sound

oktober 20, 2015

Text Maren Serine Andersen

The idea of arranging a club concept randomly occurred during one of many late nights in the founder’s old appartment located in downtown Oslo. He must really have loved opening his doors to the clubbers of Norway’s capital as he for a long while tirelessly hosted afterparties up to as many as five times a week. These underground get-togethers in the popular street Keysers gate, surrounded by chill neighbors such as the renowned and liberal art school Prosjektskolen, ranged from the intimate kind to gigantic House and Techno blasting blowouts with hundreds of guests.

Alike mon Dieu Sound (formerly the Playdate Project, video beneath article), the founder of Club Bademantel has a quite obvious fondness of bathrobes. To be a bit more precise, «bademantel» is the German translation of yet another founder; Hugh Hefner’s favorite clothing item. We all clearly share an agreement on that pajama dressing definitely can be a formidable force in fashion. The background story of the club concept’s uniform presented to mon Dieu is that a few of his countless afterparty guests at one point felt so much at home that they actually put on some bathrobes he had lying around in his place. After this he started to offer bathrobes to his guests on a regular basis. As an afterparty host with a fine reputation should, he had now become aware of how comfort comes first in the most successful and effortless afterparties. As this was warmly welcomed by the crowd it became a natural decision to go for PJs as the signature style of Club Bademantel. The way mon Dieu sees it, this was a wise choice in order to at least be remembered visually considering the enormous overflow of DJs and club concepts in the current club culture of Oslo.

Last Friday Club Bademantel had their grand debut on the nightclub scene of Oslo with a line-up of seven DJs (line-up beneath article). Our Techno guy, Marius Kristiansen (Appears on picture above) suggested that mon Dieu should check out the club concept and invited us to join the guest list for the night. The line-up sounded quite promising out from what we heard through the online DJ sets and we were also quite fascinated by the bathrobe detail as we had done something pretty similar in our own DJ and designer promoting project Playdate a while ago. On top of that we got even more surprised as we recognized one of the DJ names in the line-up that actually had been a part of Playdate (DJ Jose Espeland appearing in video beneath aricle). We almost got a bit sentimental by the sight of the former Playdate DJ once again slipped into his PJs behind the decks. And from what we heard he played even better than before.

When we arrived at The Villa, a popular venue for electronic music lovers in Oslo, we unfortunately met some of the most unfriendly and rude bouncers that we have ever experienced in Oslo, so we were not far from ending the evening before it had even started up in the entrance. Luckily the generous amount of bathrobe dressed DJs providing us with beats in this concept made it possible for a british DJ to come upstairs and rescue us together with our Techno guy. «You are the guys from Vogue, right?» he greeted us to our amusement. The guy holding the list was probably far from amused as he understood that he had made a mistake and that there now were no other choice but to let us in.

So in the end everything turned out well. The music impressed us enormously and mon Dieu will definately follow the advice of Techno supporter Marius every time he wants our company in front of the DJ booth.

Bademantel line-up, The Villa 16th october 2015:

Main room: Duncan Macdonald / Paul White / Renee Tvedt / Tore Magnus Wilhelmsen
Sweatshop : Ryan Cooke / Philip Hinz b2b Jose Espeland

Playdate #6, May 2014.