Kickstart my Heart: Decentralized Dance Party

20,000 ghetto blasters can't be wrong

Kickstart my Heart is a semi-regular blog series on Portland Kickstarter projects we don't hate.

Tom Kuzma and Gary Lachance are a couple of Canucks who, as the Vengaboys used to say, like to party. They've been throwing impromptu public dance parties around that country above the United States for two-and-a-half years, powered only by an iPod, a radio transmitter and, sometimes, a Nintendo Power Glove. The amplification comes courtesy of the guests, who bring boom boxes and all tune in to the DJ's FM radio broadcast.

---Now they're headed south of the border for a U.S. tour, hoping to bring Decentralized Dance Parties to cities across the nation, with a stop in Portland on Dec. 28. And they're looking for $999 to help get them here. WW spoke to Lachance last week about what to expect:

WW: Tell us a bit about Decentralized Dance Parties and how they come about?
Tom and I grew up together and moved to Vancouver about six years ago. I had an old boom box from my dad and got my first iPod 2006. I noticed there were inputs on the back, and we could plug it in, so we started taking this boom box everywhere we went, crashing parties running around at night, everywhere we went we'd take it with us. We used to do a thing called the midnight mass bike ride, where we'd go out with about 100 people in the middle of the night and rip around on our bikes just partying and having adventures, and we'd always take the boom box with us.

Then one night another guy had a boom box and eventually both of our iPods died and we tuned them both into the same radio station and created a really cool distributed sound effect and then I had the idea of "What if we got 100 stereos together?" and we got our on transmitter and became our own radio station and a few years later, had the time and energy and resources to start putting it together. That was about two and a half years ago. And we haven't looked back. The first six months we grew from 20 people to like 20,000 showed up for the [Vancouver] Olympic Party. It's all just totally word of mouth, Facebook, YouTube videos.

What kind of music do you play?


So why are you taking it on the road to the states?
Con Bro Chill
Do the parties just take place in the street?
Have you had trouble with the cops?
How long do they go?
Do you make any money out of this or is it a labor of love?
here

WWeek 2015

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