MIXMAG – Halcyon is the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s current clubbing boom

MIXMAG by Duncan Dick
March 24, 2017

Special places are where special moments happen; those out-of-body experiences where you suddenly realise ‘I’m here, and I’m having fun… and bloody hell, this is a bit special!’ All clubs aspire to them. Design, sound, clientele, your own mental state: they all help, but those moments can’t be forced. They just happen. And Halcyon in San Francisco – just a few months old but already the standard-bearer for this storied city’s clubbing renaissance – already seems to be one of those special places. Especially at eight o’ clock on a Saturday morning.

The last time San Francisco had a dance music boom, in the early- to mid-90s, the authorities declared war on the scene almost overnight. Or rather early morning, when (so the story goes) the then Chief of Police was woken by his teenage daughter, fresh back from an afterparty, pie-eyed and talking a million miles per hour about her incredible night out taking an amazing drug called ecstasy that was going to change the world. Halcyon founder/figurehead/visionary Gina Milano blames something else. “It was GHB. It became big on the party scene and people were dying, being carried out to ambulances. The authorities had no idea how to manage it, so they penalised all the afterhours clubs. San Fran got really stale.”

She doesn’t look like a scene veteran, but Milano arrived in the city aged 19, at the tail-end of that period, and by the time she was 20 was working long weekend shifts in bars across the city’s afterparty spots. She got to know the DJs promoters were booking – people like Danny Tenaglia, Sasha and Erick Morillo – and continued her education overseas in Ibiza, London, Berlin, and at festivals. As the club scene died back she opened restaurants, launched private members clubs, and bided her time until the conditions in the city were right. Eventually, the increased post-EDM appetite and interest in dance music, a more liberal licensing atmosphere, an explosion of Burning Man-influenced dancefloor-focused creativity and a wealth of new talent to be booked all came together and she decided to open her own venue, one that would channel the spirit of that golden period and reflect everything she had learned from her own years of dancefloor research – but in a high-spec, 2017 way…

-Check out the original article here: http://mixmag.net/feature/halcyon-sf-is-the-standard-bearer-for-san-franciscos-current-clubbing-boom?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral