NASA

Overview

A one-year Friday-night rave inside TriBeCa's Shelter, co-founded by British promoter DB Burkeman and DJ Scotto, all-ages, no-alcohol, hardcore breakbeat and UK techno, which ran a single year and inspired the club scenes in Larry Clark's Kids (1995).

NASA (Nocturnal Audio + Sensory Awakening) launched in July 1992 when DJ Scotto moved his existing 'Rave the Ritz' events into The Shelter, a non-alcoholic, membership-adjacent afterhours house club that DJs Timmy Regisford, Merlin Bobb, and Freddy Sanon had opened at 6 Hubert Street in TriBeCa the previous year, with Regisford's Paradise Garage background shaping the room. Scotto partnered with DB Burkeman (David Burkeman), a British expatriate A&R figure who had relocated from London to New York in 1989 and was steeped in the UK rave and breakbeat-hardcore scene. Together they reoriented The Shelter's Friday slot toward that harder, faster British sound (breakbeat, hardcore, early drum and bass) turning it into, in DB's own framing, 'America's first rave club.' Because The Shelter served no alcohol and charged a door that included ice water, snacks, and breakfast (admission was $9 before midnight, $14 after), NASA skewed young and all-ages in a city where liquor-licensed clubs required 21+. The Shelter's sound system, installed by David Soto for Timmy Regisford, ran at a reported 37,000 watts with speaker cabinets described as larger than the dancers themselves. NASA brought that infrastructure to bear on a booking policy aggressively oriented toward the transatlantic rave moment: Moby, Joey Beltram, Frankie Bones, Richie Hawtin, Josh Wink, Adam X, Junior Sanchez, Dmitry from Deee-Lite, Lenny Dee, Orbital, Sven Väth, Kevin Saunderson, and many others passed through in the span of a single year. Chloë Sevigny (the party's coat-check worker, before her role in Kids) described it as 'one of the best clubs ever,' and the party was culturally proximate enough to early-1990s downtown New York that Larry Clark used the NASA/Shelter scene as inspiration for the club sequences in Kids (1995), though the film ultimately shot those scenes at the Tunnel in Chelsea. NASA ran for exactly one year, closing in July 1993, two days after its own first-anniversary party, documented in a move-out video Scotto filmed at the time. Flyer artwork from the parties entered the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an early acknowledgment that rave graphic design was worth preserving. After NASA closed, Scotto went on to produce Ravestock at Woodstock '94, and DB Burkeman (DJ DB) continued to champion drum and bass, later co-founding Breakbeat Science (the first U.S. record shop dedicated exclusively to the genre) in 1996. The Shelter itself continued under Regisford's stewardship, relocating to 157 Hudson Street and eventually 150 Varick Street, surviving as one of NYC's longest-running house-music institutions. The transatlantic programming DB Burkeman brought — UK hardcore breakbeat, early drum and bass, Orbital and Sven Väth alongside the American rave circuit — positioned NASA within a network that shaped drum and bass as a trans-Atlantic genre; Breakbeat Science, the Manhattan shop DB opened with partners in 1996 (first on East 9th Street, later Orchard Street), served as the primary New York retail infrastructure for the genre through the late 1990s. The year NASA occupied 6 Hubert Street (1992–1993) sat inside a longer run of dance programming at the address — The Shelter under Timmy Regisford, then Vinyl and Body & Soul (1996–2002), then Arc — a decade-plus sequence on a single TriBeCa address that began with Garage-lineage house and crossed into the rave moment NASA represented before returning to it.