A club night dedicated to a hardcore, niche musical subgenre would be lucky to last three years in a hectic city like Los Angeles. But 30? That route makes the Das Bunker industrial club about as old as the original D Line.
It's impossible to imagine the Los Angeles electronic scene without Das Bunker, a traveling party founded in Long Beach in 1996 by DJ and promoter John Giovanazzi to champion brutalist club music. While the scene had its ups and downs for decades, today it is back in full force among young crowds. Bands like Health can sell out the Palladium, electronic body music thrives on dance floors, and Nine Inch Noize was a favorite at Coachella.
The party is now a fixture at Catch One in Mid-City, and Giovanazzi has been celebrating the club's milestone all year with sets from tough European veterans like Das Ich and younger acts like Spike Hellis and Kontravoid. He spoke to The Times about Los Angeles' tense climate for cutting-edge nightlife, what Gen Z wants from extreme noise and how to be a good custodian of underground music history.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Thirty years is an incredibly long time. Are you aware of anything that has happened like this in the nightlife of Los Angeles?
Not precisely. Even at the national level, there isn't much. But the environment is very different now than it used to be. Even festivals have been in a very strange situation in recent years. For the anniversary, I didn't want to charge a triple-digit ticket price for a big party. It became obvious to me that the plan was to do a series of events that would highlight different styles and artists that we have focused on over the years. Not everything is for everyone. In this way, we felt like we could do something for everyone, but not at the same time.
Being able to go back and do things in our original location. [Que Sera] in Long Beach has been something we've been talking about for years. The place is almost exactly the same too, if you look at the old photos. I think the only difference is that you can't smoke inside anymore.
What was the climate like for industrial music in Los Angeles when you started in the mid-'90s?
Back then, it was on the decline, which is why we ended up starting it in the first place. Labels were dropping artists left and right, and artists who had already made a name for themselves were making the transition to metal. There was a huge wave of artists out of Europe who were really great and who barely received any attention here. The clubs didn't play them, the record stores barely sold them.
Was there ever a moment when you thought the club had run its course?
There was definitely a moment around 2007 where we thought, “The current wave of popularity of this material is not going to be sustainable.” The trend that alarmed me the most was that young people stopped coming out of the closet. We always keep track of the ages of people who attended our events. We were over 18 at the time and it got to the point where we couldn't get anyone fresh out of high school to come to the club. That was a big red flag to me that we needed to dig deeper.
But that was just at the time when the clandestine EBM [electronic body music] The scene started coming out, which for me was very exciting. It was the first time we had bands like that that were actually from Los Angeles. Previously we always had to import these artists. So we redoubled our efforts to promote that scene as much as possible. Our core audience wasn't used to that, but I think the only reason we still exist is because we made that pivot.
What are young people discovering today in this music that is exciting and dangerous?
It feels like you discovered something that is not available to everyone. Almost like a scavenger hunt: “Hey, I discovered this in school. There's this whole underground scene related to this, and this history and this tradition, and a lot of things that you can explore and make your own path.” I see people getting excited about these bands that were never popular in their heyday, which is cool, but also fun. You see things trending on TikTok and you think, “Why this band?”
There is a lot of history and lore in this scene for curious young fans.
We lost a lot of bands that were stepping stones to where we are now. When MySpace went away, there were thousands of bands where that was the only place they released music, and that just disappeared. I think there's a place for someone to step in and tell that story, but I don't think it's me. I need a scene historian.
Much of this music now lives on the Internet. How to keep Das Bunker thriving as a physical presence in Los Angeles?
When we thought Catch One was going to close, they remodeled it into a much simpler modular space. I try to schedule things that I know will bring out bodies. Our noise room is probably our signature feature, which is based on what we focused on in the late '90s. It's subsidized by the larger event, but it's our most unique attribute. We tried to preserve the old-time vibe with that, because it's a taste of a genre that's not even streaming: “Come experience this that you can't even find online.”
There aren't many full lifestyle fashion and music scenes like industrial ones anymore. Is that a victim of the Internet?
Personally, I don't think many lifestyle subcultures still exist, because you no longer need to immerse yourself in them to discover them. It used to be that you'd find a goth song you liked, buy the magazines and go to the club to listen to the new music, and then you'd start dressing like everyone else there and assimilate. YouTube pretty much killed that for most subcultures aside from Juggalos.
The scene lost a founding legend in Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb not long ago. What is your role as a guardian of this music that keeps its history alive?
I think the best way to do this is to create a platform. We just did a show with Das Ich, who are one of the strangest bands ever, in my opinion, they've been at this since the early '90s. We almost lost them when the singer suffered a brain aneurysm a couple of years ago. So being able to host them was something very important. We did something with Dirk Ivens right before the pandemic that was another: Hey, this is the guy responsible for two-thirds of the styles of music you guys listen to. “You should come see it.”
More generally, what's the vibe like in L.A.'s underground nightlife these days? You're clearly doing it right, but you hear how It's difficult for people to buy tickets.
It's a little scary. Another promoter I was talking to said that now it seems like at every event you're playing the video game on hard mode. The stakes are much higher with all the costs. It's a lot more rewarding and feels good when everything goes well, and there are a lot of small places that take risks. You can't just do the same thing over and over and expect people to show up.
