BuwanBuwan Built a Nightclub Inside Minecraft. Now Its Founder Runs a Real One.

There is no line outside Club Matryoshka. There is no bouncer, no cover charge, no overpriced cocktail. To get in, you fill out an application form designed, in the words of its founder, to "weed out" the people who are not there for the music. Wait a couple of weeks. If you make the cut, a digital pamphlet arrives by email with instructions on how to enter, because Club Matryoshka is not a building in Poblacion or BGC. It is a private Minecraft server, built block by block in a forest bordered by mountains and lakes, in a country that does not technically exist.

A Club With No Address

Manila producer Jorge Wieneke V, known then as similarobjects and today as obese.dogma777, launched Club Matryoshka on July 13, 2019, with a Filipino Minecraft collective known as Chodes Craft. Its core roster is named consistently across the club's contemporary press and its own later CTM Festival credits as similarobjects, Ahju$$i, cavill and dot.jaime, with additional collaborators cited inconsistently between sources. Wieneke was already the producer behind BuwanBuwan Collective, the experimental dance-music label he cofounded to platform Filipino artists working outside the country's mainstream club circuit. Club Matryoshka became the collective's strangest project yet: a working nightclub with no physical footprint at all.

The name nods to Russian nesting dolls, echoed in the club's interior of rooms folding into further rooms. "I see the potential in how Club Matryoshka can bring more people together in music," Wieneke told VICE at the time. "It's slowly becoming a commune of some sort, and we're looking at it as immersive avenues to release music, hold concerts, [and] host international collaborations." The whole thing was built in Survival mode rather than the easier Creative mode, on purpose. "We made it in survival mode because I wanted the experience to be more personal for me," he said. "Seeing something come out from nothing is a beautiful experience in itself."

Potions Instead of Drinks

Inside, Discord voice channels double as room guides, so a different set of players hears a different live DJ set depending which digital hallway they walk down. Instead of buying rounds, clubgoers throw potions at each other: night-vision potions that saturate the colors, ones that blur and slow you down, leaping potions that send you flying over the crowd. Attendee Diego Avanceña, who came to the soft opening with his girlfriend, said he "did not expect it to be a fully interactive gig." Another attendee, Remington Chan, was struck by the sheer labor behind it: "The world they built was great, and the club looked super cool inside too. You can see that effort was put into building the place."

That labor is the point. Wieneke has said the project was partly a reaction against the unwritten rulebook of real-world clubbing. "People have a lot of preconceived notions on how to behave in the club in real life: what to do, what to wear, how to approach people," he said. "I wanted to partially break those stereotypes with this project, create new ways to enjoy music socially, and create safe spaces." When the pandemic hit the following year and the rest of the world's nightlife went dark, Club Matryoshka's timing looked less like a novelty and more like foresight: it kept growing through 2020 and into a collaboration with Berlin's CTM Festival in early 2021, at a moment when it was one of the only functioning clubs on Earth.

From Minecraft to Poblacion

Eventually the scale became unsustainable and Club Matryoshka went quiet, but the instinct behind it did not. By his own account, Wieneke spent the years after fighting to hold himself together, stepping back from music entirely after a bipolar disorder diagnosis and a difficult break from his family. When he resurfaced around 2022, it was with a food-and-beverage venture, Quay Concepts, and a rooftop bar called Ugly Duck in Poblacion, Manila's main nightlife district. Below it, he and his partners built Apotheka, a two-story club with secret rooms, a sound-responsive light rig on the ceiling and walls covered in projection mapping.

"That was one of my motivations for opening Ugly Duck and Apotheka," Wieneke told Blaqlyte in 2023, describing the wave of pandemic-era venue closures that left Poblacion's scene thinner and more commercial than before, even as a handful of Manila DIY mainstays kept running through the same years. "People were coming to me and clamoring for new spaces. It was a big risk, and I was really anxious, but I wanted to give back to the community. I want to bring back some of the autonomy we've lost."

It is the same sentence, really, said twice four years apart in two very different rooms, one made of blocks and one made of concrete: build the space nobody else will, then let people be strange in it together.

Cover photo: Club Matryoshka, via VICE.