Reg Zehner, known as “Love Higher,” DJs at The Summit on Nov. 12, 2022. Credit: Courtesy of Cameron Granger
Local DJs will collaborate for a night of experimental club music at Skylab Gallery Friday.
Skylab — an independently run gallery and performance space located at 57 E. Gay St. in downtown Columbus — will host DJs Amal, Deionyx, Noel, n/shrike and Love Higher Friday at 10 p.m. Trent Mosley, one of Skylab’s event coordinators, said the event is a part of “Nesting” — a series of shows that showcase Skylab’s resident DJs — and “Errant Forms,” another show series that prioritizes more avant-garde dance music.
Mosley said the gallery began the Nesting series in 2023, as it was trying to ramp up its number of shows. He said the idea behind the series was to give DJs a consistent space in Columbus to play and connect with each other.
“Most of the people I’m friends with are DJs who were looking for an outlet or for an opportunity to DJ in a space that’s very much about the music,” Mosley said. “Because we’re not a bar, the audience we get is always there for the music. And we go late, which is something that’s pretty distinct about our parties.”
Reg Zehner, a DJ who will perform Friday under the stage name of Love Higher, said they originally founded Errant Forms in 2021 as a radio show for Verge.FM, a Columbus-based internet radio station known for its cultural writing and community events.
Zehner said after Verge.FM stopped broadcasting in October 2022, Errant Forms officially became a party series, providing a space for local DJs to collaborate with artists from East Coast club hotspots including Baltimore, New York and New Jersey, where Zehner currently lives.
“I started Errant Forms in December of 2023 as a night where DJs can play whatever they want, where it doesn’t have to be the most easily accessible music or what people usually hear in the clubs,” Zehner said. “I wanted to give people free rein to experiment or play something different in their sets.”
Zehner said the inspiration for Errant Forms came from curator and theorist Naomi Beckwith’s 2015 lecture at The New School in New York City, titled “Curating The Errant Forms.” During the lecture, she discussed representation in art-making and abstraction as a way to create new ways of seeing the world.
“[Beckwith] defines ‘errant forms’ as these artworks, especially in the line of Black artworks, that couldn’t be digested as easily as something that’s more representational,” Zehner said. “The idea — being a Black artist and making artwork, just trying to make things digestible for capitalism or white people — is very interesting.”
Zehner said they wanted Errant Forms to reflect the parties and shows they attended in Columbus while studying studio art at the Columbus College of Art & Design, or CCAD, from 2016 to 2020.
City events organized by underground dance collectives like Bodies United In Love + Dance and BLVCK ICE at CCAD — along with the research and writing Zehner did for Verge.FM’s internet fanzine, called VRRG — gave them a greater appreciation for Columbus’s club scene and the history behind it.
“I’m glad I went out and saw those parties because that is a sound that just doesn’t quite exist anymore,” Zehner said. “Club music always is amorphous, and it changes so much. Errant Forms is like the child of those streams of club music parties, for the younger kids really trying to rip the walls off the building.”
Noel Hackman, a DJ and musician who has been playing parties in Columbus since 2011, said he feels inspired by Errant Forms and the new wave of club music emerging from the city. Hackman, a founding member of Bodies United In Love + Dance — which disbanded at the end of 2019 — said he will perform a set Friday night under his stage name, Noel.
“It’s really cool to have that kind of scene going right now, where it’s very vibrant, it’s very eclectic and you get a lot of different styles,” Hackman said. “I think people are really branching out and trying new things, which is incredible to see.”
Hackman said his sets blend various styles, regions and eras of club music, mixing ambient and noise music with dubstep, grime — a bass-heavy, London-based genre that combines hip-hop with syncopated U.K. garage drum programming or jungle breakbeats — and techno.
“That was kind of how I started out, incorporating a lot of different styles not really familiar to dance floors themselves,” Hackman said. “I was seeing how I could put that into a set and try to push people a little bit further with my sets.”
Zehner said their DJ sets move between international styles including Brazilian baile funk and South African gqom — a minimalist, percussive and bass-heavy style of house music that originated in Durban — as well as regional styles from the East Coast and Midwest. They said their genre-hopping approach to DJing is a direct impact of their experience with the Columbus’s club music scene.
“I feel like in Ohio, people have this odd element of freedom in the way they mix between genres while they’re DJing,” Zehner said. “You can tell like, ‘Oh yeah, that DJ is from Ohio,’ because they’re not just mixing one style of music.”
Zehner said Amal — a member of the Washington D.C. dance music trio Black Rave Culture, as well as owner and operator of record label Hochi Runs and one of Friday’s performers — meshes well with Errant Forms’ energetic, experimental musical approach.
“It’s definitely booty-shaking music,” Zehner said. “He collaborates with a lot of rappers and other producers, but it’s definitely club music — things that would get people hyped. I think it’s gonna be a good time.”
More information about the event, including how to purchase tickets, can be found on the Resident Advisor event listing. Tickets for the event are $10.
