Club Darc was billed as the hottest new electronic music scene in town. The EDM series, from Coachella promoter Goldenvoice, launched Friday night at Shed A, a cavernous warehouse inside Pier 48 in Mission Rock. The lineup was ambitious: Chris Stussy, DJ Tennis, and DJ Seinfeld, all of whom have huge followings. Excitement was high. Mayor Daniel Lurie, a major EDM fan, was “thrilled (opens in new tab)” about it. Tickets were sold out.
By Saturday morning, everyone was talking about the party, but not in the way organizers hoped. The consensus? The sound sucked.
“I don’t remember when I was so disappointed at any event ever,” said Lukasz Jagiello, who left after about an hour because of the audio issues. “It was like a mix of loud noise of a crowd with some bass in the background, and that’s it. There was no way you could hear vocals. I’m standing in front of that main DJ booth, and I don’t hear what the music is playing.”
He compared the experience to listening to a concert from blocks away.
“The funny part is, I don’t think I ever have expectations for the sound,” he said. “I just assume that portion will be fine. You can have expectations about the line or restrooms or drinks. But not about the fact that you cannot hear the music. That is bare minimum.”
His bottom-line review: “That was basically a money grab.”
Experts caution this could just be first-night sound calibration issues. But many first night attendees were left disappointed.
“You couldn’t even hear the music,” said Jordan, who declined to share his last name. “The bass was nonexistent. The highs were piercing, where it actually hurt your ears. The mids and a lot of the music were completely drowned out. It was a wash of noise.”
Jordan and his friends left 30 minutes after Stussy took the stage. They felt the sound issues were disrespectful to the artists.
“I made out one song over the course of two and a half hours,” said Caleb, who also declined to share his last name. “Everything else was just beats.”
“It was so chatty in there,” he added. “When people are locked into good music, they shut up and dance.” Instead, voices layered over the muddy sound, turning the warehouse into a wall of chatter. His group also left 30 minutes into Stussy’s set.
Many took to social media, comment-bombing Club Darc’s Instagram page. “You won the worst show,” said one. Others pressed Goldenvoice to adjust the sound before the next event. The series runs to mid-May, and many people purchased tickets for more than one night. “FIX it,” wrote one commenter. On Reddit, people announced that they were seeking refunds. Tickets for opening night ran roughly $70 to $80.
Caleb, who has tickets to Club Darc’s April show with Prospa, plans to sell those and to email organizers to request a refund for Friday. Jagiello, too, has tickets to several Club Darc shows, including Peggy Gou and Armand Van Helden on Saturday, and an April event. He plans to sell them all if he can; he says he’s been having trouble listing them on the official AXS resale platform.
A Goldenvoice representative declined to comment.
Gavin Smith, a Bay Area audio engineer, said these kinds of complaints are not unusual for concerts at a large warehouse venue being used for the first time. And they are not unfixable.
A warehouse presents some of the most difficult acoustic conditions for live electronic music, Smith said.
“A lot of people think you put a great sound system in a space and have good artists, and you’re bound to have success,” he said. “But it’s a lot more difficult than that, because a sound system and a room go hand in hand. It’s a relationship between the two.”
Large industrial buildings like Shed A have highly reflective surfaces – concrete floors and walls and metal ceilings – that can cause sound to bounce unpredictably. When that happens, Smith said, listeners can lose the ability to clearly distinguish the elements of the music.
“Intelligibility, being able to understand the different aspects of the music, gets kind of lost, because everything is reflecting all over the place,” he said. That was the chief complaint of Club Darc attendees Friday.
Smith said it doesn’t necessarily mean the engineers didn’t tune the sound system ahead of time, but they probably need to tweak it to account for the effect of so many people in the space. “You might nail the tuning before people are there,” he said, “but it’s different when there’s a crowd of 5,000 and all those bodies and sounds reflecting in different ways. It complicates things.”
Smith said opening-night issues are part of the “learning curve” at a new venue.
The situation reminded him of the first year of Portola, another Goldenvoice festival in San Francisco, which also faced sound challenges at warehouse-style venues.
“Those types of warehouses are hard to get right,” he said. “It’s almost like being in a cave – you clap, and you hear all that echo.”
Jordan said the experience echoed another recent San Francisco spectacle, the Red Bull F1 showrun along Marina Boulevard.
“It felt very similar to how the F1 race was promoted by the city and then how that all went down,” he said. “My expectations were up here for SF finally being back, and then it was kind of a letdown moment.”
But unlike that stunt, Club Darc has time to fix the bug. Smith said audio engineers typically learn how a venue behaves and make adjustments.
“It should get better and better,” he said. “A company like Goldenvoice typically puts on really awesome shows. I’m sure they’re taking account of people’s reactions and trying to improve.”