Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby, One Night in the Main Room
Concert · with Velvet Festival
2026
On 4 September, Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby played Holographik Space. It was their first time in Zagreb. Velvet Festival brought them to the city and programmed the night. We built the room around it.
The floor is 180 m² in Trešnjevka, and it changes what it is several times a day. In the morning it is a specialty coffee bar and somewhere to work. By afternoon the same room can hold a showroom or a photo set, and from five the grinders go quiet, the counter turns to cocktails and the place runs late. For a concert it gets emptied and rebuilt. Curtains drawn down the long wall, the ceiling lights off, one lamp on a plinth and a wash of red doing the rest. Two speakers, a keyboard rig set on the floor rather than on a stage, and the audience standing around it.
There is no stage here and no barrier. That reads like a limitation and works as the opposite. Everyone stands at the same level as the players, close enough that a voice and a Rhodes carry without being pushed, and the room stays quiet because nobody is far enough away to talk through it. The floor takes up to 150 standing, and it was full.
Eddie Chacon was one half of Charles & Eddie. “Would I Lie to You?” reached number one in the UK in November 1992 and topped the charts in six countries. The duo ended in 1997, Charles Pettigrew died in 2001, and Eddie stopped making music. He spent close to two decades as a photographer and creative director instead, and by his own account had no plan to return.
He returned in 2020 with Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, produced by John Carroll Kirby. Sundown followed in 2023 and Lay Low in 2025, both on Stones Throw. The records are unhurried and warm, built on a voice that has been somewhere and come back, a few chords, and a lot of room around them.
John Carroll Kirby is a pianist and producer from Los Angeles. He worked through Solange’s When I Get Home, and with Frank Ocean and Moses Sumney, and releases his own records on Stones Throw. Live he works from a short stack of keys and a drum machine and assembles the arrangement in the room, which is why the same songs come out differently every night. Together the two of them make something considerably quieter than either of those histories suggests, and a small room suits it better than a large one.
Some of what happens here is ours from the first idea to the last glass: exhibitions, listening sessions, film evenings, talks, dinners, cocktail nights. Other evenings arrive from outside. A festival brings an artist, a brand brings a launch, a studio brings a collection, and we build and run the room around it. This one was the second kind. Velvet Festival brought Eddie and John, we did the space, the production, the light, the sound, the bar and the photography.
We can take the whole thing or any part of it. The furniture in the room is ours and moves or rents. The photo studio is next door, so a shoot and an event can run on the same day. You can see the rest of what we have built in projects. If you have something that belongs in a room like this, tell us what it is.
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