Basement

Overview

New York's first club dedicated to techno: a Funktion-One–equipped subterranean room carved from the 1903 brick-tunnel heating infrastructure of the Gleason-Tiebout glass factory, opened in May 2019 by co-founders Téa Abashidze, GeGa Japaridze, and Tyler Myers inside Knockdown Center, with a hard no-photos policy, knowledge-based door, and a programming philosophy that runs from Detroit and Chicago through Berlin and Tbilisi.

Basement occupies the literal underground of Knockdown Center's 50,000-square-foot converted factory at 52-19 Flushing Avenue, a building erected in 1903 as the Gleason-Tiebout Glass Company works, retooled in the 1930s as the Manhattan Door Factory (birthplace of Samuel Sklar's 'knock-down' door frame), and left vacant after 2010 when operations moved to New Jersey. When construction workers jackhammered through the concrete floor during early renovation, they broke into a network of hand-laid brick tunnels that had originally carried heat through the building, discovering at their center an immense iron glass-smelting crucible and drifts of discarded glass. Those tunnels, with their arched vaults, low ceilings, old factory doors, and dense concrete columns, are now the dancefloor. Basement opened on the night of May 10, 2019, with sets from Rebekah, Heidi Sabertooth, and Ne/Re/A, followed the next night by DVS1; the May lineup also included Luke Slater, 999999999, Irakli, Tommy Four Seven, and Vatican Shadow — the room's lean toward harder, industrial techno stated up front. The sound system is Funktion-One, tuned to exploit the brick acoustics: reviewers note that volume increases depending on where you stand in the room, rewarding those who move to the center. There is no bottle service, no table service, and no VIP tier. The club was co-founded by Téa Abashidze and GeGa Japaridze, childhood friends from Georgia (the country) who arrived in New York City with, in their own telling, 'a couple of suitcases and a dream,' and who had spent years booking festivals and clubs in the Georgian electronic-music scene before identifying gaps in New York's infrastructure: clubs closing at 4 a.m., inadequate sound systems, and a tolerance for harassment of women and queer patrons that they found unacceptable. Working at Knockdown Center from 2018 as the venue's first in-house music bookers, they partnered with Tyler Myers (Knockdown's managing co-founder and executive director) to build the subterranean room. Knockdown's then-director of operations Ria Katz, who had come from Output's Brooklyn operation before its early-2019 closure, framed the launch explicitly against Output's absence: 'With Output closing there's a need,' she told Pollstar, 'there's kind of become a vacuum in the industry.' Abashidze and Japaridze's Georgia background carries its own resonance: the Tbilisi club Bassiani, built in the tunnels beneath the Dinamo Arena and raided by Georgian special forces in 2018, triggering the protest movement #MusicistheirWeapon, was a direct reference point. Bassiani has since staged nights at Basement during Wire Festival, a direct link back to the two founders' Tbilisi origins. The no-photos policy is operationalized at the door: staff apply masking tape over phone camera lenses on entry; guests caught recording inside have been removed. The door practice (never formally confirmed by ownership) involves asking incoming guests who they are there to see, filtering out those with no knowledge of the lineup. The dress code is unannounced but readable: black clothing, street-casual, no Hamptons-dinner formality. The combined effect resembles Berghain's model and is openly described as such in the press, though the crowd is distinctly New York, younger, more racially mixed, and explicitly queer-inclusive in a way that the Berlin room is not always credited for being. All events are 21+; cover typically runs $15–$25. In September 2022 Basement opened a second room, Studio, with its own Funktion-One system and panoramic windows, a later curfew enabling longer sets, and a broader sonic palette: house, electro, disco, and experimental electronic alongside the main room's focused techno. Massimiliano Pagliara played the Studio launch alongside Ryan Elliott and Rose Kourts and later became a Studio resident. The resident program in the main room was formalized in December 2022 with the announcement of three DJs: LYDO (Filipino-born, Vietnamese-American, non-binary, and a co-founder of the queer/trans record label and party series X-TRA.SERVICES), Beatrice (Spanish, drawing on the urgent techno of the mid-1990s), and Newa (whose comment on first entering Basement ('it felt like home') was reproduced in the announcement). Freddy K (Italian-born, Germany-based, founder of KEY Vinyl) was added to the residency in January 2025. Wire Festival, a two-day event Abashidze and Japaridze produce annually at Knockdown Center combining daytime panel discussions about the electronic underground with nighttime programming staged by invited collectives, has featured Possession (Paris, queer-focused) and Bassiani in its first editions and runs annually into at least 2026.

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