Inside Book Club Radio: How a Group Chat Grew Into a Music Festival

Long before it was a manifesto-driven community with no-phones parties, cinematic YouTube sets and eclectic themes, Book Club Radio was simply a tight-knit crew of five who loved to dance.

“We called our group chat Book Club because if people asked us what we were up to, we’d say we have book club, but it was just us going out and dancing,” the crew tells EDM.com.

Jojo, Tinzo, Kevin, Claudia and Carlie would go out every weekend in New York, coordinating plans in their Book Club group chat. But after one too many nights packed like sardines on the dancefloor, they took a step away from mass-ticketed events and began hosting free, intimate house parties.

On a whim, Jojo prompted the group to record one of their get togethers. “My background is in film so we had all the equipment to record stuff,” Jojo says. “We watched a lot of YouTube mixes, so why not film one ourselves?”

And just like that, Book Club came to life with a few friends dancing to UK Garage in a living room. The no-frills set was played on a $300 DJ controller and a rig of home theater speakers.

Next, the crew started hopping from one friend’s apartment to another, throwing and filming invite-only Book Club “meetings” in rooftops, basements and living rooms across New York. As the parties grew larger, they felt it was important to curate a music-first atmosphere.

“When we’d invite people, we’d tell them to stay off their phones and come for the music,” Jojo explains. “But these were house parties and it’s hard to get people to change their mindset. At some point, we felt we needed to distill our language into to a few principles that we can push forward and make the whole process a lot simpler.”

That’s how their manifesto was born:

The Book Club crew felt these principles restored the essence of a proper dancefloor. They wanted people facing each other instead of the DJ, just like they did when they went out. And they wanted people to be present with the music instead of experiencing it through the lenses of their phones.

“We want Book Club to feel like a party scene out of a movie,” Tinzo explains. “When you watch sets on YouTube, it doesn’t really feel like that because everyone is facing the DJ.”

By always placing the decks flush against a wall, they leave no room for a crowd to form in front of the DJ at Book Club. The crew believes this is what makes Book Club feel cinematic. They point to a quote by house music icon Kerri Chandler that resonates with their manifesto: “People that go to a party for the atmosphere don’t understand that they are the atmosphere, so they have to make it themselves.”

Although they’ve had to remove people from their events for breaking the rules, they typically let people off with a warning. “If we see someone taking a picture, we ask them to instead look at their beautiful friends and live in the moment with them,” Claudia said. “This whole thing is going to be on YouTube and Jack [Book Club’s photographer] is going around taking pictures of everyone that we’ll post later anyways.”

Part of it, she added, is refraining from instant gratification: “If you want to bring a Polaroid, camcorder or your grandad’s old camera, that’s totally fine. As long as you’re not on your phone posting on Instagram.”

Ultimately, this creates a lot of anticipation for the day after a party, when attendees post everything from fisheye camcorder clips to blurry disposable snapshots on Book Club’s Discord. However, most of the effort upholding the manifesto happens before an event. That’s why the elusive Librarian Instagram account exists.

After their sets started blowing up on YouTube, the crew started to receive an influx of messages. People wanted to attend Book Club. “We can’t just be inviting strangers off the internet into our friends’ homes though,” Jojo pointed out. “So we created a separate Instagram account to protect our spaces and ensure the people who wanted to attend had the right reasons.”

This virtual vibe check was Book Club’s way of building an intentional community. “Welcoming people into someone’s home is so much more personal than a venue,” Jojo asserts. “There is no staff or security, so there’s a whole other level of trust that you have to have with the people around you.”

Even as Book Club grew beyond private homes into public venues, they kept The Librarian account active as a digital bouncer. However, as they’ve scaled, they admit “it’s not a perfect system.”

There’s no bot. It’s really just the five of them having to manage an endless stream of messages on the account. “Even some DJs who have eventually played our shows told us they never came to Book Club before because their messages got lost in the sauce,” Jojo shared.

Despite these challenges, the crew firmly believes in keeping their processes the same, including The Librarian, to ensure the energy of their grassroots movement doesn’t dissipate as Book Club’s fanbase grows.

But it’s not just the manifesto that makes Book Club special. It’s the quirky themes that give each edition of their monthly party series a distinct flair.

Butterfly houses, Y2K vampires, alien encounters, robot uprisings, Florida men, murder mysteries and 2010s EDM are just a few of the themes the crew has put together. Each is a world of its own: it’s tailored to the venue, the DJs curate mixes to fit the theme, the crowd dresses up for the part, and the backdrop is filled with larger-than-life props hand-built by the Book Club crew.

Their “Milk” party earlier this summer is a great example of how they bring a theme to life. It featured inflatable cows, a milk carton so big it dwarfed the crowd, and giant cow udders dangling from the ceiling on the dancefloor. “We like to bring out the camp and go weird and whacky,” Jojo beamed. “Book Club has to be fun.”

Stage installations and set pieces are a labor of love by Kevin, Carlie and Claudia. “The joke is that Kevin makes things strong and sturdy, then we make them look pretty,” Claudia said.

The trio’s individual skills in woodworking, design and painting spawned an eight-foot tall yeti for “Call Of The Yeti,” a six-foot UFO disco ball for “Alien Encounter,” a giant guitar for “Party Time! Excellent!” and 40 feet of glowing green Matrix code columns for “The Simulation.”

The music has to fit too. “We ask that DJs submit a mix so we can all listen to it together, then we invite people that we think will work with the theme,” Jojo said. “Everything—artists, decorations, drinks and outfits—has to be immersive. It’s like LARPing.”

For Jojo and Tinzo, who perform at every Book Club meeting, set preparation is akin to scoring a movie where the crowd is both the cast and the audience. Many of the themes are inspired by specific eras of film and—like their manifesto—movie scenes. For “Milk,” that meant morphing the dystopian atmosphere of A Clockwork Orange’s milk bar scene into a disco-funk DJ set.

Book Club’s world building has fueled a fandom that’s left the crew awe-struck. Tinzo’s DJ set at Book Club’s fourth meeting just hit 20 million views on YouTube a couple of months ago. At the time it was filmed, she was still learning how to DJ and felt very nervous before her set.

“‘Who’s going to see this?’” Claudia recalls telling Tinzo to calm her nerves. “We were posting these things thinking that we would just watch them later. We never thought 20 million people would watch a set we filmed in a friend’s basement.”

Seeing people actually embrace the manifesto and come dressed for the theme has been rewarding too. Like a costume department for a movie set, they put together a Pinterest board of outfit inspiration for every party they throw.

“When we did our first public show at a bar in Brooklyn, we were worried people wouldn’t dress up for the ‘80s prom theme,” Claudia admitted. “But as soon as we opened doors, there were women walking in wearing full ball gowns and men in tuxedos.”

That’s when the crew realized they were tapping into something people wanted. And the more people embraced it, the more wild Book Club got with their ideas, like hosting their “Murder On The Dancefloor” meeting in a New York mansion with a whodunnit woven into the DJ mixes through the night.

Now, they have their sights on their biggest idea yet: a music festival.

The idea for a music festival crystallized after Jojo and Tinzo’s first headlining U.S. tour, which made them realize the manifesto could scale. In cities like Santa Fe, Boston and Seattle—places they’d never even been—crowds embraced the manifesto without hesitation.

“We didn’t even know we had a following in some of these places,” Tinzo said. “But people brought the Book Club energy.”

Since more than 50% of people at a Book Club meeting are returning attendees, the crew believes a music festival is the best way to let new people experience Book Club. Although they’ll have plenty of “dancefloor monitors” at their festival, they aren’t particularly concerned about upholding the manifesto at scale. After two and a half years of growing the brand, they’re confident that people are familiar with their philosophy.

Taking place on October 4th and 5th in the sprawling complex of Industry City in Brooklyn, the circus-themed music festival is designed to feel like three Book Club parties happening at once, each with its own world to step into and rooms to get lost in. Plus, classic circus shenanigans like fire breathers, acrobats and funnel cake.

Curation for the inaugural Book Club festival is deeply personal to the crew. Among over 30 artists on the inaugural lineup are Chicago house pioneer Marshall Jefferson, Studio 54’s Nicky Siano and Todd Edwards, a mentor and frequent collaborator of Daft Punk.

“We have artists who’ve been doing this since the beginning of house music,” Tinzo gushed. “We wanted to pay respect and share them with our audience.”

Juggling day jobs, financial constraints and limited time, pulling a festival off in New York as an independent team hasn’t been easy. But partnerships with trusted collaborators like House of Yes have helped. “House of Yes does City of Gods [an epic Halloween music festival] at Industry City every year and they’ve been an amazing partner,” Jojo said. “They’re even letting us repurpose some of the decorations they use for City of Gods.”

Staying independent means more work, but it also means more control. No corporate sponsors dictating aesthetics, outside voices shaping the manifesto, or compromises on the quirks that give Book Club its charm. “We’re really protective of Book Club’s independence,” Tinzo says of the uncompromising decision that Book Club always has to remain independent. “If anybody else stepped in, it could be cool in a different way, but it wouldn’t carry the same spirit or intention.”

That fierce independence protects Book Club’s past and fuels their vision for the future. “We’ve talked about building our own sound system and running our own venue some day,” they shared about their bucket list.

If the past two years of Book Club’s meteoric rise have proven anything, it’s that the wildest ideas in the group chat might just be the ones worth chasing. You can get tickets for their first-ever music festival here.