To quote Keanu Reeves: whoa. Was last Thursday’s Dance.Here.Now. party at Cielo a sardine can or what? We haven’t seen the joint that packed on a weekday since Danny Tenaglia dropped a set of classics there a while back. The occasion was a set by the beloved festival-techno practitioner Carl Cox (who, come to think of it, is the U.K. equivalent of Mr. Tenaglia), so the crowd wasn’t exactly unexpected. What was a bit surprising was that Coxie was on the decks all night long—no opening DJ for him, thank you very much. And he was playing surprisingly deep music early on (a track from cosmic-disco star Prins Thomas’s Full Pupp label was on when we entered the club). By the time we left, however, the big man was banging it out in big-room style, and the crowd—which was not so much dancing as it was bobbing up and down in the one square foot of space allotted to each reveler—was banging right along.

Photographs: Marc Whalen