Charlotte's dance music scene found its warehouse across from a light rail stop. Blackbox Theater at 421 East Sugar Creek Road sits catty-corner from the LYNX Blue Line's Sugar Creek station on the city's northeast side, an independent, self-described gritty-sheik live entertainment complex whose calendar leans hard into electronic music - Space Laces, Deorro, Black Tiger Sex Machine, Kloud and multi-night Whethan runs headline alongside anime raves, Bingo Loco parties and the occasional comedy .....

Two hundred people, one DJ booth, and a door that opens at ten - Cue is the late-night engine room of Charlotte's Blackbox Theater complex at 421 East Sugar Creek Road, a compact club built inside the larger venue with its own entrance and its own bar. Where the main Blackbox room holds a thousand for touring bands and large-scale dance events, Cue runs at a capacity listed between 200 and 250, strictly 21-plus, with standard operating hours of 10pm to 2am - a room purpose-set for DJs and nothin.....

The copper chandelier over the bar is made from leftover brewing pipes that the owners took to a firing range and shot full of holes with an M-16 - a tribute to founder Kurt Hogan's distant relative, the 1930s gangster Baby Face Nelson. Heist Brewery, at 2909 North Davidson Street in Charlotte's NoDa arts district, opened in 2012 as the city's first true craft brewpub. The setting carries its own history: the brewpub fills part of the Highland Park Mill No. 3 building, once the largest textile .....

A beloved live-music venue in Charlotte's artsy NoDa district, the Neighborhood Theatre occupies a converted historic cinema on East 36th Street and has become a cornerstone of the city's music scene. Set in the neighbourhood that grew up around the old mill village and reinvented itself as an arts district, the venue carries the character of its single-screen origins into a warm, characterful room that has hosted touring and local acts for years. The venue is a flexible general-admission space.....

Charlotte's smallest famous stage runs on a single house rule: the music gets the room. The Evening Muse opened in April 2001 at 3227 North Davidson Street, the corner of North Davidson and 36th in the heart of NoDa, converted from a gallery-crawl coffee shop called Living Art by Joe Kuhlmann with partners Wes Robinson and Lea Pritchard. Kuhlmann - a touring performer and recording engineer who wanted to own the best-sounding room in Charlotte by age 26 - built a listening room on purpose: 80 s.....

Funk, punk, bluegrass and Latin dance lessons share one calendar in Plaza Midwood's scrappiest room. The Rabbit Hole at 1801 Commonwealth Avenue in Charlotte is a 300-capacity live music venue in the heart of the city's most determinedly independent neighborhood. The room's pitch is flexibility: an adaptable floor plan, quality sound and lighting, and a full-service bar - a space that reads as intimate club for a local band's debut and packed house for a regional headliner. The genre policy is.....