Brooklyn is getting a full weekend dedicated to trance this winter. The first-ever Trance, Bro! Winter Festival lands Friday, December 4 and Saturday, December 5, spreading a mix of veteran headliners, breakout names, and surprise guests across two venues in the borough. Rather than a single show, the whole thing unfolds as three connected pieces — an opener, a main event, and a closing afterparty — pulling together different eras and corners of the trance world under one roof.
Friday night belongs to One77 Brooklyn, the newly rebuilt space that used to operate as Quantum. Topping that bill is Nilsix, the joint project from Norwegian trance mainstay Ørjan Nilsen and Dutch producer Mark Sixma, a pairing that’s carved out its own lane by fusing festival-scale drops with the kind of melodic, emotionally-charged trance that made each artist’s solo work resonate in the first place. Supporting them is Daxson, whose recent output has increasingly blurred the line between trance and techno, picking up fans on both sides of that divide. Local talent Sunryse, Derya Zor, and 4YU round out the night. Sitting at 177 2nd Avenue, One77 has quickly become one of the city’s go-to rooms for late-night electronic programming, built specifically for immersive production and high-energy crowds.
Saturday shifts the action to Warsaw Brooklyn in Greenpoint, where the festival’s centerpiece kicks off at 2pm with a bill that reads like a trance hall-of-fame roster: Bryan Kearney, John O’Callaghan, Solarstone, Sander van Doorn (playing a rare producer-only set), Adam Scott, and Billy Gillies, with additional names still to be confirmed. Kearney has spent his career moving fluidly between uplifting, hard-edged, and emotional trance without ever sounding out of place in any of those lanes. His countryman and fellow Irish veteran O’Callaghan brings decades of genre-defining records and a reputation for pushing trance’s boundaries in unexpected directions. Solarstone, meanwhile, remains one of the genre’s most influential architects, having spent years championing the melodic Pure Trance sound through his own movement of the same name.
Sander van Doorn’s appearance carries extra weight given the format — a producer set means every track played comes from his own catalog, a format he rarely performs. The Dutch veteran has built a career spanning trance, techno, and house at festival scale, and this stripped-down, self-referential set offers a different way to experience that catalog. Belfast’s Billy Gillies represents the genre’s current generation, known for high-energy performances that swing between soaring uplifting trance and its tougher tech-trance cousin, while New York’s own Adam Scott — the person behind Trance, Bro! itself — has quickly built a reputation as one of the top American trance acts working today, backed by a personal signing to Armin van Buuren’s Armind label. Local support comes from TCOS.
The choice of venue for Saturday’s main event isn’t incidental. Warsaw occupies the Polish National Home at 261 Driggs Avenue, a building that’s anchored the Greenpoint community for more than a hundred years before becoming a music venue in 2001. Its roughly 1,000-person capacity strikes a balance rarely found in NYC’s electronic scene — big enough for serious production, small enough to keep the connection between artist and crowd intact.
Closing things out, the official afterparty returns to One77 Brooklyn with a lineup that’s being kept entirely under wraps, save for the promise of a major New York City debut. Organizers aren’t giving up any more details than that, leaving fans to find out who’s behind the curtain in person.
Tickets for the opening party and afterparty are already on sale, while tickets for the Saturday main event at Warsaw go live Friday, August 14 at 12:00 PM ET.
Trance, Bro! is the creation of New York-based Adam Scott, built around the idea of giving the city’s trance community consistent access to the artists and sounds that built the genre, alongside the culture that’s grown up around it.
Get tickets and more information at TranceBro.com.
