At Refuge, a Team of Legendary Soundmen Builds Their Masterpiece

By Scott Enman

When Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu—co-owner of Refuge, a new nightclub in East Williamsburg, and the architect behind some of New York City’s greatest sound systems—suggests you extend the amount of time for an interview, you do it, no questions asked.

With nearly 45 years of experience building handmade speakers at places like Nowadays and Analog (not to mention Stereo in Montreal), he’s one of the most knowledgeable and respected soundmen in the space. His previous projects are considered state-of-the-art by music junkies and tech fanatics alike, but he considers Refuge’s sound system, known as REX, as the best work of his career.

“There’s a lot going on in this system,” Bernabeu, 57, says of the custom-built four-point analog setup at his freshly opened venue on Ten Eyck. “At most clubs, when they design a room, they go for the look. They’ll have an interior designer who says, ‘Put the speakers here and there,’ and it’s all about the way it aesthetically looks. We did the opposite. We made sure that Refuge was built around the sound system.” REX is both intricate and impressive, powerful yet delicate. The audio is crystal clear, enveloping dancers like a warm hug rather than ping-ponging off bodies. You can hear the space between each note—almost like the system is breathing—and there are no dead spots, the sound equally clear in the corner of the dance floor as the center. Almost every component, down to the wiring—Bernabeu searches for cords with the highest amount of copper oxide for the best signal transfer—is handmade.

An hour into our chat, he’s just scratching the surface of what the room’s 10-foot stacks can do with vintage Levan Horns and Baltic birch wood imported from Russia. “With ours being wood, it adds a beautiful texture to the music,” Bernabeu says. “It sweetens it up.”

Also, earplugs don’t appear to be necessary. Co-owner John Dimatteo, 44, jokes that the speakers are so soft on the body that he’s going to one day host a staff meeting on Zoom directly in front of them while music is playing. “A proper sound system shouldn’t come at you and attack you with volume,” Bernabeu says. “It should be easy on your ears. You shouldn’t leave a space with your ears ringing for days on end. That’s an early sign of tinnitus.”

(Photo by Javier E. Piñero)

“It’s like you’re hearing a record for the first time.”

Whitney Houston’s version of “I’m Every Woman” is blaring from the sound system when I visit the space on a recent Saturday night. Full disclosure: I’ve been accused of listening to this song too many times, and, up until this moment, was once able to safely say I know it like the back of my hand. But hearing it out of these particular stacks is confounding—new elements I never picked up on were coming through clearly. Are those swirls around the wind chimes in the beginning? Were those bells and tambourines always there? Was I always able to notice those pattern changes in the hi-hats?

“A lot is lost on a digital sound system,” Bernabeu says. “It’s loud. There’s a lot of bass. There’s mid-range. There are a lot of details that don’t translate. With REX, there’s a lot of little high-frequency ear candy stuff. You’re hearing the song for how the producer intended it to be heard. It’s like you’re hearing a record for the first time.”

Refuge has been officially open for only about a month now, but it’s already attracting fans from across the world. Take, for instance, Simon Rous, 50, a sound aficionado and DJ from Kent, England, who told BKMAG he came all the way to Kings County for his birthday just to hear Refuge’s system. On this particular night, Rous is one of the first people through the doors. “I had to hear it,” he insisted. “Honestly, it’s worth paying two-and-a-half grand to come and hear it. It’s the real deal. Even at low volume, it sounds fucking incredible. I came in early because I wanted to hear it in its entirety. It’s a beautiful thing: wholesome, warming, the vocals are projected just on point.”

(Photo by Javier E. Piñero)

No two nights sound the same

Bernaebu fine-tunes and makes adjustments to the system daily, as if by mandate. He tinkers, meticulously, almost obsessively, with the specs and calibrations, like storied soundmen Richard Long or the late producer and DJ Larry Levan at Paradise Garage before him, eternally dedicated to improving the listener’s experience.

“I work on it every day,” he says. “It’s like OCD to the 10th power. Most clubs, they’ll buy a brand X sound system, whether it’s custom or over-the-counter, and then they stop at that. They just focus on the business, you know, what’s the profits? With this, we’re always going to be upgrading. It’s going to be a never-ending experience. We want to show people that we’re actually reinvesting in this.”

As the weather starts to get colder, for example, the highs in songs get a little more pronounced, so Bernabeu lowers them. In the summer, he brings them out more. Dimatteo, a nightlife veteran who has been promoting parties on-and-off for close to 30 years, oversees talent curation, marketing, and the creative side of the business. He said Refuge held at least 14 parties before officially opening, inviting some of the world’s top artists—like Jamie xx, Four Tet and Seth Troxler—to test the system.

Even before that, there were “construction parties” held during renovation for the sole purpose of trialing different configurations of the sound and the room. Bernabeu recalls turning to Dimatteo mid-party during a friends and family event, and telling him they had to redo the entire system.

“John looked at me and was like, ‘What?!’ I told him I just had to do it. It wasn’t quite ready yet.”

(Photo by Javier E. Piñero)

Treating the room

Bernabeu’s work on the system is only one part of the equation at Refuge. The “treatment” of the room—how it is insulated and paneled to direct sound accurately and intentionally—is the other half. That’s where 73-year-old Al Fierstein comes in. The legendary acoustic consultant, whose resume includes stints at some of the holy grails of NYC club cultures—including Studio 54, Paradise Garage (where he was also the live sound engineer), The Tunnel, and Palladium—designed and tempered the space at Refuge in collaboration with Bernabeau and his team. “I’ve only worked on a couple of places where I knew right from the beginning they wanted to call themselves a high-quality listening place,” Fierstein told me. “Refuge was one of them. They were very concerned about having really great sound.”

The terms “listening bar” and “hi-fi lounge” are pretty common descriptors of venues with an attention to aural impact in modern nightlife. According to Fierstein, though, they get thrown around pretty loosely these days, and actually describe rooms with good music and decent enough sound systems, but tend to lack proper room treatment. The spaces, he says, need to be massaged to get the most out of their respective systems. “The speaker manufacturers really don’t care who buys the speakers. They try to up-play the quality of their speakers and imply that if you buy these speakers, you can have a great finished product. But they don’t talk about something that they don’t sell, which is the acoustics of the room that the speakers are in. That plays a very important part. It’s not gonna be the ultimate sound because it’s not tailored to the environment.”

For Refuge, Fierstein simulated some of the same things he did at Paradise Garage, treating the venue for excessive reflections and reverberations, and placing absorbing panels throughout the room. Those panels, he said, act like tunnels, utilizing the airspace trapped inside to provide additional absorption of low frequencies and, as a result, offer more control over them. They also prevent the music from bouncing between surfaces and sounding muddy. He even went into the homes of neighbors to measure the sound coming from the club. The result? Refuge can play music at all hours to their liking with fewer, if any, noise complaints.

Refuge co-owners Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu and John Dimatteo (Photo by Javier E. Piñero)

“We’re here to embellish an art form.”

The venue is more of a complex than a standalone club. It’s tucked away off Ten Eyck in a secluded courtyard in industrial Brooklyn with stacks of wood pallets lining the street outside. The central building, reminiscent of the Alamo, retains its original brick walls. 35-foot-high ceilings from the mid-1800s and huge windows give the room a spacious feel, allowing sunlight to flood the floor in the early morning stretch of marathon sets. Those floors, a custom-made “floated” design, “absorb the impact and return energy.” It’s bouncy, cushioning dancers, similar to Garage’s sprung floor concept (rumor had it, there were rubber tires underneath its dance floor).

It’s also a work in progress—and that’s a good thing. The layout of the room has already been altered. The sound system has changed at least three times. They’re currently building a new DJ booth. And there are plans to turn their outdoor courtyard into its own venue, as well as add a second dance floor in the basement next year.

It’s all to ensure the venue can both meet and surpass the rate of change in a borough and industry in constant states of reinvention. And Refuge’s commitment to seemingly perpetual experimentation in service of the crowd’s experience, according to Dimatteo, gives him hope this team can do more than just outlast the average shelf-life of an NYC nightclub. “We look at it almost like a cultural institution. It’s not a fly-by-night, we’re not chasing a trend, we’re here to embellish an art form,” he said.

At the end of the day, everyone has their favorite venue, presumably gauged by personal preferences and parameters like location, bookings, or just general vibe. It’s a subjective choice, after all. And who’s to say that small grungy hole-in-the-wall in Bushwick is any less appealing than, say, a massive outdoor megaclub? But if how a club actually sounds factors in at all (and, frankly, it should), Bernabeu & Co.’s compound might just be the city’s best in class. But don’t take our word for it—go and listen for yourself.