Dancing in the Dark: Weird Touch Showcases the Strength of Denver Nightlife

The all-vinyl dance party Weird Touch turned nine in August, which may as well be a lifetime in nightlife years. Plenty of local staples that were thriving when it started are long gone (chicken-and-waffles night at the Beauty Bar in Cap Hill comes to mind), but Weird Touch will ring in New Year's Eve as it has for almost a decade.

A resident at the Roxy on Broadway (then called Syntax) since it began, the event has endured largely because it nails the essential musical alchemy required to capture a longstanding audience, merging different genres to create a unique but recognizable sound. For Weird Touch, that's a darker, but still very danceable, take on disco, indie dance, house and techno. Founder Matthew Brown could happily discuss the ins and outs of that magical transformation all day.

"Generally speaking, we're playing deeper, darker stuff," he says. "There's something about the darker side of disco. A lot of the disco edits can sometimes have versions that just have a real edge to them. I don't really know a better way to put it. It kind of gets away from the real sparkly, happy top-forty disco and it gets a bit darker and heavier and deeper. ... Same thing with house: I like the stuff that's deeper and grimier and...gets under your skin and messes with your mind a little bit.

"The whole thing is, we're trying to create a certain vibe, and we'll use any tool at our disposal to do that," he adds. "We'll play !!!, but then we'll play the Cure and then we'll play a house track. But if you pick the right ones of those three genres, indie dance music and goth — if you want to call the Cure goth — and then house, they work together if you pick the right songs. It's more about an atmosphere and a vibe than anything. " Brown goes by Fancy Matthew behind the wheels of steel, and has decades of experience filling dance floors. He was part of Weird Touch's original DJ crew along with friends Shannon Kelly and Tyler Snow. The tight-knit group bonded over music for a long time prior to the project's inception; Brown and Kelly met while working in radio as students at the University of Colorado Boulder in the ’90s. By the early 2010s, both were pursuing full-time non-music gigs (Brown also runs the FM clothing store, fka Fancy Tiger, on Broadway), but they hadn't lost their love of discovering interesting tunes and occasionally sharing them with Denver's night people. In 2013, their mutual friend and fellow DJ Snow was managing what is now Adrift Tiki Bar, and brought the pair in to play records on the regular.

"We were actually throwing this once-a-month party in this back room they had...calling it Backroom Sessions," says Brown. "We had to bring in a sound system and all that, and it was on a Thursday, I think, so it wasn't a proper weekend party, but it was cool. It was a lot of fun to kind of transform this back room into a club for the night. ... We liked what we were playing."

When Snow changed gigs, the crew decided to try to keep the party going. In fact, losing the "house band" status posed a good opportunity to find a bigger room — one where the three DJs didn't have to provide their own speakers. Shannon reached out to a friend, entrepreneur Jonathan Spitz, who had recently opened Syntax, and he agreed to give them a shot at a monthly party. They were joined in the venture by Brown's wife, Annie Geimer, who stepped in as unofficial manager, booker, drink buyer and "den mother," a role she still fills today.

"We were building a party that didn't exist for us," says Brown. "Most of the parties were very genre-specific: There was a soul party, there was a house party, there was a techno party." With Weird Touch, Brown, Kelly and Snow wanted to offer something much more eclectic and personal. "We all listened to much more than just one genre, so we just decided to have a party [in which] the genre wasn't attached to the branding in any way. It was kind of just like...you're gonna hear what Tyler and Shannon and Matthew want to play," Brown continues. "We thought: Let's just give people what we want to hear and see what happens — and it worked out really, really well."

In truth, they really weren't interested in doing anything else. "It wasn't one of those parties that we would have shifted," Brown says. "If we did what we liked to do and people were like, 'Eh, don't like it,' we weren't going to go like, 'Okay, what do they want to hear?' We were just going to do exactly what we want to hear."

The bet on their own taste and expertise paid off. Fans of their particular brew kept showing up — at first the elders of the scene, in their thirties and forties, and then increasingly youthful party-goers, especially recently. Although the DJs were never flashy about their steadily growing success (this article marks the first time they've spoken with the press), a lot of grassroots organizing went on behind the scenes.

"We built it very much like how we approached the music; we were very intentional," Brown says. In the early days, they would even send physical invitations through the mail with free admission to friends and local figures in the art world.
"We would send them to people that we thought should be there, that we really wanted to be at that party...people that we knew personally and were like, 'You'll like this, maybe you haven't heard about it.'" Regular attendees included former MCA director Adam Lerner and Wunder Werkz founder Jon Hartman.

Along with its signature sound and cultivating a who's-who crowd, Weird Touch has made other canny moves, namely keeping the venue as dark as the music, as well as affordable. The lighting in the club is tweaked to get it just right for the DJs' vibe — by killing most of it. "I've always liked the ambience of an ’80s goth party," says Brown. "It's really dark and really smoky." And prices have barely budged from $5 presale tickets and $10 at the door, though New Year's Eve and Halloween have become exceptions.

Despite the overall consistency of the team's vision, there have also been a few changes over the years, including a slight shifting of the original crew. Kelly left to concentrate on solo projects in 2019, and after soldiering on as a duo with Brown and Snow, Weird Touch added another talented local DJ, friend and fan Nico Tobón, to the team in the summer. The collective is currently packing its crates full of surprises for New Year's, as well as getting a new lighting setup ready to debut. And after that? Buying more records, of course.

"At the end of the day, it's never been about, 'How do we monetize this to the nth degree?'" says Brown. "It's always been about, 'How do we make enough money to keep buying records?' Everyone just puts all the money we make back into records."

Weird Touch New Year's Eve Edition, Sunday, December 31, Roxy on Broadway, 554 South Broadway. Admission is $25-$30. Tickets are available at roxyonbroadway.thundertix.com.