Umbrella Anniversary

On Wednesday October 9, 2024, Umbrella celebrated its 3rd anniversary in the New Basement Club. The small venue was quickly packed with old and new members and supporters. As is typical for Umbrella parties the place was infused with that exhilarating je ne sais quoi that so perfectly captures the atmosphere of real life clubbing.

Of course our reporters were present as well and met up with founder and CEO of Umbrella: Chloe. Despite her very busy schedule Chloe was kind enough to offer us an interview:

Chloe, can you tell us a little about your 3DX background?

Ten years ago I joined 3DXChat and ran into Felia the very first weeks. We both were new and found each other… and we stayed a couple for 9 1/2 years. During this time we started to DJ and to do our first parties, streaming mostly rock, but also 70s, 80s and so on… the common stuff… before I discovered my love for live spinning and mixing, I got my first DJ controller and a new era began.

My first electro club was the MILLIWAYS. A tiny apartment sized club since we didn’t yet have the World Editor we have now. We had just a simple apartment interior designer which we hacked to make better clubs. MILLIWAYS still gets a reference in our AIRPORT CLUB; you should always know your roots. My roots are clear: in the beginning a party with 30 guests was a blockbuster. Nowadays people already have this number with hired dancers and bots. Not so at Umbrella; we will never do so.

Where did the New Basement club originate?

My next real club was with the brand new World Editor. And it was, no surprise, the NEW BASEMENT which first started as an independent Techno club. At the same time we also kept doing rock parties at our ROCK BUNKER. This room name is now 8 years old and the ROCK BUNKER will come back soon, even if Felia, who initially started it, is no longer in the game. But she gave me her okay. Anyhow, since UMBRELLA is mostly about electronic music, the NEW BASEMENT can be seen as our birth place. But it took us 2 more years to finally found UMBRELLA.

Why did you decide to found Umbrella?

We noticed early on that the club scene in 3DXChat was changing. More and more people were getting together, forming support networks and acting more and more aggressively towards other clubs. In addition, the number of dance groups suddenly increased by leaps and bounds. We needed a more solid foundation, we would go under with just a small club, so we founded UMBRELLA to organize, work together as a team and make a better name for ourselves.

Since then we’ve had ups and downs… bad allies and good allies… I would say, the normal 3DXChat madness. Over time, the New Basement and the ROCK BUNKER were joined by more and more clubs that either I, or other team members built. Very few were built by external, paid builders. Our most iconic rooms are all self-built and unique, with very few downloaded objects. Umbrella has a talented team of builders and we rotate rooms every week. As with the music, we want to create a unique atmosphere with the rooms themselves.

Can you tell us something about Umbrella’s philosophy?

So that’s our philosophy: to be unique and outstanding. We do a lot of things different than others do. First, we gave things time to grow. We started dancing by ourselves in our apartments (Felia and I) and now, after a long time, we have a mind blowing 3 year anniversary party with 130-160 guests. And this in a place built for 50-80… it was super packed but also super fun and like a real club evening.

That’s our next point: authenticity and design over function. We all know how good huge big square dance floors work. The bigger the better and people will stay and relax for hours in your rooms. But does it look good? Does it look real? Do you get a real party atmosphere with this? We think not. Also others need such huge places since they need to place their hired dancers somewhere. They want stages, their logos huge and big in the room. But, in our opinion, all this will destroy the virtual experience for guests. We don’t do parties to have the most visitors. We do parties because we love parties and want everyone to have fun together like in a real club.

There is no doubt there is a trend of using fake avatars to spice up a room.

I had an interesting talk with a guy today I don’t know at all, but I needed to tell him not to advertise his party at our server since he uses a pure fake dance team. He reacted like this:

“Do you then also ignore all fake avatars in your room? I bet your room is going to be empty then. A lot of people have alts and bring them to rooms.”

Is that the general consensus now? All are fake so let’s be fake as well? People know that Umbrella is against using alts, or fakes, or parking or all those false support tricks which are sadly nowadays on the agenda of almost every party host. But where’s the fun in that? The atmosphere? The experience?

This general behavior will doom 3DXChat one day. People love to generalize. So soon if you ask people about 3dXChat what they will respond? All rooms are filled with alts or parked avatars, only dancers are in rooms, it’s hard to find a chat partner, it’s boring, most rooms look like loveless halls.

We’re swimming against the tide here! Umbrella is all about making it as real and as fun as we can together!

The dedication Chloe and the rest of Umbrella demonstrate in creating an enjoyable experience for their guests is admirable and we at the Gazette certainly hope more people will follow this example.

With special thanks to Chloe and Felicia.