by RAF KATIGBAK

Angel Moraes is beaming. He's taking me on a tour of his new club's sound system, and his voice is swelling with pride like a father with a newborn baby. "This is a new generation Angel Moraes, it's six point, designed and built to my specs. It sounds pretty incredible, if I do say so myself."

Moraes knows sound. After all, he was the DJ who designed and hand-built the world famous sound system at Montreal's legendary after-hours club Stereo. Now Moraes is ready to put his magic touch on Montreal's latest post-3 a.m. house-music hotspot, Gravity. Boasting a chic circle-motif décor, comfy furniture, a lounge area, two bars, an intimate bean-bagged cinema projection room with 7.1 Surround Sound (you can even buy popcorn) and a custom-built dancefloor sitting on rubber supports, all built from the ground up, Angel looks to have done it again. The Mirror recently caught up with the music box maestro to talk DJ gods and the economics of dancing.

Mirror: I know leaving Stereo was a heartbreak for you. Were you hesitant to get back in the game?

Angel Moraes: My only condition when I agreed to head this club was that I have total creative control. The guys who approached me said sure, we wanna be kept in the loop. The first decision we made was that you can't open this place two times a week, much less seven or eight times a month. The economics of Montreal shows you that you can't.

M: Let's talk economics. With rumours of the Montreal afterhours scene struggling, it seems like a strange time to open a club.

AM: With all due respect to everybody who does this, what are they offering? They aren't offering nothing. People need to walk out of a place with something to talk about. I think it's because so many people are stuck with spending so much money on DJs, that there's no money left for anything else. So you go into a room and it's basically a hole in the wall with a DJ that thinks he's God. Here, if we do get a hot DJ, we want it to be the cherry on top, but not the whole cake. The place is the whole cake. I would love people to come here and not even know who's playing, and not care. If I had my way, it'd just be Gravity every Saturday night.

M: Obviously people are bound to compare Gravity with Stereo, so set the record straight.

AM: The concept isn't really all that different - an intimate environment with a supercharged atmosphere. If I had to compare, this place is like Stereo on steroids. It's a little classier, it's more intimate. I wanna show people that we're aware that they're here, and there are so many ways to do that. At 7:30 in the morning we're gonna be serving cookies, coffee and donuts completely for free. You're gonna have a coffee at 7 in the morning and wake up and say, "Fuck, I'm gonna be here for another three or four hours!" We have all kind of events planned and all sorts of things we're gonna be doing throughout the course of the night. It just takes work, care and attention.

Gravity (30 Ste-Catherine St. W) opens on
Saturday, Dec. 20, with Angel Moraes, 1am, $27

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