ATM is the Philadelphia collective breaking club music boundaries

Dj Haram opens with an Abdul Kadir set, actively handling hardware and software for hardstyle-like drones that are driven into ever grittier versions of themselves. Her metronomic rhythms combined with doom-brandished synths push the set forward into a retrofitted idea of techno – danceable, just in reverse. Despite her knack for experimentation being at the fore, the crowd peer on with interest, chatting to each other and Haram herself. She converses with the audience between suites, explaining what she’s doing and why, and they respond with questions and friendly jabs. ATM takes the notion of experimental music at face value and, as a response, everyone in attendance is completely in agreement, willing to travel the distance with the squad.

“I feel like experimental is a word I use to tell people that they have to adjust the expectations that they would usually bring to a dance party/club night,” Dj Haram says. ATM is an environment in which performers utilize the space in whatever way they please with a hope of expanding their audience’s understanding of what can be played in a night club. But don’t get it twisted; New Jersey-raised Haram is versed in bangin’ club and lawd knows will draw for UK funky without giving you a second’s notice. ATM pushes to the outer limit and parties there ‘til the lights come up. It’s completely DIY, an incubator for new expressions of music as well as a safe space for a crowd made up largely of people of colour and people who identify as LGBTI.

Being a self-proclaimed work in progress, ATM is an “ongoing effort” and platform that enables what the collective call “relatively unrestricted expression”. DJ Haram suggests that the ATM model is scrappy, but tactical in its execution: “We negotiate resources and hold space for each other as a crew and as a party and scene.” They invite fellow Philly natives like Yung Nila, precolumbian and Javascript to play and make links in nearby Baltimore, New Jersey and New York, bringing through club DJs and performance artists like Ase Manual, SHYBOI, Killbourne, DJ Kala and Noelle Tolbert.

One of this evening's special guests is Femmesurrection, who comes on after the Abdul Kadir set. She creates gnarled Musique Concrète full of symbolic samples, a cappellas and loops that dominates the space in sheer volume.

While dancing/absorbing ATM, it's clear that the sound of the outside filters into the party. Disruptive police sirens and mediated blasts of noise cut through and bleed into the kind of ubiquitous pop songs that get blasted out of passing car windows or from tinny speakers hung from the ceilings of liquor stores. The environment inside Dahlak is reminiscent of Burial’s stark and short-breathed warning in the opening of the episodic “Loner” track: “There’s something out there.”