Downtown venue Kremwerk opened a year ago on Valentine's Day, and it has quickly established itself as one of the key spots for electronic music (both DJ and live) and queer culture. Run by the mother/son team of Nicole and Austin Stone, Kremwerk has a big weekend celebration happening, starting February 12 with the Mr. Trans Seattle Top Surgery Benefit pageant for co-producer Braedyn Ezra's surgery and running through February 16 with its Squall night of ambient, drone, and noise, featuring Noisegasm and others. Every night in between—house, disco, techno, synth pop—shows off a different facet of the club. That range and contrast gives you a hint of Kremwerk's unconventional, diverse agenda. The fact that Kremwerk's booked major noise acts like Wolf Eyes and Pharmakon (coming February 20) also speaks to its growing prominence in Seattle's nightlife sphere. I spoke with Austin Stone to find out how this exciting new club's weathered the challenges of opening in the '10s and what it has in store for the near future.

What important lessons did you learn during your first year running Kremwerk?
Stone: Probably the most important is how Seattle works and what people want and expect and how Kremwerk fits into that scenario. A lot of people expect Seattle to stay the same place it always was. They kind of forget all the skyscrapers, development, and change going on around them. They forget minimum wage and taxes are increasing this year. For Kremwerk to be located downtown is part of this greater transition for Seattle nightlife. People in Seattle expect to go to techno shows in a warehouse and stay out till 10 a.m. I love doing that, but economic realities and the state regulatory realities of that make it very hard to do. Only a few people with enough resources can make that happen. Those experiences will continue to be rare, but Kremwerk is a regular place.

For instance, with MOTOR starting in May with us, between MOTOR and Debacle, we were doing three events a month. For them to take their whole brand and do a techno night on a Thursday, and blow up and be great (some of them are a bit hit-or-miss), for them to work within our guidelines and the fact that we have to work within Seattle’s guidelines, you can go out and see an amazing techno show on a Thursday night—that’s a big, important thing for me. It’s important to me that people have greater access to amazing cultural content.

What was most successful event, given all the ways you measure success?
The MOTOR XX event was pretty amazing. Sam [Melancon] came to me and said, “Let’s do Friday or Saturday. Come on, it’s a one-off.” I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. Finally we went for it. He put so much force and momentum into that, as well as all the crew there. For us to do twice the amount of people who came through compared to his other Fridays and Saturdays is amazing. Everybody there executed it perfectly. That’s a pretty underground kind of night, but its cultural worth is greater than a lot of other nights that happen at Kremwerk.

For me, it’s a huge event for us just to be open. There’s so much work people don’t see. They don’t see the reality of closing the bar at 6 a.m. three nights a week. And then coming back at 9 a.m. to take deliveries and do invoicing and all this other business stuff. They think it’s more of a warehouse space where you show up, do a party, and everybody gets money, and it’s simple like that. I’m just happy we’re able to go another year with it. It’s tough to underground stuff at a new spot that's not in a prime-time location yet.

What changes do you see happening in Kremwerk’s next year, both with the physical space and with content?
Our whole schedule right now is hopefully going to come together fully in the next month or so. We started in May with our first queer event, Cathedral. We've wanted to do lots of queer events. Starting in a month or so, we're going to have Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday queer nights. The rest of the nights are going to be for live music, electronic music. We always change and rotate things for special incoming artists. But we're gonna have a lot of queer and cultural events: for instance, this Thursday with Mr. Trans Seattle. That’s the kind of stuff we want to bring in, these bigger-picture cultural statements. We’ve also been working with Nick Carroll, who is trying to push Kremwerk as a live venue. [Carroll also cofounded the techno crew secondnature with Eddie Lee and helps with promotions/graphic design for excellent promotional team Elevator. He used to manage the student-run University of Puget Sound station KUPS 90.1 FM in Tacoma. Here are some of his show posters.] We’ve been working really hard since our first proper live performance, I think in May, to make live bands a regular thing. We want to get bigger, stronger talent that feels comfortable playing at Kremwerk. We want people to know we do live music and it sounds good. Musicians can come and get paid.

In terms of physical changes, we have a 40-story tower going up next to us. So as of [February 10], we’ve had our patio enclosed a bit more. It’s been taken back a couple feet, so it’s a little tight there. We have plans to add an upstairs patio bar and to provide more services and options. We’re always looking to build and expand beyond the routine at Kremwerk. Nicole's Vio Design & Build projects constantly encourage us of what is possible. We’re looking to expand from where we are.

The best thing is having Nicole, my mother, as a business partner, because she’s one of the few people who seriously thinks outside of the box. She’s put us somewhere greater than where’d we be. Otherwise, we’d be the same venue with the same décor with the same bartenders that we were last year. We’re constantly evolving and tweaking things to be better for the people of Seattle and better for the niches and communities that we want to come to Kremwerk.

Nicole will throw lots of ideas to develop a night. There are so many ideas, it’s kind of hard to accept each one on its own. For instance, she had this one idea that we’d turn this new leather night, eyeBEAM, on Sunday [earlier in the day], into a leather-crafting workshop where you could build items like harnesses, chokers, etc. and other things for club culture, and use her experience and tools to make that night better. She used to have a store in Capitol Hill called Sin. We want to get very specific and individual with what we’re doing.

We’re really excited about 2015. We were able to meet and exceed a lot of our goals. Things are moving forward and stabilizing in so many different ways. It makes me thrilled to see regulars come out. Our number-one goal when we first opened was to draw 100 people. Now that’s not an issue anymore. How do we change from drawing 200 people to 350 people? Being able to bring more than 300 people into the building in one night is an amazing feeling. We’ve been working with different people throughout the year; some have gone, some have come. We want Seattle to feel like they can always come, and no matter what, there’ll be something amazing they can see.