In many Native American groups, the vision quest is a turning point in life taken in order to find oneself and the intended spiritual and life direction by establishing contact with a spirit or force, sometimes through hallucination. Last Wednesday, the Visionquest crew lived up to their namesake, transforming DC-10 like few have ever seen.

We arrived to see the garden of the venue complete with comfy beanbag chairs, teepees and Tibetan flags crisscrossing overhead. It was an immediate signal to me that this night was going to be a bit different than usual. Once inside the terrace, it took a minute to orient myself under strobes and rolling fog, but eventually I noticed an ancient rotary phone sitting on a small, Roman-style pillar, with a beam of light illuminating it in an otherwise black room. You could pick it up and, if lucky, you might chat with another clubber on the other end in the garden. Past that, we could start to see that the entire terrace was a maze of black hallways, beds and rooms leading to who knows what.

We decided to make our way further in, passing a giant, mirrored diamond leaning against the wall to our left, and a large, white geometric shape hanging from the ceiling, hardly even noticing the ambient, tripped-out music gently squeaking out the speakers overhead. After getting my bearings at the bar, I headed toward a corridor leading to the main room when a costumed man suddenly greeted me, wearing a mask right out of Eyes Wide Shut, and beckoned me into a curtained-off area. I was led into a glass box filled on all sides with white blinking lights. I couldn’t help but smile, and neither could the couple taking pictures inside with me.

I came back out, ready to head back into the garden to catch up with friends when I realized there was one last thing next to the phone that I hadn’t noticed before. I cautiously peeled back the black curtains to a small room, revealing a simple white bench. As I did, a man laughing and talking with someone on the other end of the rotary phone noticed my apprehension and abruptly hung up. With a mischievous smile, he motioned me inside and pointed to the ceiling, which was flashing with eerie and indiscernible images less than a foot in front of my face. He simply laughed and ran out.

After catching up with my thoughts in the garden for a bit, we headed into the main room where the journey continued. Sparse in comparison, it was decorated with Persian-like sheets, leading in from all corners of the room to a large, Persian-like pillow in the center of the room. The focus in here seemed to be squarely on the music.

Ryan Crosson and Shaun Reeves were pumping out oldies-but-goodies like Luciano and Quenum’s “Orange Mistake,” Cobblestone Jazz’s “Dump Truck” and the dubbed out, groovy “In Da Bush” by Rob Mello. It wasn’t all old-school, though—the gently melodic “Elephants on a String” by Julien Chaptal was one of the night’s highlights.

Feeling the mood and energy, Seth Troxler kept a sly smile while he mixed later on, keeping one ear on the headphones, head cocked to the side as his free hand danced through the air, making small circles with the beat. Countless times, he’d finish a mix by picking up a record and pumping it in the air. The crowd, one of the friendliest that you could imagine, was clearly enjoying it as well, and as the party passed into the early hours of the morning, one look around DC-10 told you that something very special was happening. Epic. Courtesy of Resident Advisor

You can of course catch one member of VisionQuest Seth Troxler, at Circus tenth birthday. Saturday 29th September!// Get tickets Here //