* “Host layer”: greeting newcomers + making it safe to arrive alone mattered more than we expected.
* Curation as governance: coherent music changes how people behave in the room.
* Offline outreach outperformed posting: visiting local businesses in person built trust faster than Instagram.
* Scale changes the social physics; we stayed small on purpose.
Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.
Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
https://sydneyvalette.bandcamp.com/ https://coppia.bandcamp.com/
Aha, I recognise this as a direct translation of what I used to see DJs and club promoters writing in GBG and Sthlm — ses i dimman!
"Vi ses i röken och dimman! "
It actually means something specific. We tend to use a smoke machine a lot on our nights, one time the police showed up because they thought the place was on fire. The symbols at the end signifies the electricity of nights and the headphones is of course a reference to our social media headphone walks.
This is fixed catchphrase we use in all our communications.
Best of luck going forward.
Strong spring lineup. Tonight is Hidden Lines, end of Feb Sydney Valette (Paris), and 20 March Liminal Project (UK) + Yugoslavia (ES) with Inåt Bakåt Records. On 11 April there’s a one-day festival in Norrköping (Kallsup, Poloklubben, Zack Zack Zack, etc.).
We’ve been experimenting a bit with how much we pre-announce (small room, and we don’t want to spread people too thin), but the schedule on the site is the best place to check. Instagram is our main outreach: @kolibrinkpg
The Show HN part is the site + media (so people can see the scale/atmosphere), and the thing we’re trying to share is the operating model: how you get strangers to show up alone, feel safe, and come back, without big budgets.
> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.
But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.
Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world
Maria is the creative force and writes Swedish very well. We used ChatGPT as a bouncing board to translate/tighten the English and get the story across. The piece reflects what we do, but in hindsight it probably ended up a bit over-polished.
Happy to answer questions.
The paragraph when I stopped reading:
> What we built isn’t an app. It’s a repeatable local format: a standing night where strangers become regulars, centred on music rather than networking.