How to… Klymax

The secret sauce behind our multifunctional sound space.

In the words of DJ Harvey, Klymax was designed as a “machine that you feed music in one end and happy people come out of the other.” The legendary DJ and scene provocateur channelled over 40 years of nightclub experience when helping to design the venue.

The phrase “greater than the sum of its parts” comes to mind when describing the club. While all components are high quality — from the wood used for the floor to the lights up above — they’re all readily available. Just as with the best cooking, the ingredients are simple; it’s the expert knowledge that provides the ‘secret sauce’.

The aesthetic is, if not exactly a happy accident, a by product of the need to properly serve the sound. Acoustically treated to keep wayward frequencies in check, the design creates a sonic sweet spot across the entire dancefloor, so the music sounds great wherever you’re dancing. The result is finely balanced on the axis of form and function.

To keep the sound focused on the floor (and to prevent it from spilling out into the Desa) the 200mm concrete exterior walls are fitted with 365mm of acoustic layers made up of three sections — rock wool insulation, perforated plywood panels, and a teak veneer. The plywood panels on both the walls and ceiling are permeated with (count them) 2,680,135 holes to diffuse the sound as it hits the wall.

Harking back to a practice used during the golden age of ballroom dancing, Klymax features a sprung dancefloor designed to reduce stress on the dancers’ joints. While rarely seen in modern nightclubs, the technology is similar to that used in basketball courts to protect athletes from injury. The floor is made of a four-layered wooden lattice structure, with 50mm of foam between each intersection to supply the bounce.

Then there is the sound. The speaker stacks in all four corners of the room are custom-built taking the best of the old and the new — using a traditional design complemented by state-of-the-art components. Designed by revered audio engineer George Stavro, it’s a classic disco nightclub system based on a blueprint established by Richard Long in iconic 1970s New York clubs like Paradise Garage and Studio 54.

Perched high above the crowd for the perfect vantage point, the floating DJ booth is fully isolated so the sound from the dancefloor doesn’t bleed into the booth. The speakers inside are true monitors, featuring the same drivers as the main room speaker stacks so that the DJ knows exactly how their sound is translating on the floor.

And, of course, no discotheque would be complete without a disco ball. The Klymax variant is one metre in diameter and was locally made, with countless tiny glass panels to reflect the state-of-the-art lights and Unity Elite lasers – all programmed by none other than Rainbow Disco Club’s Real Rock – across the dancers below.

Learn more. Klymax.co