Dweller 2024

A selection of some personal key moments at Dweller that are testaments to the power of this festival, this music, these artists & these spaces: 

• Friday PM: an entire night dedicated to one of my favorite genres; witnessing my peers play alongside an originator & innovator of the sound. Feeling the inter-generational legacy of this music & this festival play out in real time. 
• Saturday AM: leave the club at 7:30am even though I don’t want to, but I’m too tired to carry on. A sense of tenderness and vulnerability overcomes the conversations that happen between the ending of the party and the ending of the after-party. As I find my Uber on Cooper Ave, I leave behind a handful of Black djs who continue to play music with & for one another, with full morning sunshine bursting through the dance floor windows.
• Saturday 5pm: mere hours later, I’m back on that same dance floor with many of the same people from the night before. We’re all here to listen to a person who has made some of the most significant contributions to the art of djing: Theo Parrish. Instead of speaking through the music though, this time he’ll be on the mic. 
• Sunday AM (1): Once we’ve briefly gone home in an attempt to replenish whatever wells might need it, or pursued these sounds and lessons elsewhere, we come back to that very dance floor yet again, my personal classroom this weekend and every weekend. This time our teacher speaks through the music, in the way he know him to do best. We hear echoes in the music of his words from the previous afternoon. Reverberations, themes & patterns, plot twists. The same characters appear but we’re also introduced to some new ones. The music runs the full gamut of emotions. We learn lessons for a lifetime.
• Sunday AM (2): And when we need a reprieve from being shoulder to shoulder in front of the stacks, we take a seat nearby and process these lessons together in real time. Pull at the threads, peel back the layers, thread the needles. We veer in all sorts of different directions, get lost sometimes, but always know we’ll be able to get back to where we started.
• Sunday PM: during a dance floor break in the office upstairs, the video of Aaron Bushnell’s final act appears online. Five of us gather to bear witness together. I was unable to keep my eyes fixed on the video for its duration, and looked away from it at several times. I nearly even asked for the video to be stopped, as it was more excruciating to witness than I could have ever anticipated. We’re all briefly left speechless. I feel tears coming on but tell myself to get it together because I know if they started there would be no stopping them anytime soon. Soon after I make my way back to the dance floor, and it’s Batu’s final song (Dozzy <3). I make my way to the front right for the first time of the of the entire party, there finally feels like enough space to do so, and I love to look at the dancers and witness the collective from the dj’s perspective. I’m struck as I notice nearly everyone within view has been moved to tears, or has their eyes closed. I remind myself that most probably don’t even know about Aaron Bushnell yet, and certainly none of them have seen the video yet. I consider all of the other reasons there are to cry or be so moved right now: so many instances of joy, pain & everything in between, that could be felt by any of us right now.

This is the power of dweller.

This the power of this music.

This is the power of these artists. 

This is the power of this community. 

This is the power of these spaces. 

This weekend, & every weekend.