No Parking on the Dance Floor: Amanda Brown and the 100% Silk Crew Make You Actually Dance

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Amanda Brown of LA Vampires and Daniel Martin-McCormick of Ital rock a dank Polish club.

M Dinner House was a Japanese jazz club nestled into a strip of bodegas and windowless brick facades atop the Hollywood Freeway. Once a week, the club hosted Grown, a lurid soiree soundtracked by the best chill-out, house and bass music in Los Angeles. Top-shelf talent spun for appreciative aficionados.

When it was shut down last summer, Amanda Brown's 100% Silk, a boutique off-shoot of her vanguard experimental label Not Not Fun, emerged as the new home for retro-fetishistic dance heads. Not two weeks after the demise of M, many of its regulars jammed Hollywood's Freak City for the label's first eponymous party. Now, following a successful international tour with Silk artists, Brown's back, and throwing the second edition at Little Temple tonight.

Brown says she's inspired by the legendary parties at New York's Paradise Garage and San Francisco's Trocadero, where there was no parking on the dance floor, and the talent behind the booth responded in kind. "We're trying to explore actual dancing -- instead of dance music that people stand around to -- by making it housey, classic, luxurious, and pleasurable," says Brown.

Really, the 100% Silk aesthetic is closer to that of Factory Records, the legendary Manchester label that turned a lifestyle -- freaky dancing and incestuous artistic collaboration -- into a business venture.

Last July, the label hosted their first party at Freak City, a clothing store-cum-nightspot whose dissonant interior design (comically large off-brown support poles, flickering green plastic trees, digital b-boy threads on the racks) resembles the Philip Johnson-inspired furnishings that crowded the floor of The Hacienda, the nightclub owned by the label.

Musically, many of the Silk artists pick up where the acid house and Manchester's late '80s/early '90s Madchester scenes left off. Consider the talent tonight. Magic Touch, the solo project of Damon Palermo of San Francisco's jungle brothers Mi Ami, might be Silk's answer to the Happy Mondays, those goofballs who color soundtracks with a palette of canned piano settings. SFV Acid, a resident DJ at Grown, is the post-punk band Durutti Column, an enigmatic student of the game, tweaking out on familiar grooves. Pharoahs are Section 25, chin-stroking conceptualists taking New Wave shimmer to taut, krauty heights.