At an album release party Friday night at Cafe Nine, DJs from New Haven’s HEATSYNC all-vinyl collective dropped tracks from their new 4‑track techno dance EP Buddy City. The crowd pulsated as fog and humming beats pumped into the space. Every so often, a dancer would take over the floor for a moment, flowing alongside the distortion and sweet noise.
As DJ 7Ways played one of the original tracks from Buddy City, his voice floated over the crowd: “This record is for sale. And this is the first time a mic has ever been used at HEATSYNC. Goodbye.”
HEATSYNC, New Haven’s all-vinyl DJ group that grew from local music collective Neubody, has been spinning records and scrambling minds for the past two years, heating up New Haven’s 9 p.m.-to-midnight hours. They decorate New Haven’s downtown with flyers of their smiley-frowny-face logo and supplement the pounding music with video projections from in-house artist B Midy. The visuals at HEATSYNC maintain an element of the familiar along with the strange, taking the crowd to new places while staying unmistakably local; at one HEATSYNC past, the projection was footage Midy took from the train to Hartford, cut with geometric shapes.
On Friday, the backdrop undulated with abstracted projections of live infrared footage from the crowd. It looked a bit like a heatmap, fitting right in with HEATSYNC’s mysterious, intimate party style.
The HEATSYNC dance party Friday night might have drawn some of the customary loyal crowd, but the occasion was a new one. The Buddy City release marked the start of HEATSYNC’s growth from fun night out to independent record label.
DJ Jentlemen, one of the DJs on Buddy City, gazed at New Haven’s night sky outside Cafe Nine as she described how specific the format of the new vinyl is to the dance world. Because it’s just four tracks, she explained, the grooves are deeper and it plays louder. In other words, it’s “meant for the club.”
She has been making electronic music for seven years, but this was her first time releasing it on vinyl. She did it in community, with fellow HEATSYNC DJs 7Ways, Townwide Tyler, and Antoni Maiovvi on a 200-copy limited-release vinyl weaving acid, house, and dub into a snapshot of one of HEATSYNC’s classic New Haven techno nights.
Some members of the outdoor gaggle at Cafe Nine were in line to get into the party. Others were taking smoke breaks, sipping their drinks at the few small tables by the wall, or just passing through. It wasn’t always clear which category any individual belonged to. When John Hatch, aspiring DJ going by the moniker Mental AF, noticed friend Varg Iseldbjörn lingering, he asked if Iseldbjörn was performing in some way that night; Hatch had noticed him playing guitar earlier. Iseldbjörn replied that it was “just with some bozos, nothing special.” He sounded husky enough for Hatch to ask, “Hey, is your voice fucked up or something?” Iseldbjörn leaned with one foot resting on Cafe Nine’s exterior, describing the two respiratory illnesses and 15 years of smoking he was recovering from. “I just gotta eat spicier shit and run more."
Hatch had come to the vinyl release party after hearing about it on local community radio station WPKN, where radio host Brendan Toller interviewed HEATSYNC’s larger collective Neubody earlier this week. Iseldbjörn’s mission for the night was less clear. Hatch asked if he was staying or going, and when met with silence, added, “It’s not a quiz.” Iseldbjörn responded through action, already walking toward his next stop as he called out over his shoulder, “‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ is what you’re supposed to say!” Ravers and late arrivers waiting to get in the venue would encounter Iseldbjörn here and there over the course of the night, but he never went inside.
Aliyah Efotte, a longtime HEATSYNC fan, took a break outside the venue to catch her breath. One of her first dance nights in New Haven was at HEATSYNC, and here she was finally dancing to HEATSYNC’s own creations. She called the new EP groovy, and said she was a fan.
The EP was not the only thing to celebrate Friday night; the DJ booth itself was new. Cafe Nine installed it this past December, opening up the space to more dancing and eye-level audience interactions. DJ Panzón, Connecticut sweetheart who moved to North Carolina and was visiting for the weekend, thought back to nights he spent spinning records on Cafe Nine’s corner stage. Being up high, he said, “feels a little funny. I’m not like, a rockstar.”
Efotte liked that the stage had become an elevated dance platform instead for the night. It reminded her of the New York rave scene, where you can opt in and out of different sections of the space for a different vibe.
Hermanson, along with fellow partygoers Brianna Mitchell and Dove Hellman, came to Cafe Nine on a whim. “We were watching a movie tonight and said, ‘You know what? We want to dance,’” Mitchell explained. Hermanson and Mitchell had met for the first time at Cafe Nine’s goth night on Friday the 13th; in Hermanson’s words, Mitchell was his “midnight maiden.” HEATSYNC brought a different energy than goth night, and Mitchell played Pokémon and danced amidst the gyrating crowd.
One outside break-taker, going by just the first name Posey, described the night primarily as “foggy.” So foggy it felt like laser tag. So foggy, in fact, that she immediately lost one of the people she was with, Fabian Menges, and had to retrieve him from the thick of the dance scene. Posey said she and Menges were both scientists and thought they knew how things worked. But the fog Friday night was beyond their logic. It was, in Posey’s words, “Fog Against the Machine.” A friend next to her added, “And we are the machine.” Posey could not believe how quickly she lost Menges, deep in the clouds of blue mist. When asked if he wanted to be found, Menges laughed and thought a moment before nodding yes.
Neubody posts their updates on Instagram at @neu_body. Their next moves are to invite visiting guests and release new music under their own independent DJ projects.
