I arrived in Seattle last Wednesday evening after a rather long journey from Lisbon that featured a layover in Ponta Delgada in the Azores and a night at my sister’s in Brooklyn. It’s an eight hour time difference in total, which doesn’t sound like much more than the five hour difference in NYC but meant I was wide awake at 4am on Thursday morning. I spent that day doing touristy stuff (Pikes Market, Seattle Art Museum) and hanging out with Sharlese, who I’ve written about before (here and here) and who I warmed up for at Outra Cena back in November. En route from dinner to her place, where we had a bit of a DJ practice before Friday’s gig (she would be closing the night after me), we stopped by Pony, a gay bar where Sharlese runs a monthly night called Audiodrome that also broadcasts live on Intergalactic FM. From the outside the place genuinely looks like a bus stop, but you walk in the door to be greeted by disco lighting, pin-up hunks on the wall and cocks hanging from the ceiling. Audiodrome was scheduled for Saturday night, but sadly I wouldn’t be able to attend because I had to head down to San Francisco. I heard the party was fabulous.

Like I said, me and Sharlese were playing on Friday at a night called Research. Run by Nick and Eileen, the party is a bona fide DIY job, with little to no outward promotion (you request to join as a member in order to get a ticket) and, this time at least, taking place in an office building that during the day houses a holistic gut health clinic. Nick and Eileen spent several hours on Thursday and Friday taping up the doors and windows in the building, not just to prevent them from rattling (though that is something I truly appreciated while playing) but also to limit the damage done by the copious amounts of fog needed to disguise the fact the party was happening in an office. But I wouldn’t know about this until I arrived at the venue on Friday night.

During the day on Friday I met up with Bobby ‘nohup’, who soundtracked my post-shift epiphany at Honcho Campout last summer. They took me on a walk up to the top of a water tower in Volunteer Park, which affords a 360 view out over Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west, snowy mountains in the distance. We hit the park’s botanical greenhouse and then wandered along Millionaire’s Row before jetlag smacked me round the face again and I crashed into a long afternoon nap. This was a period I had allocated to some final playlist preparation, so when I woke up at 8pm I was a little freaked out about how little time I had left. From my outsider perspective, the musical vibe at Research was a bit of a black box. I had looked at the party’s list of previous guests and the connecting thread between Nick and Eileen’s choices seemed to be “good DJs” and nothing more specific. I listened to a couple of Nick’s own sets on soundcloud, including this one from the 2023 edition of The Lodge, a mini festival he helps run out of the city. It’s pretty heads-down driving club stuff until 38 mins in he drops ‘The Ultimate Warlord’, and in the final half an hour it really opens up. As soon as I heard that I started to feel a bit more grounded. The practice session with Sharlese the night before had also helped, as we vibed off each other’s choices and geeked out about Razormaid.