Meet the Halifax DJ celebrating the city’s underground dance scene

Taylor Mooney remembers the first underground dance party she attended. The Prince Edward Island-born electronic/house DJ had recently moved to Halifax from Ottawa, when she got an invite to a secret gig that a friend was hosting. Even now, a few years later, she won’t say where exactly the gig went down. (“Can’t blow up the spot, right?” Mooney says.) It was a hush-hush kind of invite: For one thing, the province’s COVID-19 restrictions were still in effect at the time, and it was the kind of party that was almost certainly bound to break after-hours noise bylaws in addition to any limits on people gathered in one space. But the music was hard to beat. And the community, too: a group of “sound nerds” and queer folk who would organize clandestine house-music parties and gather in a closely guarded number of shops, warehouses and bars around the city, tucked away from scrutiny, to dance and listen to music until dawn arrived.

To Mooney, it felt like a scene begging for its story to be told.

“It’s a small city, and it’s punching above its weight in terms of experimental dance music,” she says, speaking in a video call with The Coast. There was a DIY ethos Mooney saw around her. Artists were teaching each other. International DJs were coming in for parties. It felt like a moment in time that might not happen again.

A music scene can be “kind of ephemeral,” she says, because it depends on “specific individuals doing things”—which is to say, people who are willing to host after-hours parties, even if they’re breaking bylaws, people who DJ those parties and people who turn up to dance. “So I wanted to document it while it was happening.”

So began the premise for PLATTER, a 10-part podcast series about Halifax’s underground dance scene, past and present, as told by the DJs within it and the historians who have catalogued it. The show’s finale just came out this week. It’s a show that manages not only to peel back the layers of a subgenre and its devotees, but also shed light on the underground scene’s place within Halifax’s queer history.

A history of counterculture

House music was born out of resistance. Before techno stitched 1990s Berlin together after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ravers in Tbilisi, Georgia mixed protests with prog house parties, the genre was birthed in Chicago. In the 1970s and early ’80s, a group of Black DJs—many of whom were also gay—started throwing after-hours parties out of a venue called The Warehouse, a yellow-brick building a few blocks from Chicago’s Union Station. Frederick Dunson, who danced at The Warehouse, told NPR Music it was a “solution to a problem that wasn’t getting better”—the city’s other gay clubs weren’t letting Black people in.

Halifax had its own underground movement around the same time, Mooney tells The Coast, and for similar reasons: There were very few places for queer people to dance. The city’s first gay bar, Thee Klub, opened on Barrington Street in 1971. It was open two nights a week. The Turret followed in the Khyber building in 1976. But before those bars arrived—and until Rumours opened on Gottingen Street in 1982—queer people in Halifax often turned to after-hours clubs like The Stockade on Windsor Street, where DJ nights and drag shows would draw a crowd. The same underground scene picked back up when Rumours closed in 1995.

“I knew that the history was there,” Mooney says, “but it wasn’t actually apparent to me until I started talking to people and connecting some dots.”

The same underground scene filled a void when both Menz and Mollyz and Reflections Cabaret—Halifax’s only two gay bars at the time—closed amid the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Mooney dug into Halifax’s underground scene and the parallels between past and present in her first few episodes, she started hearing from people like Daniel Dominic—AKA Disrespects—who shared the podcast and posted in an Instagram story about how those underground parties were “safe spaces for queer folk when Halifax lacked any.” That prompted a flurry of posts from other Haligonians who shared stories of coming out or finding community within the city’s underground dance scene.

Taylor Mooney is the host and producer of PLATTER, a 10-part podcast about Halifax’s underground dance scene. Credit: Disposable Ravers (via Taylor Mooney / Instagram)

Mooney—who DJs under the moniker Groceries—found that same community, too: Having lived in PEI, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Ontario, she says she’d never found a music scene like the one in Halifax before moving to Nova Scotia.

“It’s a really welcoming, supportive community,” she says. “Mentorship is really strong. I’ve learned so much from the DJs in Halifax—people who have been deejaying for, you know, 20, 30 years sometimes, are so willing to share what they know.”

As a podcast host, Mooney is generous in sharing, too. Her episodes feature the likes of Tony Haze—a longtime Halifax DJ and promoter—along with Douvet and Swee, two of the city’s most prominent house DJs today. PLATTER reaches its apex in the finale with an appearance from artist and queer historian Robin Metcalfe, whose Eastern Passage home holds decades’ worth of “historical documents, books, artworks and ephemera” related to Halifax’s queer history. There’s one jaw-dropping part of the episode that connects two moments in Halifax’s underground scene, 50 years apart. (We won’t spoil it.)

Mooney hopes that the podcast will find an audience beyond underground dance-music lovers and reach Haligonians who might just be curious to hear another side of their city’s history. Consider this your invitation to the party.

Find all 10 episodes of the podcast series here.