LAVAGXRL houses the wares at Warehouse XI on Saturday, 2 December 2023.

Velvet Dreaming, KSRMR, and Borboleta keep the laptops popping on the four-stack bill.

What happens after the bouquet is thrown? At Warehouse XI, a space in Union Square promoted for weddings and more, pretty much whatever.

It’s an “industrial, chic, modern event space” used for pop-ups, bar mitzvahs, and on Saturday night, music shows.

You know the kind of place. Walls of exposed brick painted white, epoxy resin smeared across the concrete floor, and furnishings from the Derelicte collection cast like Yahtzee dice through the interior.

Lots of places to spend your money in Union Square, eh?

Between the restaurants, ax throwing establishments, and live music offerings (The Jungle, Sally O’Brien’s, Union Tavern, a local brewery, even a lutherie and more), it’s a bustling hive of surplus income disposal.

All the destination needs is a functioning Green Line to get there and back and we’re golden.

Borboleta

It’s Borboleta! Sometimes Rochelle Bonamie.

Jazzy space lounge vocals with minimalist honey-toned, six-string fretwork on the backing track. Shades of trip hop as the artist segued from jazz sing-song to speak-sing rhyming.

Not sure whether the moniker makes a difference music-wise. You know, how some artists use different noms de guerre to inspire different creative approaches to music making?

Didn’t the vanilla country singer mega star Garth Brooks have an alter ego called Chris Gaines? Which looked like a vanilla country singer mega star’s idea of an emo rocker. Gaines was a “fictional, Australian rock star.” But don’t tell Garth because he’s a method actor.

KSRMR

It was a tale of two halves to this set. The experimental electro popper KSRMR dove into the deep end with a high concept noise assault. A real change of pace after the sweet timbre of Borboleta’s set. She walked it back a bit by midset as the songs adopted more conventional pop structures – singing too! The solo artist likes to keep the Category 5 industrial caterwauling in her back pocket as a kind of avant garde propaedeutic to the less demanding numbers.

Velvet Dreaming

Perhaps the dance party zenith of the night. Velvet Dreaming targets a specific crowd response, and is pretty shameless about extracting it in the most fun way. It’s elevated houseparty music, conjuring up the exhilarating free-for-all, dance-on-couch energy. Salted with a uniform visual aesthetic, peppered with shelf-stable choreography to produce a punchy beverage. A Hawaiian Punch.

LAVAGXRL

Headliner LAVAGXRL celebrated the release of her new album Faith In Chaos. She’s a solo popper with lyrics that explore the highways and byways of love, loss, and redemption. If that sounds too heavy, no worries, the beat never strays too far from the club. Dance your cares away.

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