Burning Man-born House of Dust, Understands Your Inner Party Needs

This playa sand-inspired art collective spoiled Toronto last Saturday with a faultless concept: a bedtime bacchanalian techno party aboard the Kajama—a 1930s schooner tall ship.

The costume theme, "Bazaar of the Bizarre," plops alien travellers on an outdated relic of a vessel that is psychedelically lit by LED projection. All under the judging eye of the supermoon.

The crowd answered with the lost art of crimped hair, the paradoxical pairing of crop tops and elephantine furry boots, pants that have a lighting of their own and even a random Mario Brother mascot.

House of Dust is the brainchild of DJ K-Dust who I found out, with little research, also charmingly moonlights as "Toronto's Expert Realtor"—but don't tell him I said that. Yossi Kaplan, his real name, likes to shut off the "default" corporate world when talking about his utopian underground art collective.

House of Dust tries to reproduce Burning Man, a weeklong arts and community desert camp in Nevada, in a much smaller scale to feed the local electronic music craze. In fact, it started as a Burning Man theme camp. Dust, along with other event promoters of the genre like, Promise nurtures a growing electro community. It hardly deserves explanation why the miniaturized EDM party package is so attractive. The trancey, electrifying loops and trippy sonic mixes, the eye-popping LED displays, the hedonism, the bold sartorial choices—they all just look damn good together.

One of the five DJs aboard, Aquatic Mind, is a consummate pro. The man unblinkingly left Brazil while the rest of the world was completely under its spell. To play this gig, he left a few days shy of the World Cup finals, teaching the whole underachieving lot of us what real commitment is.

Given the nautical venue, Aquatic seems appropriately at home. He kept the mood-setting supermoon in mind and accordingly opted for his slower and deeper melodic staples. By 1 AM, his tech-house set reduced a man clad in Gulf garb into a bare-chested dancing hooligan who stopped only for a moment to show me the googly eye sticker on his neck.

DJ Lumberjockey, the man with the music and the mane, kept it weird, pulling off a whimsy quasi-nutcracker look. He is a staple in the local electronic music scene, running the weekly archi-textures in Kensington and founding the monthly Knotibel, an incubator of electronic talent and a hub for his growing music family. His Kajama set is an inspired one, choosing organic electronic sounds that screamed open water and whispered nautical undercurrent. He melted minds with sounds reminiscent of foghorn, chimes and clangs of metal and machinery. He laid it on to lovers with a slower seductive house and diversified it with video game flavors; this was a reminiscent of my childhood years when I killed it at Contra.

DJ K-Dust, an electro autodidact, closed the night like a seasoned DJ. He moved the crowd, possibly even the Kajama herself, with his bouncy techno offerings, especially that swelling dancefloor favorite "Check That Body." Closer to shore, he wrapped up elegantly with tunes that are more lush and melodic.

The party drew originals like Dalion Hunt, who partied it up with her mother ("She wanted to take me to Guverment!") and Munis Topcuoglu, who stripped down to his red Diesel boxers halfway through the night. There is also the 70-year-old Ron Tabachnick who graced the party with his fringe leather jacket-wearing self.

Part two of the House of Dust summer festival is on Saturday, July 26 at Mojo Lounge with Burning Man veteran Elite Force.

Ofelia Legaspi is a freelance journalist looking to sell out to advertising to support this creative writing habit of hers. Follow her on Twitter: @OfeliaLegaspi.

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