Demon Nights

ongoing · thursdays, 11pm to 4am

venue: Maison Nur 217 Bowery, NYC · created by Nur Khan
role: VJ / Visual Artist
with: Diablo (Sebastian Baldeon) & friends
tools: TouchDesigner, MIDI, audio routing

every thursday i build custom audio-reactive generative visuals from scratch for demon nights at maison nur (217 bowery), the downtown room created by nur khan. dj and producer diablo brought the party to new york after building one of la's most talked-about underground residencies, and it runs 11pm to 4am for a crowd of artists, creatives, founders, and tastemakers. the work plays live across the full ceiling above the dance floor and reacts to frequency bands, percussive hits, and how hard the room is going. i wrote and run the whole TouchDesigner network myself.

04 clips

01 diablo + friends

How it works

every Thursday i build the visuals from scratch in TouchDesigner and run them live across the full ceiling above the dance floor. they react to frequency bands, percussive hits, and how hard the room is going. i wrote and operate the whole network myself. TouchDesigner reads a live audio device feed and splits it into frequency bands: kick, low, mid, and high. each band drives a different visual parameter. every song hits differently, though; some tracks have a soft kick, others compress the highs, some run loud all night. so through the set i tune the detection thresholds by hand in real time, raising the kick floor so a quiet track still triggers geometry, pulling back the mid sensitivity when a dense mix starts firing everything at once. if the audio isn't being read cleanly, the visuals fall apart, so that calibration never stops.

02 diablo + friends

the set, mid-night

the system ran the whole set, changing as each section of music changed. this clip is from the mid-point, with the crowd on the dance floor below and the ceiling lit up overhead.

03 diablo + friends

the drop

the drop is where the system hits hardest: parameters pegged to low-frequency amplitude slam to full scale and release with the tail, so from the dance floor you feel it before you read it.

04 diablo + friends

close up

the geometry up close: particle systems and feedback loops that look like texture from the dance floor. at this angle you can see how the whole composition is built.