A Scene for All Scenesters

Club Eliptic has nothing to do with an eclipse or an ellipsis, and it doesn’t have much to do with an ellipse for that matter.

What the hip Lounge 217 Wednesday night club is all about is making progressive electronic music accessible. It’s about the rhythm of the music dropping in and out while still being danceable. And it’s about breathing life into a stale Santa Monica lounge scene.

While bars are aplenty on the Westside, lounges are lacking. Promoters Regan Kibbee and Jason Saville have sought to change that with electronic grooves in a candle-lit and smoke-free club that has a ticking pulse and funky scene.

At Club Eliptic, the lounge’s regular nightly dress code--no sneakers, no hats and no sleeveless shirts--is tossed out in favor of a come as you are, come as you want to see and be seen. So it attracts all kinds.

Club-goers donning stylish clothes and matte makeup knock knees with post-Seattle-esque grungers and stylish punkers. The denim-clad who’ve just come from the Third Street Promenade--that’s just a block away--are equally prevalent.

Between these exposed brick walls, this mad mix of scenesters hangs. The lounge is decorated with soft industrial and minimalist architecture--velvet cushions and couches, rusted copper candleholders and plain wood coffee tables with bowls of organic fruit on top--and populated by night owls who are young enough to be carefree about staying up late on a school night.

There are couples who can’t keep their hands off each other snuggling on the sofas and singles who can’t sit still sweating it out on the dance floor. The music gets going at 9 p.m., and for the first two hours, deejay Saville spins transglobal trip-hop tunes that sound like a cross between something you’d hear in the rain forest and a trendy dance club.

Club Eliptic is the kind of place where people just dance; they don’t wait to be asked. A diva wearing a rhinestone and velvet hat shimmies up and down the dance floor watching herself make finger shadows on a wall where an oil wheel spins psychedelic colors and shapes straight out of a hippie acid trip. She is surrounded by a bunch of guys who dare to dance solo and some who look as if they may have taken a few pointers from Arthur Murray.

The nightclub is one of the few places in L.A. where nonsmokers don’t end up going home smelling like a chimney, though catching a whiff of incense is another story. It’s also a place where smokers aren’t relegated to the back of the bus, since there’s a small smoking lounge with a bar in the back for those who need their nicotine fix.

Kibbee, who’s had wild success with club nights Bootius Maximus and Dog-On-It at the Olympia Club back in the 1980s, spent months looking for a place to launch the eclectic club night. Lounge 217, which was known as Mr. B’s before it opened three years ago, offered her the space, and for six months the club has packed them in.

“We’ve lasted six months on Wednesday night; that’s gotta say something,” Saville said. “Why stay at home on Wednesday night when you can go out to a club that feels like your living room?”

BE THERE

Club Eliptic on Wednesday nights at Lounge 217, 217 Broadway, Santa Monica. 21 and over. Cover: $5. (310) 399-2259.