DJ Spider Marks 10 Years of Digital Noir at The Milestone

At around 5 or 6 p.m. on one assigned Saturday each month, Suzann Knudsen rolls up to The Milestone Club, the west side’s most iconic music venue, and begins unloading a trunk full of trinkets and toys.

From the vehicle comes Knudsen’s personal controller, mixer and laptop — normal enough equipment for a night of spins — then come the decorations. She covers the length of the main room with gothic and sometimes outright ghoulish ornamentation, oftentimes even setting out treats for those who will come through the door.

By 7 o’clock, The Milestone is transformed, and so is Knudsen ready to transition into the ever jovial and eccentric DJ Spider, host and featured act in one of the biggest regular nights for Charlotte’s dark scene: Digital Noir.

The next event, scheduled for Nov. 29, will mark a full decade of monthly goth glamour, industrial alchemy and dark dance into the night.

How Digital Noir began at The Milestone

Arriving on the scene in 2015, Spider, along with longtime collaborator and best friend Michael Price, who performs as DJ Price, were organizing electronic music nights spread across town.

Where Price had Installation, an industrial music-focused event, Spider was throwing Return of the Bats 2: Electric Boogaloo, weaving together a variety of set tracks with Spider’s own touch of whimsy mixed in. While the two practiced their crafts in the same city, it wasn’t until one autumn night that they considered sharing a stage.

Tiring of the work it took to run Installation alone at The Milestone, Price hit up his passing acquaintance Spider to see if she would be interested in co-hosting something new.

“‘We’ve never actually DJed together,’” Spider recalled of her reaction to the inquiry. “‘We know each other, we respect each other, [but] we’ve never actually DJed together or hung out or really done anything.’”

The idea of organizing a party at The Milestone, known more for its hardcore and punk rock shows than gothic dance parties, intrigued her. The two bounced ideas for a name back and forth for a good hour and a half before landing on Digital Noir, she recalled. Then it became real.

“We kicked it off Thanksgiving weekend because they happened to have an opening at The Milestone for that, and we just worked right,” she explained. “The night was good, it was strong, it was fun, and we actually pair really well with each other.”

Neither one of them could have guessed that the show would go for 10 years from there. After all, both of them had, unbeknownst to one another, recently sworn off hosting Charlotte shows.

“Running Installation at The Milestone was doing well, but running a night by yourself is tiresome, especially [with] the amount of lights and work, and you’re on stage all night long,” Price told Queen City Nerve.

His decision to reach out to Spider was a last-ditch effort to avoid burnout and it ended up pushing them each to new heights.

Price laughingly took credit for the fateful call. “I pulled her out of retirement, basically,” he told Queen City Nerve.

Price and Spider no longer team up on Digital Noir, as Price moved to Wilmington shortly after COVID-19 clamped down in America. Still, their bond remains strong, which remains evident in the way they speak about each other in separate conversations.

“I call him my partner in grime because I can be silly and goofy and he kind of grounds me,” Spider said of Price. “But then all of a sudden he’ll do something ridiculous, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you did not just do that.’ So we have fun. We were silly. We work well together.

Like her tag, Spider’s sound can be creepy but light. She described Price’s strength as “the industrial crunchy stuff.”

It’s a mix that inspired Price to call Spider his “DJ wife.”

“I definitely tend to be the darker, harder type stuff, which there’s a market for, but she tends to be the lighter, ‘get your fun’ stuff. And I think you can’t have just one or the other, so the blend of us worked really well.”

Keeping the dark scene alive through the pandemic

While their collaborative creation feels perfectly at home in The Milestone’s storied dance floor, staying there hasn’t always been an option. March 12, 2020, would see the closure of the venue among so many others around the world at COVID-19’s behest.

Fortunately, the online sphere was still open for business, so the pair took the show to Twitch to give some stability back to their regular fans. During those uncertain times, the two DJs gave any proceeds from the streamed shows back to The Milestone to help keep it running while ownership wasn’t able to open.

They were the final performers to leave through the door before it was forced to close. At the time, there was no guarantee that another performer would ever set foot on that storied stage again.

“I always felt sort of a responsibility to The Milestone, having been the last ones there,” Spider said. “So, during the pandemic, I made sure, if someone wanted to pay, like, a digital cover, don’t give me money on Twitch. Here’s the QR code. Give it to The Milestone. Make sure that they keep going, because they’ve been our home and our second home.”

As regulations cooled down, business as usual started back at the venue and Digital Noir returned to its rightful place with the duo at the helm. Eventually, however, Price would get a call with a dream job offer on the other end … one located in Wilmington.

Spider made the transition easy for Price, showing the support one would expect of a best friend watching her pal chase a dream. She never expected him to drive the 200 miles every month to help put on a show, but she did have one demand if she were going to keep the show going.

“I’m like, ‘Yeah, absolutely not going to hold you back … Just realize I’m going to drag your butt back here for the anniversary every year. So keep that on your calendar,’” she recalled. “So he’s come back for all the anniversaries each November.”

This November anniversary show will be just Price and Spider on the boards, like the good old days. However, in the time since Price’s move, Spider has used the opening to showcase a slew of great local, state and regional DJs.

Besides, the idea of playing with a partner was the reason she signed on in the first place.

“I can only play so many Sisters of Mercy songs before I have to go pee,” she quipped before sharing some of her rotating roster.

Over the last two years, DJ Spider has recruited Carolina names like DJ Bavanova of Asheville’s Sanctum and DJ Radio Priest of Winston-Salem’s Devil Disco Darlings. Other guests include DJ Misstep of Club Terraform in Columbia, South Carolina and Atmosphere in Augusta, Georgia.

There was DJ Villainess from Washington DC’s Fiction, plus veteran Charlotte names like Christian Hoefle and DJ Velvetine, who both run other shows in the city but tag in at Digital Noir semi-regularly. The next generation of Digital Noir DJs includes names like Dil3mma, Deathflower, and Squeaky.

Spider has on occasion made the monthly party into a hybrid event, bringing on bands like Dead Cool and Circuit Preacher to showcase new music in the dark- and synth-wave genres. Each new event builds on the other, with Digital Noir regulars getting to check out new sounds while rotating acts get placed in front of crowds that might not have ever heard of them.

“It’s been exciting for me the last few years to bring in as many people from different places, both locally and outside of North Carolina, just to come in and play,” Spider explained.

Part of Spider’s interest in rotating her cast is selfish, there are plenty of people out there she wants to play with and she gets to invite a new one every month. Another of her goals, however, is more lofty.

During the pandemic, people got locked into their virtual silos or hyper-localized scenes. Running Digital Noir gives her a chance to open things back up and showcase the talent that is spread throughout the region.

“So many people made friends online and heard DJs from other places, because you could sit in your living room and go to four different countries in a single evening, just bouncing around on Twitch,” Spider explained. “I wanted to bring a little bit of that to Charlotte.”

Connecting the region’s dark music communities

A sprawling story in its own right, Digital Noir is just a piece of a growing movement called Charlotte’s dark scene. Just as she is purposeful about her support for The Milestone and other acts, she’s equally encouraging to her fellow showrunners at other venues.

Spider said she’s in regular communication with counterparts such as Hoefle, who runs Shadow Play at Crown Station, and DJ Velvetine, who puts on Requiem at Tommy’s Pub. They sync their calendars so as to avoid double booking as best as possible.

As of October 2025, Digital Noir has hit another milestone — a miraculous run that still shocks Spider every month: For two years straight, the event has sold out ahead of each night it’s been held.

She still remembers the first few times in the fall of 2023 that Milestone owner Wyler “Buck” Boswell told her what had happened.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, we had to turn people away at the door,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t understand those words. Like you need to say that again. What do you mean? You had to turn people away?’”

In fact, for a showrunner who just wants everyone to have a good time, it felt unnatural.

“Nobody was leaving, so we couldn’t let anybody else in, I just thought that was weird,” she recalled.

As the faces up front rotate and change, so do the people lining the foggy dance floor each month. While the older crowd continues to support the dark scene events they grew up, the younger faces Spider affectionately calls “baby bats” have also discovered the camaraderie and inclusion that have been cultivated in the crowd over time.

Read more: Femme Fest Expands in Second Year at The Milestone

Despite her reluctance to even take on the gig a decade ago, all signs point to many more years to come for DJ Spider & Co. at The Milestone.

Looking back on her 20+ years DJing in Charlotte, Spider marveled at the fact that folks she taught to DJ back at the long-closed Breakfast Club are now bringing their kids to shows where she’s spinning — not by chance but because they know Spider hosts a safe, inclusive and jumping party.

Sometimes the darkest scenes are home to the brightest lights.