SILO, a new nightclub in Brooklyn, is an intimate 500-person space was built in a converted hangar, and design by two people with backgrounds in graphic design, software engineering, and electrical engineering: The NYC ‘Secret Loft’ party series duo Lilly Wolfson and Alex Neuhausen. For Wolfson, whose background is in software engineering and graphic design, SILO was her first interior design project. On top of commissioning a floor-to-ceiling wall mural, she also infused her love of natural materials into the venue’s design, with a front bar molded from three concrete blocks polished to a smooth finish and the showroom bar cut from a slab of semi-translucent Patagonia quartzite.
Neuhausen, who has a PhD in electrical engineering, handled the creation of SILO’s sound, lighting, and projection. He designed the venue to act as a “human terrarium”—a sonically-filled space equipped with a custom 40,000 watt Danley sound system—and outfitted the dance floor with a fully custom lighting and projection system featuring eight high-contrast projectors stitched together to form a seamless 8K image mapped onto the ceiling and walls.
Live Design chats with Wolfson and Neuhausen about the design and technology of SILO.
Live Design: Please describe the overall look of the club and how the hangar was converted? What did each of the designers bring to the project in terms of design and technology?
Lilly Wolfson: When we inherited the building it was a big tin can, there was no electricity or running water. The steel struts were all rusted out and the concrete was cracked. Together with our landlord (they’re a construction company), we got water and gas and electrical hookups, we replaced the concrete slab, the entire outer shell, insulated the building, everything totally from the ground up. The project was massive and it took three years. Our mezzanine is a refurb that came in parts and that Alex (co-owner) drove back in a 26’ rig from Texas. Alex was the one to work with the electrician on the circuits in the walls (he has an electrical engineering degree), to order and spec the sound system with the Danley engineers, to coordinate the production of our stage truss and our tech mezzanine. He also built our acoustic panels by hand, and our mezzanine doors. And the railings above the bathroom, there’s a picture of him putting all his weight against a pipe bending tool to form the corners of our steel railings.
I did the interior design on the space. So the material and cuts of our countertops, shelves, bathroom tile, mirrors, lighting, pretty much anything that’s a fixture in there. And I picked out our beam lights. I helped out with the build-out sometimes, but I’m not super strong, so usually it was tasks like folding the fabric for the acoustic panels.
LD: Can you talk a little about the lighting?
Alex Neuhausen: The lighting isn’t super complicated…yet. We meant the system to be modular and built in such a way that we could add fixtures as we saw a need.
The most impressive piece is the 14 Chauvet Rogue R3 Beam Lights. They’re light cannons: super-bright moving head lights that can do numerous colors, use a spectrum to split into multiple beams, they have gobos that can make patterns, they strobe, they can use a frost effect to become washes or a tight gobo dot to become almost like a laser beam. There are two rows of five down each side of the dance floor, two hanging from the truss in the front of the room, and two in the back of the room.
We have three moving head washes in a triangle above the DJ booth, which is usually in the center of the floor. We also use those to hit pre-set spots so we can light the stage or hit a performer on a platform above the crowd. And then we have various small lights for our front room bar, and four bright pars for stage lighting. The beam lights use super-hot halogen car headlight bulbs, but everything else is LEDs and we did some extra searching to make sure every LED light has a hex bulb - red, blue, green, amber, white and UV— so that we can do warm natural lighting or deep blacklight.
Next up we want to add some lasers.
Live Design: What about the sound system?
AN: We read various white papers by Danley and EV about subwoofer placement and we also did modeling with the Danley engineers. It’s very hard, likely impossible, to put your subs on either side of the stage or in a four-point arrangement and not have bass nulls where certain frequencies drop out because of destructive interference as you walk around the room. So we kept the big subs next to each other because that’s the best thing for clarity.We built a special housing for them out of double-thickness drywall, with green glue sound-deadening between the layers, and then ¾” of plywood. This is all to keep the stage and backstage from rattling too much and the sub from overpowering the stage monitors.
The Danley SH96HO mains hang from our main truss and point down a bit at the audience. They have a really wide dispersion. Each 96HO actually contains 11 speaker drivers: 4 x 15”, 6 x 8”, and a tweeter, and they’re mounted on one big horn.
The Danley SH46 rear fills hang in the back of the dance floor, under the tech mezzanine. Each of those contains seven drivers mounted on a single horn. We tuned the two sets of speakers to have similar response and EQ curves and we slightly delayed the rear fill speakers so that when you’re in the front of the room you mostly hear the mains, when you’re in the center of the dance floor you’re surrounded by sound, and as you step off the dance floor to head to the bar, the rear fills take over.
It’s a simple setup for a room our size, and it aligns with the Danley philosophy – get a few pieces of powerful gear with a lot of head room. We control the system with Linea Research’s System Engineer software. We tuned the room using a Beyerdynamic MM1 Condenser Omnidirectional Measurement Microphone, measured and averaged the room EQ using AFMG SysTune, and created a Finite Impulse Response curve to compensate using FIR Designer from Eclipse Audio.
LD: And projection...?
AN: The NEC PH1202HL1 12,000 lumen large venue DLP laser projector is a super-high-contrast laser projector that you’d find in a movie theater. We use that to project a large 30 foot wide, 20 foot high image onto the back wall of the stage. We painted the wall with a high contrast projector paint. The eight x 4000 lumen Optoma projector images are stitched together in Resolume Arena to form one continuous 60’ x 60’ image across the walls and ceiling of the dancefloor. We built the PC media center ourselves—it’s a gaming PC with a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor, 128 GB of RAM, and two gaming graphics cards. One card is a mammoth GeForce RTX 3090 with 24 GB or RAM, and there’s a smaller GeForce 3060 that we actually aren’t even using yet.
The VJ and lighting designer sit next to each other on a mezzanine above the dance floor so they both have a birds-eye view of the room and they can talk to each other. They can both follow the music and they’ll call out to each other if they’re heading in a certain direction with their color palette or intensity.
LD: What were the main challenges in creating the club in this venue?
AN: The metal walls and concrete floor make it hard to design a sound system, because those materials reflect sound waves and mess with the acoustic clarity in the space. That’s why we have so many sound panels up, we built around 60 panels out of sound-absorbing mineral wool and plywood and we put more wool inside the mezzanine doors. The concrete is also not ideal for dancing, so we installed vinyl on the dance floor to make it a little easier on feet. The room is also pretty narrow and long, which means we needed speakers with a long throw (coverage). It’s also only one level (ground level) so we built a bunch of areas with different heights, so that people would have separate spaces to go and can see over the crowd.
LD: Who provides the content for the large video images on the walls and ceiling —what are these images? Do they change frequently?
LW: We have a rotation of VJs that we hire to create projections for different events, but more recently we’ve been working with our in-house VJ Hannah Wernher to come up with a library of immersive imagery that feels sort of subtly transporting or evocative of different places. She’s really talented at taking raw media and turning it into projection maps that make it feel like you’re somewhere else; so far she’s created image maps of a cathedral, a night sky, a glitchy portal, and a bunch of other pseudo-environments.
LD: What are club-goers today looking for in a club experience and how does SILO meet that need?
LW: I don’t think there’s just one thing that they look for, it depends on the specific subculture and the music they want to hear. I do think it’s important to understand that people aren’t always ready to go wild when they walk in the door, it’s our job to guide them to a place (emotionally and otherwise) where they’re comfortable and able to live in the moment and dance. Part of that is keeping them safe, and part of it is understanding the type of energy we’re introducing into the room ourselves, some of it with our tech (sound and lighting) and some of it with our own demeanor and the demeanor of our staff. We hire security and bartenders who vibe with the community and who know how to assist people who need help.
SILO TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT
MAIN ROOM SOUND SYSTEM:
2 Danley SH96HO mains
2 Danley BC218 subwoofers (low-end extension down to 22 Hz)
2 Danley SH46 rear fills
2 Danley 20K4 amplifiers (total 40,000 watts amplifier power)
2 Electro-Voice PXM-12MP stage monitors configurable on stands facing DJ console or as floor wedges
1 Electro-Voice ELX-200 18SP 18 inch powered sub-woofer (optional DJ sub monitor)
1 Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital mixer (48 channels, 96kHz processing) with AR2412 digital stage box
DJ:
5 Pioneer CDJ-3000
4 Pioneer CDJ-2000 NXS2
2 Technics SL-1200 MK7 turntable w/ Audio Technica AT-VM95E Cartridge
1 Pioneer DJM-V10 6-channel digital mixer
1 Pioneer DJM-900 NXS2 4-channel digital mixer
1 Allen & Heath Xone96 6-channel analog mixer
1 Pioneer DJ RMX-1000 Performance Effects System
1 Pioneer EFX-1000 DJ Effects Unit
FRONT ROOM (SMALL PA):
2 Electro-Voice ELX200-12P 12" 1200W 2-Way powered loudspeakers
1 3000 Watt Behringer Eurolive B1800XP subwoofer
1 Mackie ProFX16 Mixer w/ reverb and delay
MICS:
2 Shure BLX288PG58 wireless mics
3 Shure SM-58 vocal mic
1 Shure SM-57 instrument mic
6 Behringer XM8500 super cardioid vocal mics
1 Audix D6 kick drum mic
5 mic stands, 1 kick mic stand, two keyboard stands, music stand
LIGHTING:
14 Chauvet Rogue 300W R3 Beam Lights
4 ADJ 18p Hex Par Stage Wash (capable of full blacklight, amber, white)
3 ADJ Vizi Hex Wash 7 - Moving Head Stage Wash (capable of full blacklight, amber, white)
2 ADJ Ultra Hex Bar uplighting (capable of full blacklight, amber, white)
5 ADJ 6p Hex Par - Fill Washes (front room bar)
2 ADJ Inno Spot Pro (front room bar)
1 Chauvet DJ Hurricane 2000 Fog Machine
1 PC with twin touch screens and MA Lighting grandMA 2 Command Wing and Fader Wing Control Boards
PROJECTION:
1 NEC PH1202HL1 12,000 lumen large venue DLP laser projector
8 4000 lumen, 300,000:1 contrast Optoma Projectors, projection mapped across ceiling and walls
12-core liquid cooled PC workstation with 8x4K HDMI outputs, running Resolume Arena 7
MULTI-CAMERA LIVE STREAMING:
Main camera: Sony Alpha A7 III, 4K recording, 1080P streaming resolution, great in low light
2 Logitech C920 HD Pro Webcam, 1080P HD resolution, used for DJ closeups or second angle
Green Screen
2017 Macbook Pro running OBS Studio 29. We run sound to the stream directly from the FOH mixer digital output.