The Echostage crowd gets lit. Photograph of Echostage by Doug Van Sant.
Pete Kalamoutsos was heading to a Greek restaurant in Rockville with his buddy Tiësto, a Dutch DJ who was at the time on the verge of global stardom. It was 2003 and Kalamoutsos was managing a dance-new music celebration organization, Club Glow, even though also doing the job close to town as a DJ. In the automobile, Tiësto posed a concern that would essentially adjust Kalamoutsos’s life—and also DC’s new music scene: “What do you want to do? Do you want to be a celebrity DJ or a superstar promoter? You can not do both.” Kalamoutsos assumed about it and made a decision Tiësto was appropriate. “Whatever you do in daily life, you have got to do 100 percent,” he says now. “You can’t 50 %-ass it.” So he determined to ditch DJing and target on the small business aspect of issues.
It would choose a further 9 decades, but that clarifying instant culminated in Kalamoutsos’s generation of Echostage, the 30,000-square-foot club in Northeast DC that nowadays is regarded as a person of the premier tunes venues not just in the District but on the planet. Very last yr, DJMag named it the world’s best dance-audio club.
Now Kalamoutsos is hoping to raise DC’s dance-tunes profile even more. Operating with the California promoter Insomniac, he’s staging a major two-working day competition on April 30 and Might 1. Dubbed Task Glow and held on the grounds of RFK Stadium, the celebration will blend veteran worldwide electronic functions such as Higher than & Beyond, well-liked American DJs such as Diplo, and rising talent like John Summit. (Insomniac bought Echostage in 2020, while Kalamoutsos even now runs its day-to-working day functions.)
Balding and even-tempered, Kalamoutsos does not come throughout like a high-traveling nightlife impresario. The baby of Greek immigrants, he grew up in Rockville and frequently visited spouse and children back in Greece, where he was exposed to the early-’90s European dance-music scene. Later on, he became certain that a edition of all those clubs could be replicated in the Washington region, with its abundance of school pupils and considerable worldwide local community. That hunch was correct: Echostage opened in 2012 and promptly captivated the variety of stars—Avicii, David Guetta, Skrillex—more normally discovered spinning in New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. Why has it acquired such a passionate pursuing in the District? It’s a spot where the strobe lights are not solely red or blue. “When I appear over the group, it’s Black, white, loaded, poor, gay, straight, Republican, Democrat, whichever,” Kalamoutsos says. “They want to let unfastened on the weekends. You go by means of the [doors] and you are like, ‘I’m below.’ ”
This article appears in the April 2022 issue of Washingtonian.
