2006,” Tan recalls, “I didn’t have any intention of doing parties; I was here to get my master’s degree in global fashion management at FIT.” A friend had told her that she’d be unhappy with the music in NYC, but Tan wasn’t buying: “I said, ‘Nah—it’s New York. I’m sure I’ll find something.’ And I remember thinking, Well, if it doesn’t exist, I’ll make it exist.”

It didn’t, and she did: The Minimoo nights are among the most anticipated on Gotham’s clubbing calendar. The party focuses on the minimal end of the techno spectrum (“No singing!” Tan stresses), with dozens of local and international artists playing at the 30-odd editions so far. That success has given Minitek the juice to score some of electronic dance music’s top talent, including the Mobilee label’s Pan-Pot, Spectral Sound’s Audion, Get Physical’s M.A.N.D.Y. and Heidi, and a huge chunk of the Minus label’s roster—Magda, Marco Carola, Ambivalent, Troy Pierce, Marc Houle and big gun Richie Hawtin. And that’s just a fraction of the schedule.

Magda, a onetime NYC resident now living in the techno Valhalla of Berlin, has high hopes that the Minitek posse can pull this off. “There’s all the trouble with permits and laws and just dealing with the city that you don’t get elsewhere,” she says, “so it’s cool that Jenny is attempting this. And really, it’s about time—when you think about a party like Warm Up that draws thousands every week, it seems like there are enough people to make this really good.”

Tan is aiming high, hoping for perhaps 8,000 revelers over the event’s three days, but it won’t be just music that lures those crowds. The festival will also feature something called “Innovation,” an exhibition of electronic-oriented art and technological doodads curated by Magnus Bischofberger and Jasmin Ruiz Blasco, the pair behind L.A.’s Catalog Records. And they know their audience, which will be more in the mood for dancing than for anything that stresses the cranium. “The work has to be immediately engaging,” Blasco explains. “It has to be things that are interactive, that are very tactile, and that you can easily play with in a very intuitive fashion.”

On the eve of such a massive undertaking, it’s natural that the Minitek crew has a few butterflies. “It’s only now, when I think about what we’re putting together, that I realize how crazy it actually is,” Tan says. “Every now and then I look at this lineup and go, Really? How did we do this? We’re taking baby steps, but at least we’re constructing roads that we won’t have to construct again when we do this in 2009.” It’s a path that, just maybe, will help lead NYC back to dance-music dominance.

Minitek runs Sept 12–14. For information and tickets go to minitekfestival.com.

NEXT: Long live the King! NYC's rulin' house-music label solidifies its reign with a 15th-anniversary celebration.»

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