Event Review: Drunk and Horny v. Frisco Disco

This past Saturday the boyfriend, J, Kitty and I went out to wish Jeff and Gary good luck with the reconstitution of Drunk and Horny as a monthly, and then, on a whim, the boyfriend and I went over to The Transfer to check out the infamous Frisco Disco. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but was close enough in terms of vibe to Drunk and Horny that it did seem a bit familiar.

We arrived around midnight, and when we first came through the door Richie Panic was in the midst of a three track trip through the 80s that made me think we somehow had walked through a wormhole that had brought us back to Underground SF. I was in the bathroom, thinking that one drink’s worth of retro was about all I could take, when he switched up and made a run into the bloghouse/banger territory that I had expected. Over the course of the next hour we heard Feist’s “My Moon My Man (Boysnoize remix),” Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E. (Justice Remix),” and Kid Cudi’s “Day N’ Night (Crooker’s Remix)," which should give you a sense of the night's musical flavor (all trainspotting thanks to the boyfriend, btw).

Richie Panic is a laptop DJ and has a style that I have come to think of as typical for DJs who work in this medium, one that I characterize as brutalism. There are no long mixes; rather, he takes advantage of the ability to set cue points and have tracks start and stop on exact beats. The effect is of the tracks being spliced together in a continuous stream, rather than being mixed, where you hear perhaps two or three minutes of one track before another one starts, usually at a point that keeps the intensity and energy of the mix pretty high. The crowd was clearly into it, and in some ways it's appropriate to the banger genre; I refer to it as brutalism because it reminds me of the architectural style, which opted for the big, chunky and concrete over the subtle and organic, with an occasional gesture toward striking juxtapositions of form. I find this style of DJing to be a bit difficult to listen to over a long period of time, but there were plenty of happy dancers grooving along with Richie's set when we left around 1.30.

The crowd was pleasingly diverse, with lots of women and gay guys on the dancefloor, though it wasn’t quite as fabulous as the Myspace pictures would have led me to believe. Maybe this is because it was so damned dark in there, it was hard to tell what anyone what looked like, but it might also be because The Transfer, no matter how fab a party you bring to it, is still a dumpy dive of a bar, and it’s hard to not look like a dork standing there with a drink in your hand. Why the back room wasn’t open I have no idea, this certainly seemed to be a big enough crowd to warrent the opening of the second bar, and it would have made getting drinks a lot easier than dealing with bartenders who seemed more interested in doing shots with their friends than serving other patrons.

My overall impression is that Frisco Disco is sort of a straight version of Drunk and Horny, though with admittedly more contemporary music. It seemed like the kind of party where folks come because they want to drink some really poisonously strong potions, dance around to music that is pleasingly familiar, and feel a little naughty and edgy for a while. As for me, now that I’ve been there once, I don’t feel a real compelling need to go back (an opinion that might change should they ever move on from The Transfer), but you should definitely check it out for a glimpse into one of the reigning hipster dance scenes of the moment.