- Located directly in a basement across the street from Sound-Bar – one of the Chicago’s most formidable dance clubs – Spy Bar is a small nightclub that offers clubbers a more understated approach to their weekend club experience. Pure Future used to throw parties at Sound-Bar a little while back, but now they’ve switched gears to team with Spy Bar on Friday nights, offering clubbers a more intimate atmosphere to their large-scale Saturday night events that used to happen across the street. It’s proven to be a huge success, and a glance at the roster from past months will reveal such names as Nic Fanciulli, Danny Howells, James Zabiela, and MSTRKRFT to name a few.
This past Friday was Jimmy Van M’s turn to grace the decks in Spy Bar’s basement. His Bedrock compilation [2001] was praised for being one of the most forward thinking and masterfully engineered progressive compilations to date, and with the recent release of his second compilation on the famous ‘Balance’ label, I had made it my utmost duty to go along and pay my respects.
I arrived to find Chicago native Jay Prasad was already warming up, playing funky house with click elements. There wasn’t much of a crowd present, and even when Jimmy Van M took over at around 1:30, the club was still quite sparse. It was a very cold night in Chicago, so I’m guessing the chill fended off a good chunk of the potential crowd.
Van M opened with a solid deep groove that lifted to make way for atmosphere and melody. His set seemed to interweave melody and deep spacey elements with more drawn-out and darker sounds, for the most part sticking to 4/4 with heavy basslines that rolled nicely. I was impressed with the way JVM was able to change direction in his set with apparent effortlessness: His transitions were masterful, making it difficult to even guess at where one record ended and another began.
There couldn’t have been more than 150 people in the club at any one time, but nonetheless the vibe was great and everyone was dancing. People were congregating around the front of the stage and there was enough room for everyone to dance. It almost felt as though Jimmy Van M was hosting a private party for a limited amount of lucky guests.
Towards the latter stages of the evening a large fight broke out on the dancefloor, involving what seemed like ten or fifteen people. It wasn’t contained straight away and people were swinging arms and fists in all directions. Once the fight was finally controlled the dancefloor had thinned substantially. Nonetheless, props go to JVM because he maintained his focus and kept the party moving forward by playing great music for the small number of remaining fans.