Twilo

Overview

The West 27th Street warehouse (former Sound Factory) where Phil Smith and Steve Dash rebuilt the room around the Phazon sound system; Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, and Sasha & Digweed made it New York's dominant superclub of the late 1990s before Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign forced it shut in May 2001.

Twilo occupied the same converted warehouse at 530 West 27th Street that had housed Sound Factory (1989–1995), a space already encoded into New York's house-music mythology through Junior Vasquez's marathon sets. When Sound Factory closed on January 12, 1995, Phil Smith (who had been a co-owner of the original venue alongside Vasquez and Christine Visca) revamped the building and reopened it as Twilo, this time licensed to serve alcohol, a departure from the Factory's no-substance model. The defining investment was the sound system: Smith and his partner Steve Dash, through their Phazon company, designed and installed a bespoke integrated system of roughly 120 speakers, broken into bass, mid-range, and treble frequency paths, time-aligned via digital signal-processing chips Dash had modified himself, and CAD-designed custom enclosures manufactured in Philadelphia. Sasha described it as 'like a Lamborghini in constant need of tuning, but when it's in fine shape, nothing can compare.' The room could hold approximately 3,000 people; its décor was minimal ('a big, bare, ugly black box' in contemporary accounts), the sound and the mirror ball were the spectacle. The residency roster across Twilo's six years traced the arc of late-1990s American club culture. Danny Tenaglia was the inaugural Friday-night resident, his nights on that night were credited with establishing Twilo as 'one of the planet's most talked-about venues', while Junior Vasquez, after residencies at Tunnel and the Palladium, returned to the West 27th Street address for Saturday nights by 1997. Saturday nights were ostensibly gay-oriented but drew an unusually mixed crowd of gay and straight clubbers; Tenaglia's Friday crowd was described as notably diverse. From roughly 1997, Sasha and John Digweed held the last Friday of each month, playing sets of eight to twelve hours that stretched into daylight; their residency grew from a lukewarm reception into one of the most sought-after tickets in the city. Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Jeff Mills, Paul van Dyk, Josh Wink, and Sven Väth appeared as guests, helping Twilo serve as the primary American beachhead for European progressive house and techno at a moment when those idioms were crossing over to mass audiences. Twilo operated under sustained regulatory pressure from Mayor Rudy Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign, which weaponized the city's near-dormant Cabaret Law (requiring a license for any establishment where three or more people danced) and dispatched task forces to conduct inspections and raids. The club retained its cabaret license through most of this period, but in early 2001 city authorities alleged that management had misused a privately contracted ambulance to conceal drug-overdose victims from emergency responders; club management contended the ambulance had been obtained on the city's own recommendation, and that in at least one documented incident NYPD officers blocked the ambulance from departing and allowed a Daily News photographer inside before it reached the hospital. The dispute proved fatal to the license. On the night of May 6–7, 2001, police and inspectors evicted hundreds of patrons, padlocked the entrance, and cited six regulatory infractions. It was among the last acts in the systematic dismantling of New York's superclub era: Limelight, Tunnel, and others had already been or would soon be shuttered under the same campaign. The address passed through Spirit, B.E.D. (closed 2007 after a fatal incident), and in 2011 became the McKittrick Hotel, home of the immersive theater production Sleep No More, which, inadvertently, preserved the warehouse's maze-like spatial structure. A two-night reunion was held at the McKittrick in March 2026, with estimates suggesting 60–70% of attendees had danced there in the original era. The room's sound system could not be reconstructed; the Phazon hardware is gone.

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