If you happen to walk by CVS at 2 a.m. on the weekends, you might just hear Milo XXX ’25, Tyler Heaton ’25, and Austin Guest ’25 before you see them dancing to techno music. When he’s busking with his guitar during the day, Heaton uses his speaker to amplify the music—but at night, it’s blasting techno music, drawing from Milo’s experience in Berlin this summer. There, he fell in love with the genre and embraced the culture, even getting into the club Berghain, dubbed “the world capital of techno” and famous for its exclusivity and strict door policy.
The three sophomores met as first years, brought together partially by their proximity in Weld, and perhaps more importantly, as a result of their mutual love for truly dancing at parties. They call their group “Funktion-Eines” named after Funktion-One, the German sound system used by top clubs. They are even on instagram, under the name @funktion_eins. The first iteration of their name was also German: “De Anst” meaning “the fear.” But the group of optimists realized the counterintuitive message it conveyed, and pivoted to this double-entendre title.
This is not their first organization. Last year, they formed the “Harvard Whistler’s Society” (with the intentional apostrophe), and even ran a guerilla marketing campaign at the annual club fair, touting their tunes that range “anywhere from Pitbull to Puccini.” But their true passion is dancing.
What started as “raves” in their Lowell dorm room soon turned into an open call to the steps of Widener in early September, where Milo, Tyler, and Austin started dancing to techno music as the Harvard Islamic Society happened to watch on during their convocation. Soon, the music genre shifted to Arabian to include the audience, and the dancing continued until the speaker died. In subsequent nights, the festivities moved to the cobblestone sidewalks outside of the CVS on John F. Kennedy Street, where one night, a crowd of 50 people accumulated dancing the salsa.
Passersby have mixed reactions, from steering clear to enthusiastically joining in. Heaton observed that “you can tell a lot about a person by the way they react”’ to three sober men dancing techno on the sidewalk past midnight.
Hugo Nunez ’26, a one-time participant in this dancing adventure, finds movement to be both mentally and physically freeing. “Dancing makes me feel free because man is condemned to be free and when I dance it opens up the movement in my heart,” Nunez said. In a truly techno-enthusiast manner, he explained that “when my frequency is good, I dance.”
Nunez is a proud member of Harvard College Electronic Music Collective, which recently lost its HUA funding—perhaps another incentive for him to turn to the streets for dance. He hopes to continue to explore his bodily freedom to the beat of techno music.
Sure enough, in a school where the social scene is dominated by exclusivity and closed invite parties, these techno dancers demonstrate that not all fun is behind closed doors. Indeed, the best experiences can be found outside of CVS at 2 a.m., embracing the freedom and fluidity of the music.
Carly Brail ’26 (carlybrail@college.Harvard.edu) loves to dance the robot.