I Partied With Diplo in a Sauna
Featured Image Photo Credit: @amandalaurena via Instagram
At 1:45 a.m., I walked out of the sauna into the cold air of Williamsburg, freshly showered, wet-haired, and feeling strangely awake. I texted my friend: “I just partied with Diplo in a sauna and then cold-plunged right after.” Probably the first person in my bloodline to say that.
When Daybreaker—the radical dance-party collective that has spent the last decade throwing alcohol and substance-free raves—revealed on Instagram that its secret guest for their Friday night sauna rave was Diplo, I exhausted every contact I had in the sauna world (one of my many ongoing side quests) trying to get a ticket. I failed. Then my friend Deborah, a longtime Daybreaker devotee, texted to say she had a spare. I said yes and I knew I was in for a night to remember.
On October 23, Daybreaker took over bathhouse Othership Williamsburg for HEATWAVE where roughly 100 people gathered for a night of sweating, ice plunges, and dancing with Diplo. The DJ’s identity had been kept under wraps until the morning of the event, when the announcement confirmed that the $84 ticket would buy you not a quiet night at the sauna, but a Diplo set in a room full of people wearing swimsuits.
I’ve been to Othership many times, but tonight it is behaving more like a nightclub than a sauna. The event email promised “fire, ice, and full-body liberation”. By 8:55, there’s already a line outside for bag check. I realize pretty quickly that this is going to be a night of firsts. I’ve never had my bag searched to get into a sauna.
Inside, DJ Eddie Tyler is working the decks with effortless precision turning the tea room into a dance floor while electrolytes and coconut water replace what would normally be the bar. Before the music really begins, groups squeeze into the sauna for guided “landings.” For someone who doesn’t regularly go to Othership, the whole thing sounds a little surreal but bear with me: shoulder to shoulder, damp knee to damp knee, breathing slowly with strangers while a guide leads us through different breathing patterns under bright LED lights. At various points, we’re told to raise our hands and sway side to side as the guide tosses snowballs infused with eucalyptus oil onto the sauna rocks. It is part meditation, part soul-cycle core, part extremely hot group ritual—and somehow the pregame for this sober night.
In another era, house and EDM came with chemical add-ons: ecstasy in the warehouse, molly at the festival, a $25 beer in the field. Tonight, the substances have been swapped for heat, breath, cold water and electrolytes. The rush comes from the contrast itself: 190-degree sauna, ice-cold plunge, the adrenaline jolt of hitting the water. For the first hour or so, the dance floor keeps emptying and refilling. People disappear into the sauna, emerge dripping, throw themselves into the cold plunge, then wander back toward the music, pink-faced and half-dressed.
Then, around 10, the sauna and plunge stop being a revolving door as people squeeze into whatever pocket of floor they can find, pressed shoulder to shoulder, dancing hard in their swimsuits, really letting loose. Three musicians are posted near the DJ, riffing over the beat with trumpets and other brass, improvising as the crowd gets louder. The night was billed as phone-free, and, for the most part, people actually complied—which was refreshing. What made it notable was how small the room was: there were roughly ten cameras set up around the space to film the set. At certain points, with cameras pointed into the crowd from every angle, it felt like I’d wandered onto an MTV set. (I think a recording of the whole set will soon surface online.)
At 11 p.m., Diplo finally arrives with two security guards: huge guys in black polos, black pants, and water shoes. Water shoes. I have no idea if they knew what kind of security assignment they were walking into. There is no backstage or barricade separating Diplo from everyone else. His route to the decks is straight through the crowd. Then Diplo appears behind them in blue swim trunks, a bucket hat and a towel. It is hard to take the machinery of celebrity entirely seriously when the security detail is wearing water shoes and everyone around them is wet and half-naked.
He begins and the room is bouncing. People are dancing in their swimsuits, the saxophone and trumpet players riff over the beat beside Diplo, sweating almost as much as the crowd. A few minutes, you stop noticing whether it is your own sweat or whose sweat is on you. I guess sweating at a Diplo show is a must, regardless of venue.
“It’s hot,” Diplo says.
He is about three feet away from us, so we can see exactly how hot he is. But the music doesn’t miss a beat. He closes with “Let Me Cook.” Hands up in the air, hands down in the air, the whole room locked in. The saxophone climbs back over the beat. The lights go orange, then blue. When the last drop lands, Diplo does not retreat to a green room. He walks straight from the decks to the cold plunge, and the crowd, and water-shoes wearing security follows him.
In a kitchen, one might refer to this as blanching. You boil something, then shock it in ice water so it stops cooking and keeps its color. Tonight, we are all vegetables, Diplo included. By 12:30, half the people who came for Diplo dipped. The founders of Daybreaker open up a circle and ask us to hold hands. Someone passes around a silver tray of grapes. Then a card appears: “What are you cooking in your life?” At a sober party, the grape feels like wine that never happened. One person shares that they’re celebrating nine years sober. I’m still holding a grape, a stranger’s hand, and wondering how I ended up here: barefoot, damp, and standing in a Williamsburg sauna after midnight, somehow feeling like I’ve been put through the heat and come out different.
The sauna isn’t even the strangest room music has moved into this year. It seems to be a trend. I mean, roughly nine hours after he climbs out of that cold plunge, Diplo is due at a start line in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, leading thousands of people on a 5K before DJing the finish line at his “Run Club Experience”. And Diplo is hardly the only artist experimenting with what happens when music leaves the traditional concert setting. In January, Fred again.. brought the breathing fabric roof from his tour—a piece by artist Boris Acket—to a soundstage in Queens, where fans lay on yoga mats beneath it, sipping tea as they listened to Secret Life. As concerts become seas of phones, artists are pushing back with tech-free experiential listening parties. Phoebe Bridgers premiered Lost Weekend in 40 phone-free planetariums. Rosalía turned a former bank in Williamsburg into a listening room for LUX wherephones were sealed into pouches.
Music is finding new ways to bring people together, making the experience of being there a priority instead of the music itself. The stage-and-pit arrangement is giving way to experiences you lie in, walk through, sweat inside, or plunge into. What matters is less where the artist stands, or if they even show up, than what everyone in the room is doing together. These events turn listening into a shared ritual—and I believe this shift suggests that the future of live music may be less about watching an artist perform than finding new ways to experience music with other people.