In Brooklyn, Dweller Festival: a utopia for Black DJs – The Washington Post

Dweller Festival, a series of lectures, performances and parties centered around Black house and techno music, celebrated its fifth year in New York.
NEW YORK — If you’ve never been to a rave before, it can be hard to understand exactly how music and the body can become one. This feeling is increasingly rare in an era of cellphone videos and the constant threat of ending up in the background of someone’s TikTok. But what I’ve learned is that if you give yourself to the music, the music will give back.
Two weekends ago, I left Basement, the Hellmouth-like venue on the lower level of New York’s Knockdown Center, a little after 7 a.m. I was making my exit from “The Portal,” as the organizers of Dweller Festival, which celebrated its fifth year, call their series of parties, lectures and performances. Over five days in Brooklyn and Queens, 82 DJs and performers took over eight venues for almost 6,000 listeners, students and ravers. One party, at a nightclub called Nowadays, began at 11 p.m. on Saturday and continued, nonstop, until the following Monday morning.
At a lecture last year for Harvard’s “A Black History of Electronic Dance Music” speaker series, Dweller co-organizer, Ryan C. Clarke, attempted to draw a direct line from the very roots of “Black music as a West African tradition” to the ways that we commune with one another on a dance floor in 2024. Techno, he explained, has had a tenuous position within the Black musical tradition, which makes a festival like Dweller even more important.
But this is a very heady explanation of an experience that is felt with your body, your ears, your heart. So I asked photographer Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. to go into the night (and stay out into early, early morning) and explore the festival. This is what he saw:
“Dweller reminds me of the capacity of nightlife to reflect a full emotional spectrum,” Brown told me.
“When photographing [other parties], they’re so often about desire and lust, that a lot of the time, I find myself gravitating toward images of romantic intimacy. And for a moment, I found myself, at least subconsciously, seeking that at Dweller,” Brown told me about his experience photographing the festival.
“But then I realized this is a series of events about fraternity, fellowship and friendship — not lust in the same way. So, from there, I focused on images of people in groups, and explored the intimacy they expressed between each other. There were also a lot of moments of introspection. A lot of people come to Dweller alone, so I was also drawn to those instances of self-possession.”
“Rave spaces used to be so controlled by whiteness,” said DJ Suzi Analog, photographed below. “And it’s so important to have a space like Dweller at a time when there are very few, if any, Black-owned electronic dance venues in the United States. And there are very few club owners who will let us do what we need to do for our communities.”
“Everyone needs to come witness something like Dweller to see this level of multifacetedness in Black experience,” DJ Suzi Analog continued. “As Black DJs — Black people — we’re often put in a box. We’re not just rap. We’re not just techno. We’re not even just house. We’re everything innovative because our Black existence, especially in North America, is rooted to the beginnings of all of these genres.”

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