Partly in the Head

The 'silent noise party' made a subdued entry in Delhi's nightlife.

Blue Frog on a Friday night is usually filled to the rafters by the city's musical cognoscenti. So, we expected the introduction of the "silent noise" party to the city, which had received rave reviews in Goa, to generate a lot of buzz (no pun intended).

Multiple DJs play at the same time but there's no music bursting through the walls of such parties. Revelers are handed a set of cordless headphones upon entry, and they can choose which DJ they want to listen to, and switch DJs by changing the channels on the headphones. On Friday, guests had a choice between Ozgur's chill-out house music and Ankytrixx's resonating EDM. The concept was simple — party-goers indulge their individual musical tastes in a common space. Like in a democracy, some elements worked, some didn't.

While we found sauntering around the club trailing a pair of headphones to be a novel experience, our fellow hedonists were not as easily impressed. Perhaps it was because Delhi's populace needs conversation to get the party started but the usual flood of people to Blue Frog that night ebbed to a small trickle. There was a distinct paucity of punters, with conversation filling the vacuum that the music usually occupies in the performance space.

The party that started around 10.30 pm was over by 1.30 am. During this time, a common complaint was that the headphones were "just not loud enough". We agree; if the headphones had worked right, we could have ignored the conversation around us. Hardly the most silent of nights.

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