DJ Wiz, Who Taught Singapore's DJ Booth to Scratch, Is Dead at 63

A Last Gig, Booked by His First Student

Wayne Liu got his first DJ gig from Andrew Chow at Zouk's Phuture room in 2004. Twenty-two years later, Liu, who now DJs as Koflow, was the one booking Chow. "He gave me my first gig as a DJ at Phuture in 2004, and I gave him his final gig in May," Liu said. That gig, a one-hour set at the Boat Quay bar Kossa on May 24, turned out to be the last time Andrew Chow, better known as DJ Wiz, played in front of a crowd. He died on August 3, five weeks before Singapore's DMC chapter was due to hand him a Legacy Award he had already been told was coming. He was 63.

His daughter, Abby Bernadette Chow, announced the death on Facebook the same day, saying he "passed on peacefully" in hospital with both his daughters at his side, after living with stomach cancer. His wake ran through the morning of August 8 at a void deck on Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10. The dress code, his family asked, should be "colourful and stylish, just like how Andrew would dress."

Three Decades in the Booth

Chow joined Zouk's DJ roster in the mid-1990s, not long before the club carved a smaller room, Phuture, out of what had been an MTV viewing bar. Phuture opened in December 1996 as the deliberately weirder counterpart to Zouk's house and techno main floor, a place for hip-hop, R&B, funk, soul, rock, big beat and breaks. Chow became its resident, and stayed one into the early 2010s. Colleagues who worked alongside him describe a DJ who could scratch technically enough to win competitions without ever making the scratch the point: the cuts sat inside the groove instead of chopping it up. He later worked in-house at Kyo, and from 2001 taught turntablism at AudioSports DJ Academy, which is where a lot of Singapore's current DJ generation first stood in front of two decks and a mixer.

Three DMC Titles, One World Championship Leg

Competitively, Chow won the DMC Singapore title three times, in 1998, 1999 and 2001, at a point when DMC was still the closest thing scratch DJing had to a world championship circuit, the same series that made names like DJ Craze and Q-Bert. He also took the Singapore leg of the Technics World DJ Championships in 1998. Locally, that made him the DJ other DJs measured themselves against for the better part of two decades, and the reason Radikal Forze, Singapore's best-known b-boy crew, has pointed to watching dancers respond to his sets at Phuture as part of what pushed its founding members to start battling in 1998.

A Legacy Award He Won't Collect

DMC Singapore had planned to present Chow with its Legacy Award on September 6 at RASA, the Raffles Place venue co-founded by Kavan Spruyt, the same promoter behind Kyo, where Chow worked in-house for years. RASA has hosted Loopliner-covered nights before, including Moodymann's Singapore debut and Darker Than Wax's 15th anniversary set. DMC Singapore has said the ceremony will go ahead as a tribute rather than a presentation.

What Zouk's DJ Booth Owes Him

Zouk just rebuilt its own dancefloor for a 35th birthday, and Chow's name barely gets a mention in most retrospectives of the club, which tend to run straight to the international headliners. That is a gap in the record, not a reflection of what he meant to the room. Eddie Chan, who DJs as DJ Small, called him irreplaceable in how Singapore's DJs learned to mix. Terence Leong, now managing director of Live Nation Taiwan, put it more bluntly: "the best coach a DJ could have, the best DJ a rapper would want to rock with." Kossa, the bar that gave him his actual final gig, wrote on Instagram that he was "more than just the DJ that every millennial came to know while partying at Zouk and Phuture," calling him "a true pioneer who paved the way for many DJs in Singapore." A club scene this young doesn't have many people left who were there for the first ten years of it working the decks. Singapore has one fewer now.

Cover photo: Andrew Chow in an archival portrait from his early career, via The New Paper / Bandwagon Asia.