Block parties are how many New Yorkers escape the drudgery of the city in the summer. On a Saturday in August, music and the scent of barbecue lured people out of their brownstones onto a street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where kids pranced in the path of a bubble machine. Behind them, a dancers circle opened in a thicket of jubilant adults.
Ping-ponging around the makeshift dance floor was a bearded man in flamingo pink joggers carrying a laptop. Karl Scholz, 41, was using the computer to tune the sounds coming out of each of the six hulking stacks of speakers along the street, each painted the same bold pink as his pants. “I think a lot about the somatics, which is how the sound feels in your body,” said Scholz, a D.J. turned audio engineer.
Since 2021, Scholz has brought his Karlala Soundsystem to community events like Clinton Hill’s St. James Joy block party for free or at a reduced cost. Most of his roughly 100 bookings per year are dance focused. But he also does events at film screenings, produces live sound at cultural institutions like the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn and at volunteer efforts like the Thanksgiving banquet at the Black Trans Liberation Kitchen in Manhattan. He subsidizes these reduced-cost events with earnings from his day job building audio software, studio recording work, private bookings and weddings.
“He’s a godsend,” said Natasha Diggs, the resident D.J. and co-creator of Dance Is Life, an outdoor party series that centers hustle and uses Karlala as resident sound. “You can tell that he’s doing this out of a love and a care for, obviously for providing great sounds.”
Music, technology and public service have always been linked for Scholz, who grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., with jazz-loving parents. His father was an engineer for Hewlett-Packard and assembled a hi-fi stereo system in their home. Both parents (his mother was a resource aide at an elementary school) supported their son’s musical impulses, regularly hauling a teenage Scholz and his D.J. equipment to raves, scouting the block to make sure it was safe and sleeping in their van until the party ended and it was time to collect the gear.
In 2003, Scholz left the Bay Area to attend N.Y.U., where he was immersed “in a place that understood dance music,” he said. Scholz got an education in the city’s rich dance music and roller skating cultures, going to parties and venues like the Shelter, Deep Space and the Crazy Legs Skate Club. That led to work as a nightclub sound technician and Scholz taking on recording and music production clients.
During the coronavirus pandemic in summer 2020, Scholz was one of many New Yorkers who found therapy in walks in neighborhood parks, where social distancing was enforced more stridently than noise ordinances. “It seemed like the City of New York was a bit more permissive in letting people play sound in public spaces,” he said, “like they understood the need for it.”
He noticed that parkgoers were mostly setting up store-bought speakers, and he pondered ways to deliver more full-bodied sound that could be powered portably. Through research and tinkering Scholz found that lithium iron phosphate batteries, the kind used for utility power in motor homes, could drive his public address speakers efficiently for hours.
The speakers’ look required less trial and error than finding the batteries. “I basically just woke up one day and I knew I had to make it pink,” he said. “It’s a color that’s always captivated me.” He painted the speakers’ grilles and invested in as many pink connector cables, accessories and decorations as he could find.
By 2021, Scholz had 14 speakers, a van and a monthly party called Sweet Kicks, in the schoolyard where he and the D.J.s Miss Alicia and Rose Kourts had run their initial battery tests. But Scholz remained unsatisfied. “I felt almost as if I shouldn’t play on my own sound system and that it should be used to support other people, that I should use it responsibly,” he said.
So he offered his setup to his roller skater friends, many of whom were still using a single Bluetooth speaker in public parks; and then to St. James Joy, whose resident D.J.s had visited one of the Sweet Kicks parties. Within months, Scholz said, “the phone started ringing. And we were doing three, sometimes five events a week.”
For these bigger and more ambitious gigs, Scholz sourced and built additional speakers at a lower cost and higher quality than pre-manufactured. He bought a 16-foot truck with a lift gate and began hiring crews — mostly women of color — to set up and tear down at the sites. This summer, he is at 42 speakers, nearly all of which were deployed at St. James Joy.
“I’ve been coming to every jam that he does,” Conrad Rochester, 56, said. In Karlala’s pink loudspeakers he hears echoes of the storied nightclubs he used to sneak into as a teenager. “This guy has a system that sounds like you’re in the Loft or in the Garage. ”
That clear, evocative sound and meticulous attention to detail have earned Scholz bookings with famous D.J.s like Diggs, Louie Vega and Tony Touch. And his geniality and commitment to community make him rare in a very specialized market, his collaborators say.
Karlala is distinct, but not alone, in New York’s sound system scene. Sting International, a sound engineer and music producer, sets up his massive equipment at nightclubs and summer festivals. Brooklyn’s Dub-Stuy collective uses an imposing wall of speakers in the competitive “sound clash” traditions of Jamaica’s original sound system culture that began in the 1950s and was later brought to New York by West Indian immigrants.
In New York, seminal D.J.s and curators like Grandmaster Flowers, King Charles, the Disco Twins and Frankie D. often headlined a rich ecosystem of park jams with muscular sound systems that spurred the technologies later used by nightclubs like Paradise Garage and Studio 54. When these systems became the domain of clubs, which were more lucrative, Scholz says, they left a void in communities.
“If you’re a dancer,” Scholz said, “you know how much you need to do this regularly, how essential this is for your sanity and health.”
Sound can be healing for communities even when it’s not booming. At the block party, Scholz had used almost his full arsenal of speakers at a volume that could be heard from blocks away. The next weekend, Scholz and his assistants used dollies to roll less than half his inventory into a clearing in Prospect Park in Brooklyn for a gig billed as a “meditative music activation.”
“Today will be more intimate,” Scholz said.
In contrast to the previous weekend’s drum-driven sounds, the multi-instrumentalists Rena Anakwe and Surya Botofasina improvised soothing, atmospheric tones. Shielded from the sun by a pink canopy, they used synthesizers, a pan flute and soft sonic textures looped on a cassette player. About 100 people laid blankets on the lawn, on which they reclined or sat cross-legged with their eyes closed.
“We were able to answer something energetically that people needed,” Botofasina said after the event. “Don’t get me wrong. I love a good concert. But I don’t think you necessarily get that in a dark room where a bunch of lights are flashing. We need to feel vast. We need to expand.”
While loading equipment back into a truck, a sweaty and sore Scholz said he was planning an expansion: “We’re more than halfway to what I see as the final form of the sound system, which is an exciting feeling because we might get there by next year.”
James Thomas is a software engineer in the Interactive News department, a team that creates tools used by reporters and editors to produce Times journalism.
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