You know Kirill Zhan from loud projects like Secta, the collective that has become a fixture of the city’s underground techno scene; Moist Paper Party, the “anti-party” series that takes over hidden corners of Dubai; or A Little Gathering, built around eclectic underground sounds that don’t care much for genre boundaries.

Now, Kirill is doing something completely different. It is called 'distance minimaliste'.

So, what is it? A series of listening evenings where, instead of coming to dance until late, you come to sit down, hear music on a proper sound system and discover tracks that might otherwise stay buried in DJs’ and diggers’ collections. The first four editions will take place every two weeks on Tuesday at Reunion, with the first happening on September 8.

We spoke to Kirill about why he wanted to slow things down, the music he rarely gets a chance to play, and why Tuesday might actually be the perfect night to simply sit and listen.

— Kirill, what is the idea behind distance minimaliste? What will it be?

— These are going to be evenings built around music that is meant primarily for listening.

In bars, music is usually there to create a fun atmosphere. But the kind of music I want to present to my audience has a much deeper, more intellectual side to it. It is music you want to listen to on a really good sound system, preferably together with other people. And at the same time, it is music that doesn’t get played very often. That is the concept.

The evenings will happen on Tuesdays, from 7 to 11 pm, at Reunion, which is actually a club. But for these evenings, we are going to reformat the space into something closer to a restaurant-bar. The goal is to try to make the existing setup feel different.

For now, it will be a pilot series of four evenings. I will be inviting completely different people to come in and share their own vision of this kind of music.

— Why did you suddenly feel the need to create something like this? Because of Secta and Moist Paper Party, I have always associated what you do with movement and energy. And now you are talking about slowing down, sitting, listening, absorbing the music. Where did that shift come from?

— I have always loved this kind of music. I actually have a pretty big collection of it, both on vinyl and digitally. But I very rarely get the opportunity to play it somewhere and share it with people.

For a long time, I have also wanted to create something separate that was specifically mine — something I would curate myself entirely. And I wanted it to be an evening format rather than a nighttime one.

Dancing is obviously great, and it is fun. But there is another side to music that you just don’t get to hear very often.

There are also many people I know who I would love to hear in a format like this, and they have never played at those kinds of venues.

So I thought it would be interesting to create a platform where I could share this music, and where other people could do the same — including people mostly known for dance music, but who have a completely different side to their collections that they could finally show.

And probably one of the main differences between this and some other listening formats is that I’m not asking people to play only vinyl.

In reality, there are a lot of releases that simply don’t exist on vinyl. Or, if they do, they can be incredibly expensive. And considering the region we are in and the limited access we have to certain records, I think allowing different formats makes the whole thing much more honest.

— You mentioned that you are inviting people who are normally associated with something quite different. Who are they? Can you announce them already?

— Yes. Declan, for example. He is someone who is incredibly deep into sound from the physics side of things — he literally built his own system. But what a lot of people don’t know is that he is also a DJ and a producer with a huge music collection.

There is also Oldcarfun, a friend of mine who collects vinyls and has a lot of very interesting sounds.

And then there is my good friend Mahyar Parsa, who co-founded A Little Gathering with me. He is also an incredibly talented collector. He has a lot of music that is really made for listening, and he has never played any of it anywhere.

So I think a pilot with the four of us could create something really interesting.

And I already have a lot of other people in mind who I’d love to invite and who I think would be perfect for this format.

— Why did you choose to call these evenings distance minimaliste?

— I spent a long time thinking about what to call it. And what I really want is for the distance between the music and the audience to become smaller.

So it is about distance — the minimum possible distance between the music and the audience. I want music that very often stays hidden somewhere deep inside the collections of diggers, DJs and selectors to actually reach the people who might connect with it.

— You will be playing music that you wouldn’t normally play in your usual format, and the other guests will do the same. Could you give me a few tracks or artists off the top of your head, just so I understand what that might sound like?

— My biggest recent inspiration was — and it actually helped put this whole format into my head in the first place — an album, 3 Chairs Collection. I bought it quite a while ago, and it had probably been sitting in my collection for about two years.

Then, fairly recently, I put it on and properly listened to it.

And I realised it was a project by Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Rick Wilhite and Marcellus Pittman — these are all major Detroit producers. The project itself goes back to around the mid-1990s.

And all the music on that record inspired me a lot. It really shaped my idea of what this format could be and what I wanted it to sound like.

Also, there will be the Los Angeles: Critical Mass collection; there is music by Omar S and Beatdown Boys as well. There is just so much music I want to play and share.

A lot of diggers and people who are really deep into music already know this stuff, but the wider audience has often never even heard it. And that is exactly what makes me want to bring it out and share it.