Looking down at his checklist and after delivering a somewhat serious warning about the cannons of pulsating smoke that were set to explode expeditiously during Tinashe’s set, the belugued, grey-clad security guard noted that, at precisely 1:38 a.m., a fountain of condoms would be set to explode into the crowd. “It’s in here as the ‘Durex moment,’” he said. “You don’t want to miss that.”
Beyond the $6 bottles of water and the coming canon of condoms, there was a lot not to be missed at the fourth incarnation of LadyLand, an evening-long music festival that is almost as old as the cavernous former steel fabrication shop that an Austrian EDM promoter named Billy Bildstein has been inspired to make work as a “prehistorical amphitheater” based on a Wu-Tang Clan music video. And years later, his Brooklyn Mirage still has some of the charm that still evades the more corporate, similarly named rivals that dot the former warehouses of East Williamsburg, like AEG’s Brooklyn Steel or the slightly smaller and newer Brooklyn Made, a project of a former Live Nation executive. The open-air club’s sheer bigness still gives it a kind of monumental beauty – the number doled around when it opened gave it a capacity of 6,000, second in Brooklyn only to Barclays. It’s a little Berlin and It’s a little Red Rocks and it gives its center stage a transfixing grace.
Early into the night, the once-“RuPaul” star Vanessa Vanjie yells “Love you! Deuces! Let’s get turnt up!” She had finished a tight dance set, an athletic romp that involved a considerable cartwheel or two through a trap-pop mashup of hits and was now pouring shots of tequila into the Mirage’s front row. She wore a one-piece that donned the logo of Pumps, an East Williamsburg strip club that, like the festival itself, quietly reopened last year. The local branding was comforting and seemed to solidify the small festival’s connection to the neighborhood’s nightlife scene.
