The Concourse Project

So how does a random warehouse on the outskirts of Austin by the South Terminal Airport, not even downtown, come to be ranked as the number five club in the country and number 28 in the whole world? And that’s among the top international venues, you guys. I’m Kelly Gray, one of the owner-operators of the Concourse Project, and ultimately it’s a story of perseverance and passion.

When you think of the top clubs of the world, you think Ibiza, Berlin, London, Vegas, LA, Miami. How does Austin get in the mix? We all know we’re known as the live music capital of the world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean electronic dance music was on the map until now.

So this is the Concourse Project. We’re known for our world-class production paired with top-tier touring acts and a really, really special crowd culture. Fun fact though, this is when we first opened, September 2021 debut show, our walls weren’t even painted, I know. Turns out construction takes a lot longer coming out of a Covid era, but we needed to get moving and the show must go on, so on it did. But don’t worry, it was way cooler when the lights were off.

At the time there weren’t really events of this size going on in warehouses with really top-touring big acts. This is what we needed to do. It paid homage to the early rave EDM scene, but it was really turning a chapter to something new and so much more was to come, and that it did. We started adding in all the layers as we had planned to do within weeks, months. It was completely transforming before everyone’s eyes, no longer just a pop-up special event warehouse. And the community got to come along with that journey and we truly put the project in Concourse Project. Ultimately, evolving is something that we’ve always planned to do and we won’t stop. As an independent business, maybe our playbook was a little bit different than normal, but we knew we had the special sauce, and that’s where it all begins.

So things are accelerating very quickly. Sorry if you have whiplash, but that’s how it was for us. Mind you, this is the very first year, and we hit that global top 100 ranking in that one year too. That’s pretty impeccable starting with those white walls. A lot of evolution very, very quickly and a testament to our team. We were working very hard doing all kinds of events, even like festivals outside and burning man art cars and just crazy stuff in addition to the normal concerts.

Well, if you take a step back, the journey does not actually start there, did not start in September 2021 when we opened the doors with those white walls. It goes much further back than that over 15 years actually, and the Austin was along that ride with us.

So ultimately, it’s a start as a love story, not just one with me and my husband Andrew, who’s actually the talent buyer who books those artists. That’s a fundamental part of the story, but it actually goes beyond that, just for our individual love for electronic dance music and how it changed our lives. It’s also for our affinity for Austin and the culture here, the people, the community. To us it was a marrying of those two worlds, and then later us as well. That was part of the whole recipe and the roots to what was later to come. We both wanted to dedicate ourselves to just building this scene out here because we could feel that momentum.

So we started doing that in 2009, did our own events as real music events. Started very small, 100 people, very quickly it was growing 300, 400, 700, 800. We did venues of various sizes. And over the years we started to gain notoriety nationally for the really big artists that we would book at some intimate spaces.

We had a flagship venue at the time, and we also did some events at other venues around town. Ultimately, we were starting to fine tune our event ops skills. And everywhere we would go, we would see as a blank canvas and just transform it and enrich it to make a really thick energy and special night. And that kind of set the precedence for what was to come later. We started doing special events outside that started to set the tone for delving into the festival world. So quickly, we ended… Well, not so quickly, but we started our brand Seismic Dance Event, which is a festival. This was the second edition that took place at the Austin American Statesmen. It was fundamental for me because it solidified the format that I wanted an indoor warehouse with really dope production with the juxtaposition of an outdoor stage or two.

I liked that balance, but we needed to find a venue of our own. There’s all kinds of development downtown, issues of all sorts. And we’ve had trying times with venues and the search went on. We were like Goldilocks, we know what we’re doing, but we need to find our own place and set our own roots. So we kept looking.

A couple years, eventually we go out to the airport, we meet up with a colleague who has a Latin club and I see this blank warehouse and I ask about that and he’s like, “It’s new construction. No plumbing or anything.” But to me, I saw a blank canvas. I saw my indoor stage. There was an adjacent field. I see my outdoor stages. So we jump into it, we bring in our now partner David. We start strategizing and planning and building a business model to make this happen for not only the festival but for all of our events year-round as well.

So things are looking great. We faced a lot of adversity more than I even got to get into and we’re ready to sign lease. But then what? Covid hits. That’s great timing. I remember feeling like the rug was pulled out from us once again. We faced so many challenges and it finally felt like we found the answer. And I remember distinctly, we were going to bed and I cried a little tear, and Andrew and I were just like, “How does our luck suck so much?”

But we take a step back, we start to rethink. Everyone’s like, “Are concerts coming back? Will live music even return? And we were like, “I don’t fucking know.” But having this big warehouse at first seemed daunting. There’s no way you can do events of that scale right now. Then you think about it again. And actually, size is on our side. If we stayed in a Covid world, we have enough space to do all those socially distanced pods. So we reworked our business model with our partner. And we had two financial plans, one with the pod world and one where we slowly go back into a more normal world with very conservative numbers. And we were able to make it work both ways. So we’re like, “Let’s go. Let’s rock and roll. Let’s start that construction.”

And it was exciting and it took some time, but we were able to utilize that time to think of what was to come and that journey. And here we are today at the Concourse Project. We’re fulfilling both of those visions. We have our festival, that was our last edition, one of the outdoor stages. We have our shows every weekend, multiple shows, usually 2,000 people. It’s a testament to our team. We were able to do something that we never really truly envisioned. We knew we were going somewhere. That train was a move in, but we didn’t necessarily know it was going to look like this. But if you just keep going and you keep building, your humble beginnings can turn out to be something so much grander than you ever conceived of.

I remember having those moments where I look at that and little tears of happiness come to my eyes when I’m like, “I can’t believe it. It’s like an out-of-body experience that we’re finally doing this.”

Thank you.

Whoo!