The event started out small and local, at a friend’s bar, where we would gather and play “weird” music and create generative visuals. From the beginning, Weird Nights had a characteristic friendly vibe to it, because we never had the intention of making it a commercial project, and just wanted an excuse to lay around on beanbags, hang out with friends, drink, smoke and listen to strange music. This remains to be the core of our aesthetic.
When the quarantine hit, our friends lost the bar, and we saw it as an opportunity to become mobile. First we did an online-stream event, and then an invite-only event with friends at a studio. I realised that I quite liked the nomadic format, and began experimenting with places and formats.
One of my favourite events we did, was a commemorative listening party to the late Dmitry Vasilyev, a music journalist who dedicated his life to collecting obscure experimental music. A friend bought a chunk of his vinyl collection, so we decided to share it with the public, by listening to the records. During the event, we set up a box of records, roughly organised by genre and allowed musicians to come up and blindly choose the record to play, based on their intuition and the cover of the vinyl. This ended up being a lot of fun for everyone involved.
We’ve also done a couple of collaborations with other promo teams, setting up two stages, one for dance music and the other our meditative music. However, we decided as a team that this wasn’t the best option to do, because having the other stage, took people out of the WN atmosphere and prevented them from fully getting into the meditative zone. Having experiences such as these, has helped us form our aesthetic and understand what our priorities are for our events, and I think the fact that we are relatively flexible in our approach has tremendously helped our success.
This spring, in March, we decided to launch our own tape label and released a VA compilation of tracks from artists who have previously played with us. We were happy with the results, received lots of positive feedback and would like to continue to experiment with this format.
The label launch party in the Bashmet Center, a neo-gothic mansion in downtown Moscow, was a very special event and it definitely set the bar and vector for development. In terms of organisation it was a very difficult event, but the return on it, in terms of audience engagement and reviews, was well worth it.
Currently, we are working on preparing new Weird Nights releases from local musicians and always welcome new faces and recommendations for interesting local talent.”
