Jupiter Disco

Overview

The sci-fi cocktail bar that proved Bushwick's Flushing Avenue corridor could hold an audiophile dancefloor: co-owners Maks Pazuniak and Al Sotack built a Danley-powered, Condesa-rotary room behind an unmarked industrial door in 2016, explicitly LGBTQ+ and trans-friendly, spinning house, disco, and jungle Thu–Sun.

Jupiter Disco occupies a former industrial space at 1237 Flushing Avenue, opened in November 2016 by career mixologists Maks Pazuniak, formerly of Maison Premiere in Brooklyn and co-author of the influential cocktail manuals Rogue Cocktails and Beta Cocktails, and Al Sotack, formerly head bartender at Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co. in Philadelphia and later Death & Co. and Pouring Ribbons in Manhattan. The two had been friends and record-trading partners for roughly seven years before they built the bar together. Their aesthetic brief was precise: the dive bar from the end of time, indebted to 1970s-80s science fiction cinema (Dune, Blade Runner, Alien, the Mos Eisley cantina of Star Wars) and realized through steel-plate ceilings original to the building, circular aqua-upholstered booths, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, and a functioning reel-to-reel tape recorder behind the bar. A pre-production 1976 Star Wars cantina blueprint hangs on the wall; a Frank Herbert Dune epigraph appears in the employee handbook. The sound system was designed by Danny Taylor of House Under Magic, who had previously engineered for the experimental rock band Collapsing Scenery, and it is what separates Jupiter Disco from Bushwick's many other bar-club hybrids. Mains are a pair of Danley SH60 horn-loaded loudspeakers, their grills removed to expose the geometry; a Danley TH118 subwoofer is integrated into the DJ booth, with two Danley CS30 subwoofers providing additional low-end support. Signal processing runs through a Danley DNA SC48 processor and Powersoft K-Series amplifiers; the mix position uses a custom analog Condesa rotary mixer and an SSL G-Series VCA bus compressor, studio-grade infrastructure by any standard. Sotack has said 'the sound is as important to the bar as the cocktails.' The booth runs Thursday through Sunday, hosting a rotating roster of local and visiting DJs across house, disco, techno, jungle, and reggaeton. From its opening, Jupiter Disco has been an explicitly LGBTQ+-friendly space and a designated transgender safe space, an orientation that inflects both the door culture and the party programming. Recurring nights include Pleasure Jams, a local DJ series; House Music is for Lovers, a house-focused Friday or Saturday event; and Village Hidden in Sound, a leftist electronic collective that blends techno, house, and UK garage and donates ten percent of all artist proceeds to the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network (TASSN). The bar also programs film screenings, chess nights, and other community-oriented events, maintaining an intentionally neighborhood-embedded identity rather than scaling toward a full club model. Food is a short empanada menu. During the COVID-19 pandemic closure of 2020, Pazuniak and Sotack launched a Kickstarter campaign (April–May 2020) to fund Preservation, a zine of original cocktail recipes, art, interviews, and record selections, as a way to sustain the bar's community and cultural identity during forced closure.

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