Groove follows the red spiral down into Vilnius’s night

Germany’s electronic music magazine Groove sent a writer to Vilnius for the night and came back with two reports and one firm conclusion: the city belongs among the great party capitals east of Berlin.

Groove’s Jakob Senger began on the dance floor. He spent a night at Vilnius Nights, a club festival spread across four Old Town venues, where city support keeps a ticket at €10 and almost 3,000 were sold in advance – not bad for an underground event in a city of about 600,000. His route led from a Soviet-style bunker four floors below street level to Gallery 1986, a former radio-electronics factory that now serves as the heart of local clubbing, and on to the early-morning Red Room, where veteran DJ Vidis pre-listens to his tracks through a telephone receiver. The crowd ranged from veterans of the 1990s to youngsters at their very first party.

Then came the story behind the scene. Invited by the Vilnius Night Office, which links the city’s night culture with the municipality, Senger toured the places that keep it going: Radio Vilnius, a community station broadcasting around the clock from a former car-park booth, and the Lukiškės Prison, now a cultural quarter that hosts performances and Vilnius Fashion Week, and was once a set for Stranger Things. The venues, he writes, feel less like public institutions than like living rooms thrown open to visitors.

The atmosphere reminds him of the stories people tell about Berlin in the 1990s. Vidis, who once ran the legendary Opium club, has simple advice for visitors: come for the authentic energy, not for the biggest line-up or the longest queue. Groove’s verdict is that Vilnius, alongside Kyiv and Tbilisi, is one of three equally great party capitals east of Berlin.