John Digweed magicked for 11 hours at Stereo Montreal on his birthday

Stereo Montreal may be the best club in North America right now

Introduction to Digweed’s magical birthday room

To celebrate his birthday on the first of January each year, John Digweed has lately been in the habit of picking one of his favorite rooms in the world and playing a very long set there¹. To kick off 2025, Digweed played for 11 hours (4am to 3pm) at Stereo Montreal, lifting an already excellent room into the realm of magical dancefloor with his otherworldly thaumaturgy.

Highlights of Stereo include a loud but pristine soundsystem, a sprung wood floor, a music-savvy crowd with the stamina and vitamin supplements to dance all night long, and thoughtful policies that protect the vibe: no VIP sections, no alcohol sales, and no phones on the dancefloor.

Over the course of the night, Digweed likely played a couple hundred tracks, but I’ll highlight one here so that you can listen to it as you read on — the lyrics speak to the philosophy of both Digweed and Stereo Montreal.

"This room is a magic room, but it's really not about the room itself. It's about the people in the room. It's about the moments you share: the smiles, the looks, the music. It makes you feel like you're one thing. And it makes you want to live forever… And you think, "why can't we always live together like this?" --  Dino Anthony Lanni, Jarvis Cocker, Martin Paul Doorly

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A pornographic pitstop

We'd been dancing for over four hours when nature insisted on a water and restroom break. My body, accustomed to rhythmic movement, resisted the mechanical rigidity of walking. Walking made me feel alien, as if I were pretending to be human after hours of fluid undulations in the belly of my interstellar rave transport. I had to use the handrails to navigate the stairs down to stand in line for Stereo's restrooms.

I learned a few things while standing in line and people watching. I knew the couple that had gone into the toilet stall immediately ahead of me and to my right were fucking, because they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other while in line — kissing and pawing sensuously in ecstacy-fueled foreplay that wasn’t entirely uncalled for, this being the kind of place where people tend to let their inhibitions go.

A stall opened and they stopped mauling each other long enough to enter and lock the steel door behind them. Only a moment passed before the heels of his Nikes could be seen in the gap below the stall door, because he'd positioned his legs near the entrance of the stall in a wide-legged stance. Another short moment later his pants were bunched around his ankles. He was facing the toilet bowl and his partner, presumably, was bracing herself against the far wall. His heels could be seen lifting rhythmically. They made a wet little slap on the bathroom floor every time they came down.

A toilet at Stereo Montreal — another type of magic room | photo credit: SDB

I must admit to some doubt. A corollary to Schrödinger's famous thought experiment with the cat in a box says that if you seal two lustful adults in a toilet cubby and provide them with a bit of psychoactive substance, you can't really know if they really fucked unless you open the cubby, and I certainly wasn't enough of a scientist to do that. So there’s a chance he was simply dancing while peeing while his partner stood to the side and sniffed her house key clean. Stranger things have happened in those toilets, to be sure.

A different stall opened up and I slipped inside. During my multiple trips to the bathroom over my 11 well-hydrated hours inside Stereo, I’d seen couples and throuples in all gender configurations enter and leave the stalls together, these utilitarian concrete-and-stainless steel stalls apparently being the place where dancers came to do drugs and each other.

Surprisingly, the toilet was in good shape. Stereo’s dedicated and heroic janitorial staff keep the trash bins in the stalls emptied, the floors hosed down, and the soap dispensers filled. The seatless, prison-style toilets were of course completely wet every time I visited through the night, so anyone who needed to sit had to pop a hover squat, but the bathrooms never smelled nor overflowed with trash. You can tell a lot about a club from the state of the restrooms, and I start with this sketch to help illustrate that Stereo is a well cared-for, and well-maintained club where people are taken care of so that they can have a very good time.

In my internet research I’d encountered rumors of an easy drug trade in the restrooms, but no one approached me—perhaps deterred by my cop-like aviator shades and matching dad bod, or perhaps because the bounce in my step and smile on my face suggested I was already operating at optimum altitude for dancefloor bliss.

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Right. The dancefloor.

Leading this narrative with an account of the bathrooms is perverse when the real draw here is Stereo’s sprung wooden floor (there are actual springs beneath the floor!) surrounded by a four-point soundsystem that sounds so good, DJs sometimes take to reddit after they play there to talk about what a good time they had.

Wrote DJ Rinzen, "They call it a ‘temple of sound’ and I totally see why. You feel a special vibe just walking into the place. It feels sacred. There’s an air of magic as soon as you step up those stairs and see the room for the first time. The sound system is so good that it makes me a better DJ. I’m more patient with transitions, more surgical with my EQing, and more confident to play tracks that wouldn’t work on a lesser system."

It's not just the floor, it's not just the impressive -- perhaps best I've ever heard -- soundystem. It's the darkness of the room, the disciplined use of fog and lighting effects, and the club's policies that result in a dancefloor where magic happens.

One of my favorite policies is the fact that Stereo doesn't sell alcohol. This allows the club to open at 1am and stay open well past the hour when clubs that sell alcohol must, by law, close for the night. Stereo has on occasion stayed open until 5pm. On the night that we attended, John Digweed played 11 hours, from 4am until 3pm.

The no-alcohol policy also results in crowd behavior that's far more respectful and polite than you would find at a venue that does sell alcohol. People are able to dance these marathon-length DJ sessions because they're using other stimulants to go the distance (typically LSD, Mushrooms, MDMA/Molly/Ecstacy/X, Ketamine). And yes, this crowd sometimes even uses the wild and somewhat dangerous party drug ​​C₈H₁₀N₄O₂, popularly known by its street names of caffeine, Joe, espresso, or pumpkin spice latte, depending on the adulterants the shady caffeine dealers add.

You might think I’m joking about caffeine use at the club, but a nice, hot espresso shot was the first thing I ordered at the bar after we entered after standing outside in freezing (33° F) temperatures for an hour due to a bottleneck at coat check.

Regarding Stereo Montreal's no alcohol policy, owner Tommy Piscardeli said, “In alcohol clubs, music just becomes the background. Here, all you have is music; all you have is a dance floor. There is no VIP. You’re not judged on how much money you have like in a club. People are here for the music. They’re not sitting in a booth showing off with their bottles.”

I poured cold water into my espresso so that I could drink it faster, and soon after I could feel the drug snaking its tendrils through my nervous system. I'd gone caffeine free in anticipation of this night, and this was my first caffeine in three weeks. The come-up was glorious, a real "Red Bull Gives You Wings" kind of moment. I began bouncing on the balls of my feet. I grabbed my partner’s hand and we navigated a flight of stairs down from the bar that overlooks the dancefloor. Looking down at the floor, a large (maybe 5-foot diameter) disco ball dominates, hanging about nine feet over the center of the floor, sparkling like a thousand-faceted jewel in the darkness as it slowly spins above the crowd.

Stereo Montreal on Jan 1, 2025. Photo credit: anonymous

We popped in our ear protection and descended the stairs down to the dancefloor. The room was dark — as all good dancefloors are — with just enough light to help dancers avoid crashing into each other, but not so much light that anyone could easily perceive whose hands are where on whose bodies. The darkness was intimate, a blanket providing privacy. A unique split on the dancefloor—straights to the left, gays to the right—was pointed out by regulars but seemed more a general tendency than a strict rule. I knew I wanted to be at the center where those two groups mingled.

We made our way around the side of the floor towards the nearest towering speaker stack. It was 4:30am, and John Digweed had been on the decks for 30 minutes, following Ostrich, who had warmed up the floor prior to John's arrival.

We were initially so far left that the horns on the closest speaker stack projected high-frequency sound over our heads. I could hear the mids and feel the bass as it compressed my chest, and I took a sonic bath for a few moments while taking my first tentative dance steps, my joints still stiff from the cold, my legs tight from standing in line for an hour, my guard up in this new and unfamiliar place.

Stereo’s capacity allows for about 1,000 dancers, but were immediately surprised to discover that it hadn’t been oversold. On our way in, we saw folks without tickets being turned away from the sold-out event, whereas most clubs maintain a line for people without tickets, so that they can continuously sell more tickets until the dancefloor is so packed nobody can move. This was our experience in Ibiza's so-called super-clubs, where crass commercial motivations stomp on dancefloor vibes.

Stereo got the density exactly right — the dancefloor was packed from 4:30am to 7am, but it was never rammed to the point of discomfort. As the crowd naturally thinned over the course of the night, I soon had room to move and groove, and getting onto the dancefloor after water breaks proved easy. Antisocial behavior was, as a result, minimal. People were not bumping each other to get where they needed to go -- they were dancing their way to their destinations.

As opposed to my recent, somewhat traumatic experience at Hi Ibiza, one of Spains biggest tourist traps, nobody at Stereo stepped on me deliberately, shoved me from behind, dove into my space and made themselves at home in it, pressed themselves against me in an effort to make me move out of the way, or hip-checked me. These were all behaviors we endured multiple times over the course of hours in the oversold clubs of Pacha and Hi Ibiza.

At Stereo, people are nice to each other even as they dance with energy and spirit. I was elbowed in the back once. It happened when a tiny 30-something woman in a pack of similar-aged women insisted on defending for herself a space that was larger than the average space that anybody else had at the floor’s most packed moment. Her taking of space was a math violation — far exceeding the allocation anyone else in the vicinity had around themselves, so I turned around, acknowledged her elbow and continued to dance exactly where I had been dancing. Her across-the-line assault didn’t move me or break my groove — it just hardened my resolve to stick it out in this location for another 10 minutes or so. I did attempt to move with her — matching her to-and-fro motions rather than opposing them, so that space between us stayed fairly constant, even as we both moved together. I hope she noticed my effort. I like to think that the lack of another elbow indicates she did.

After our warm up on the sidelines, I needed more than just bass and mids, so we moved to the center of the floor where the straights and the gays mingled under the disco ball. We made the disco ball our anchor for the next 10 or so hours, dipping out only occasionally for water breaks.

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What Digweed played

In the line to get into Stereo Montreal, we befriended a crew from New York who had flown up to see Digweed. There were about 10 of them in line with us, all men and one woman, most of them in their early 30s. I learned that one of the crew who goes by the nickname BD had seen Digweed more than 50 times, comprising some 200 to 300 hours of time spent in the room with the master. He was the ringleader of the group, and this was his 15th trip to Stereo Montreal.

Thanks to BD and his crew, I was able to grab a number of track IDs. Before I share the big list, I'll share my three favorites of the night:

Daunia Disko (Of Norway Version) -- Cheema -- This electro-funk tune features shouted vocals in an Italian dialect coming from the part of Italy that looks like the spur of the boot-shaped country -- appropriate, because this song spurred us to dance with a feral, claws-out energy. Google Translate struggled with the dialect of the lyrics (something to do with water, wind, and night), but the vocals feel ritualistic, dark, and dangerous -- like a prelude to one of us getting snatched off the dancefloor for blood sacrifice.

Cravings (feat. Love Letters) -- Wallace -- I recognized this track when Digweed first started mixing it in, because a few weeks prior, I was in Seattle on vacation when I heard this song for the first time, and I spent almost an entire day walking and driving around the city listening to it on repeat, beating my chest at times to stimulate the feeling of body-shaking bass that my rental car's flimsy speakers could not muster. Of course I purchased the vinyl record that day as well, and it was sitting on my turntable at home when Digweed played it inside Stereo. The spoken-word vocals urgently interlaced with whispers, the spare arrangement, the subject of craving and lust -- it reminded me of Madonna's Justify My Love, and I knew I would need to dance to this song because of the way it moved me. I didn't know at the time it would only be a few weeks before John Digweed would be playing it for me. Kismet!

Magic House - Dino Lenny, Jarvis Cocker -- To quote the spoken word lyrics at the start of the song: "This room is a magic room, but it's really not about the room itself, it's about the people in the room. It's about the moments you share: the smiles, the looks, the music. It makes you feel like you're one thing. And it makes you want to live forever. And you think, "why can't we always live together like this?"

If there's a song that captures the essence of what we felt in Stereo Montreal, this is it. We were in a magic room, we were sharing smiles, looks, and music with other music heads, and then the chorus came in, and everyone sang along, "I was listening to house music all night long." Surreal. This being my first time hearing the track, I took a moment to find my voice and join in. I later learned that Digweed had been playing this song frequently at his gigs in 2024, and the folks gathered there for his birthday marathon set knew this. They were ready for it.

And as we danced and sang along, we did indeed feel that we wanted to live forever, and we did wonder why we can't always live together like this. It was a life-affirming moment.

BD and crew further identified the following list of songs played by Digweed:

• Needin' U (2016 Mix A) -- David Morales & The Face

• Brian's Proper Dun One -- Alan Fitzpatrick

• Regulator -- Alfred Heinrichs

• Submerged (Four Candles Remix) -- Anton Borin

• Catch You By Surprise (&Me Terrace Dub) -- Art Department

• En Route (feat. Ian) -- Bengoa

• Let's Try Again -- Bengoa

• Bodytalk -- Bengoa

• Soul Brother (Superlover Remix) -- Bombay Traffic

• Sometimes Changes Feels LIke Thunder -- Christopher Molan

• Forbidden City (Khen Remix) -- Davi

• Get the Feeling -- DJ Alex J

• What's Going On -- DJ Deep

• Incorporeo -- Djolee

• Meltdown -- Folgar & Chumbita

• Pillowtalk -- Four Candles

• Monoculture -- Four Candles & Sean Harvey

• Perron (Wehbba Remix) -- Marc Marzenit

• Serena -- Jepe

• Impulse -- Reverie

• Herb -- Remcord

• Wax -- Remcord

• The Sub Changed My Life -- Remcord

• Far Away -- Juliane Wolf

• Perron (Wehbba Remix) -- Marc Marzenit

• People Say (Nic Fanciulli Remix) -- Paulo Rocco

• Galactic Buds -- Remcord

• Solar Detroit -- Maceo Plex

• SOL -- Pryda

• Fya (Nicolas Rada Remix) -- Nicholas Van Orton

• I Miss You (Sentre Remix) -- Of Norway

• Forbidden City (Khen Remix) -- Davi

• See Through -- Quivver

• Together We Stand (Charmbord Remix) -- Myd & Chambord

• Voices of Bah -- Secret Factory

• We Are Connected (Original Mix) -- Jondi & Spesh

• Low Tide (Ezequiel Arias Remix) -- Jamie Stevens & Zankee Gulati

• Always the Same Eyes (Andres Luque Remix) -- Erre

• Holograph -- Kamilo Sanclemente & Sebastian Valencia

• Emptyless -- Kamilo Sanclemente & Sebastian Valencia

• Pretend -- Kamilo Sanclemente & Sebastian Valencia

• Danny Tenaglia Presents George Vidal: Out from Obscurity -- Danny Tenaglia & George Vidal

The way Digweed plays, we were often unsure when one song ended and another song had begun. Digweed weaves songs together for long periods of time -- giving the room a sense of hallucinogenic time dilation and fevered madness had me doubting my senses.

BD explained, "the way John layers everything, it almost feels like he's playing live at some points where he's grabbing a baseline of one track in the midst of another, highs from another track, and he's layering all three tracks, holding this tension, you know, for 10, 15, or even 30 minutes" before finally bringing the tension to a close.

During one moment when Digweed resolved a tension that had been building for 30 minutes, BD said that "it sounded as if the Montreal Canadiens just scored a championship-winning goal. The upstairs, the downstairs, the entire dance floor was completely losing their minds. It was nuts."

Digweed maintained absolute focus on his decks -- every time I looked at him, he was staring with intense concentration at his CJD-3000s and DB4 mixer. He's not a DJ that dances, throws his hands in the air, or basks in crowd adulation. He doesn't transmit his energy to the floor in that way -- he instead focuses completely on the music and the mix and watches how the crowd of dancers reacts to it. Like a very attentive lover, he could tell when we needed release, when we would appreciate teasing and tension building, when we needed to shift positions and get into another position. The mind-body connection that exists between lovers exists between really great DJs and their dancers. It's a union that brings so many bodies together, blurring boundaries between individuals and the collective.

Our relationship to him changed through the night. In the first third of the night, during the getting-to-know-you phase of the 11-hour set, when the floor was packed and folks still had residual alcohol in their systems from their New Year's Eve partying, he didn't rush into crowd-pleasing harmonic or lyrically interesting work. The first act felt dark, almost angry, Digweed conducting a priestly exorcism of the demons of 2024, letting us sweat out our resistance.

John Digweed at Stereo Montreal, May 22, 2022 (via Frontrite)

When we debriefed on it, BD remarked that Digweed, "had us down there for a little bit, like we were trying to get out of the pool, and he was holding us underwater for a little bit. It felt like the bass lines were almost like sitting on us, holding us down. It was dark, and when he finally let us out, I was like, 'Oh, man, I can breathe again.'"

“Stereo is a place where the music just flows out of me," Digweed told the press. "I’ve had so many incredible nights at Stereo and always look forward to returning."

On his Facebook page, Digweed called Stereo “one of my favourite clubs in the world,” and went on to say, “I am not sure what happens when I get in that booth, but the records just seem to flow out of me. Time passes so quickly and the vibe is so so good.”

To get a clear sense of how this all sounds when mixed by the master himself, give Digweed Live In Stereo a listen on your hi-fi system of choice. It's a remastered recording of his 10-hour set he played at Stereo Montreal in May 2024, and is the closest cousin to the 11-hour set he played on January 1, 2025.

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In the maelstrom, underwater

In the middle of a good dancefloor, I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a sacred ritual. The soundsystem is typically tuned to sound best in the center of the room, and the energy of everyone else tends to meet in the center, as if there are ley lines connecting all the dancing hearts and the speaker stacks and the DJ decks. These lines of energy intersect under the disco ball. That's why I like to anchor myself under the disco ball.

In the middle of a great dancefloor, enhanced by molecularly granted superpowers that connect me to the music and to the people, I feel all of the above, plus a heaping shovelful of chaos and tumult. I'm able to forget everything and abandon myself to the waves of sound and the occasional bumps from other bodies. I'm unmoored, a boat adrift in a storm at sea, my hull lifted by swells, slapped and slammed by waves. My body is at the mercy of the elements -- flotsam in a roiling river, loose seaweed tumbling in breaking waves. This is the energy in the center of my favorite dancefloors, and Stereo is now one of them.

We spent about 10 hours in the center of the room and I have no idea how long any of the following flights of fancy lasted, but I'll share some of them to give a sense of the headspace I found myself dancing in.

I felt like I was a salmon, swimming upstream against the roiling current. Occasionally, the music would present a groove that my body felt good in, and when I moved to that groove, I felt no struggle or effort -- as if I could swim all day in place, gentle flicks of my tail enough to keep me stationary in a current of other bodies that were also moving upstream. The water flowed over, around, and through all of us.

Then, a bear came along. A great, big, coked-up lumberjack man -- perhaps 6' 4" and 250 pounds -- came splashing through our stream without first checking in on the local vibe. He was on some other molecule -- not a chill one -- and could not stay still. He moved around clumsily, dancing in place for a moment or two, then moving again before splashing about like a grizzly might. His movements didn't feel aimed at us -- he wasn't really aware of our presence at all. He seemed to be looking for a nice Twinkie or other snack to eat. I would not be dislodged from my groove under the disco ball, so I let myself bounce off of him whenever he visited my section of the floor, and before long he was gone again.

I moved my body and contemplated the way rocks might block my progress as I fought to swim upstream to my spawning grounds. A fish knows that it cannot swim through a rock that has appeared in its path. There's no frustration, only gratitude for the little eddy that forms next to the rock, offering respite and a chance to change movement patterns and move different muscles for a while. Whenever a new group formed an immovable boulder near me, I found ways to swim in their eddy, and since they too were moving to the beat, I looked for ways to time my movements with theirs. They were not aware of me, I was just another body in the stream.

As I practiced moving with others who were next to me but not with me, I found myself feeling a sense of peace and zen-like acceptance. I practiced not becoming too attached to my spot on the dancefloor, and therefore felt no suffering when someone came in and dislodged me from the place where I had been dancing. I welcomed them in and felt the way in which their presence changed the flow of energy in our little microclimate. I embraced the impermanence of their presence and of this particular combination of beats, lighting, and movement.

I looked up and saw hanging from the ceiling perhaps a dozen amniotic sacs, heavy with amber fluid and pink flesh. Inside these sacs infant beings pulsed with red light and kicked to the rhythm of the beat. Of course in the back of my mind I knew these lights to be red emergency lights hung in large glass bowls, but the illusion of life glowing within them, of a small being kicking rhythmically, was a fantasy I indulged in for perhaps an hour. I allowed myself to be in that cave hung with clusters of alien eggs. I allowed myself to hallucinate a many-legged spider mother that hugged the ceiling's darkness and that occasionally moved closer to the dancefloor when the room darkened, blanketing us in red-suffused, womb-like darkness.

Image credit: The Matrix

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Wrap-up & rating

This is the review where I first tested the DPARTI (aka “Dance Party”) scorecard. Honestly, a lot of this is subjective, not objective, and it feels somewhat churlish to reduce a complex human endeavor like a dancefloor to a number. At the same time, I think we can break a complex thing down into the different components and then we can closely examine each of those components to evaluate the whole. In this way, I hope to figure out which dancefloors are merely good vs. truly great and build a shared vocabulary that we can use to compare dancefloors around the world.

Bottom line: get yourself to Stereo to experience an almost-perfect magic room where the dancefloor is the point. I'd recommend a Digweed performance there -- he's been playing every May (long weekend) and New Year's Day these last few post-pandemic years.

In parting, I'll leave you with John Digweed's update he posted to Instagram after we'd all been kicked out of the space:

1. Here’s the last 10 years of Digweed’s NYE into NYD sets, for reference:

• Jan 1 2025: Stereo Montreal, CA

• Jan 1 2024: Stereo Montreal, CA

• Jan 1 2023: Four Candles, Manchester, UK

• Jan 1 2022: Stereo Montreal (scheduled but cancelled for Covid)

• Jan 1 2021: ? (None? Pandemic)

• Jan 1 2020: Avant Gardner, NYC, US

• Jan 1 2019: Output, NYC, US

• Jan 1 2018: Output, NYC, US

• Jan 1 2017: Output, NYC, US

• Jan 1 2016: Exchange LA, US

• Jan 1 2015: Exchange LA, US