Clubs and nightlife
Where house and techno actually happen in Asia: venue guides, residencies, opening nights and closures, from Bangkok's RCA to Bali's cliff-top decks, Singapore's Zouk and the warehouses of Manila and Saigon.
Defected played Phuket's Illuzion and Koh Samui's Club Seen on back-to-back nights in August, the same year both sat inside DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs. Here's how two very different Thai venues got there.
Dry season fills Uluwatu's clifftop clubs, wet season cuts prices in half, New Year's Eve breaks every rule of the calendar, and one day in March shuts the whole island down. Here's how to time a trip.
Djakarta Warehouse Project borrowed the word for a stadium-sized festival. The actual warehouse and DIY scene is smaller, scrappier, and scattered across converted shophouses, a former cinema, and a small club above a Poblacion sidewalk.
Before Vietnam had a techno scene, it had this: pop songs sped up, chopped and slammed onto a four-on-the-floor kick until the whole street shook. Here's where Vinahouse came from, and why the country's newest DJs are trying to outrun it.
Central Vietnam isn't a clubbing capital, and it doesn't pretend to be. But between one red-lit techno bar in Da Nang and a sunset DJ set on An Bang Beach, there's a real, small scene worth knowing before you land.
DJ Harvey and LA sound engineer George Stavro built KLYMAX's quad-stack rig in Seminyak from off-the-shelf parts. The resident DJs playing it, DITA included, are all Indonesian.
While RA's anniversary tour picked Taipei over every Southeast Asian capital, Hanoi's Unmute booked a Smoke Machine-affiliated techno DJ for a normal Friday night, no world tour required.
Six weeks after shutting Headquarters, the crew reopened one unit over as Exit Reality. On Saturday it hosts Paula Koski's Singapore debut, in a party series with Hanoi's Unmute that predates the closure by two years.
Drop is closed. FLY became Mudita, which also closed. Most club guides never noticed. Here is who is actually playing house and techno in Hong Kong right now, and what it costs to get in.
Cakeshop, Faust, Soap and Vurt: what's actually good in Seoul's techno and house scene right now, what it costs, and how you get home after the last train.
NotYuTing came up through a Saigon hip-hop club that turned itself into a record label. Her newest single weaves a Vietnamese folk instrument into trance to mark 50 years since reunification, and nobody outside a small SoundCloud page has really noticed yet.
Resident Advisor is marking 25 years with ten parties worldwide. The only two stops in Asia are Tokyo and a basement club in Taipei called Pawnshop. Not one Southeast Asian capital made the cut.
From a studio on Bangkok's Charoen Krung to the inside of an actual Manila jeepney, community radio has quietly become Southeast Asia's cheapest, most durable piece of nightlife infrastructure.
House and techno in Hanoi now runs through Unmute and Mirage, and a handful of bars and burger counters doing a club's job, as the scene adapts to a nitrous oxide ban and near-routine police raids.
DJ Harvey handpicked her to lead Klymax Discotheque's resident roster in Bali. Three weeks ago, DITA was behind the decks at Panorama Bar in Berlin.
bani haykal's new record turns bicycle frames into more than 90% of its sound. Every sale of the Strange Weather Dunia cassette goes to Palestine solidarity groups.
Savaya Group, operator of Asia's top-ranked club, has opened a second Bali venue on the Kuta coast. Zumana's Grand Opening Weekend on September 25-26 brings the Martinez Brothers and Satori to a beachfront space built around a 10-metre wooden sculpture.
Eri Septian has been releasing tracks under the name Cyda since 2016, scattered across half a dozen small labels. It took a Paris imprint called Minitel to finally give him a full album: nine tracks of 90s progressive house dressed up as a fake in-flight announcement.
ZoukOut turned one nightclub's beach party into Asia's biggest dusk-to-dawn festival. Here's the real history, what 2023's tickets cost, how to actually get to Siloso Beach and why the 2026 dates still aren't out.
Bangkok doesn't have one closing time, it has four, and which one applies to the club you're standing outside of depends on a street name most tourists have never heard of. Here's how the zoning actually works in 2026.
Vu Phuong Thao grew up on an organ in Son La, dropped out of diplomatic training, and built her name in Ho Chi Minh City's underground. This July she became the first Vietnamese woman to play Tomorrowland, and Vietnam's own press called it a Vinahouse homecoming.
The Ukrainian duo behind Upperground make their long-overdue Singapore debut on October 17, inside a decommissioned power station Collective Minds is turning into a venue for the night.
There's a stone quarry on the festival grounds that turns into a minimal house and techno room after dark. Here's what a first-timer actually needs to know about dates, tickets, camping and where the electronic music lives at Thailand's biggest arts and music festival.
Yeti Out started as two brothers and a friend blagging free entry to parties by pretending to write about them. Sixteen years later they run a Hong Kong radio station, a record label, and the crew Boiler Room called when it finally came back to the city.