Francois K will bring Deep Space to Brooklyn's Dekalb Market starting on July 4th for the first edition of a new series, Mission.
Deep Space is well-known on New York's clubbing landscape as Manhattan club Cielo's Monday night staple, and as one of the city's most eclectic parties. Now in its ninth year, Deep Space been focusing more and more on bass music artists, something that's reflected in the Mission series. The first night will feature Francois K himself alongside Philadelphia's King Britt, Brooklyn producer and Planet Mu signee FaltyDL, and "dub poet" Infinity.
We chatted with Francois K via e-mail to discuss the new party as well as how Deep Space is changing.How have the bookings changed over the past few years in terms of style? You've been booking some more dubstep-related artists lately, how do they fit into the Deep Space aesthetic?
There is no question that over the course of nine years since our party started, there have been some very significant changes in music out there. Starting around 2006 we became aware of this new sound out of the UK, and I quickly latched on to a number of key artists such as Digital Mystikz who played at Deep Space. While the initial reaction to this music was quite mixed, some people were swearing that they wouldn't come back if we kept playing "that agarbage," but they were a minority. Being in early on dubstep allowed us to develop relationships with some of these artists when no one else wanted to book them. Fast-forward five years, and suddenly this stuff is becoming widely popular all over.
For us it's not so much a matter of ever trying to cash in on trends, but rather that there is a very definite connection between the aesthetics of what Deep Space has always been about and some of the key elements that make dubstep so appealing. In a sense, dubstep is the logical extension of all those Jamaican dub records, the unpredictable child of dub, breakbeat and drum & bass. And it's evolving at an incredible speed! So for us it was always natural to go in that direction.
What made you want to bring the Deep Space franchise somewhere else, and why Brooklyn?
Our event producer Erica Ruben has been chomping at the bit for years to try and produce some outdoor festival centered around the same sort of vibe that we are doing every week, and this year everything has been auspicious and made it easy to start moving in this direction. The location, Dekalb Market, is new this year, and we were quite impressed with it. Brooklyn arguably has a much more sophisticated music crowd than what Manhattan has generally become, so we felt it was a great fit for our first year, something to build on and a concept that we can hopefully expand in the future.
The Mission #1 night lands on a Wednesday. What is it about weekday parties that appeals to you so much?
In this instance it just happens that the Wednesday is the 4th of July, and we feel that it's a perfect match for the sort of family-friendly, daytime outdoors event we wanted to put together. When it comes to our regular weekly events, and while we have nothing against the types of crowds that go out on weekends, it has always been our credo that holding our party on a Monday was allowing us to not have to deal with the type of loud party-time fist-pumping customers who may not have much interest in the subtleties of dub-tinged music, rather they just want to go out and have a good time. We figured that if they come on a Monday, they must know what they are in for, and this has helped us maintain a certain amount of artistic integrity in the music programming and vibe of the event for close to a decade; besides which we don't really have to worry about competing against anyone else.
You've booked King Britt and FaltyDL for the first edition; will the Mission bookings differ in style or genre from the usual Cielo Deep Space?
Not really, if you track back some of the names we feature it really runs the gamut and I would think this lineup is an extension of the open-minded music policy we have always championed on a weekly basis.