Di Linh Has Lost Two Home Clubs in One Year, and She's Still DJing in Hanoi

A Sunrise Set for a Club About to Become an Opera House

Di Linh played her last set at Savage at sunrise, on a New Year's Eve that doubled as a wake. Hanoi's government had already told the club it wanted the site, a converted French villa in Tay Ho that used to be the Angolan embassy, for a 44.1-hectare opera house and cultural park. The lights came up on the dance floor one final time, then Savage was gone. "If we stay together and stick with each other, we can rebuild," she told Huck Magazine. She's spent 2026 finding out whether that's actually true.

Di Linh didn't set out to be Hanoi's most durable DJ. She showed up at Savage in 2018 as a regular, a clubgoer who kept coming back because, as she's put it, she'd finally found a place she belonged. A resident DJ there took her under his wing, she practiced for about two days, and then he put her on the lounge decks. No academy, no years of bedroom production before the first booking. Just a club that let her in.

The Room That Made Her Doesn't Exist Anymore

Savage opened in 2016 and moved to the Tay Ho villa in 2020, two rooms called the Anteroom and the Red Cube, plus a record shop and internet radio station called Pond Records. It became the anchor of Hanoi's underground: a place where, as Di Linh told Mixmag Asia back in 2022, pandemic border closures had accidentally handed local DJs more stage time because nobody could fly international names in anymore. She built her residency in that gap. Then the gap closed from the other direction. A nationwide ban on nitrous oxide in mid-2025, state media accusing the club of selling it, and the opera house land grab all landed inside the same twelve months. Savage threw its last party on December 31, 2025, and didn't reopen.

Equation Festival, the other fixture on her residency list, didn't survive the same year. It's officially cancelled for 2026, another casualty of the same tightening: more police drug testing at events, less room for promoters to take risks. And her third home, Ho Chi Minh City's The Observatory, is closing at the end of this month after almost 13 years, citing rising rent and booking rules that have made it steadily harder to bring international DJs into the country at all. Three residencies. Within the span of one year, none of them are open.

Hanoi Didn't Die, It Just Got Smaller

What's actually interesting here isn't the closures. Southeast Asia has had a bad run of those this year, and Loopliner has covered more than its share. It's that Di Linh kept playing through all of it, because Hanoi's scene didn't disappear so much as it got rehoused in smaller, scrappier rooms. Unmute, a 300-capacity space built inside a fruit and vegetable market in Tay Ho, picked up Equation Festival's programming after the festival's usual venue fell through. HUM Studios, a multi-level micro-club started by Yanes and A.lien, opened as a second landing spot. There's even a DJ booth at a burger joint, GoodTime Burger, running weekend sets. None of it has Savage's old capacity or its record shop. All of it is still Hanoi playing music on a Friday night.

Di Linh has turned up on Unmute's bookings since, including a Thugshop crossover night billed "Never Tooo Loud." She's also the kind of local DJ this scene gets covered abroad for keeping, not just keeping going: Resident Advisor handed her an hour of its own podcast slot in September 2023, a mix built around Dust-e-1 bookending a run of house and techno from Schacke, Kerrie and Mac Declos, patient and well-paced in a way that doesn't scream for attention. In August 2025, she played Singapore's RASA, a room built specifically around what it calls sophisticated, club-driven techno from the region, headlining over local support Woosuk and Rocky Chann.

What's Left to Play

She still describes her own sets as disco, house and techno blended on a go-with-the-flow basis, mid-tempo with bursts of energy rather than one relentless BPM. It makes for a style built on a room trusting its DJ, and these days that room is more often Unmute than anywhere with Savage's old name on the door. The Observatory, the last of her three original residencies, plays its final Saturday on October 31.

Cover photo: Di Linh, via Mixmag Asia.