Epizode, the Festival That Made Phu Quoc Vietnam's Biggest Dance Floor, Has Been Dark for Six Years

For four winters between 2016 and 2020, a laser-ringed canopy shaped like a flying saucer rose over a stretch of beach on Phu Quoc, Vietnam's largest island, and stayed up for eleven straight days. Carl Cox played under it. So did Nina Kraviz, Ricardo Villalobos, Loco Dice and Peggy Gou, years before she was selling out arenas. The festival was called Epizode, and for a few New Year's seasons it was arguably the biggest thing house and techno had going in the country.

Its last confirmed edition ran December 28, 2019 to January 8, 2020. Nothing has happened on that beach since. No cancellation notice, no farewell post. Six years on, its own websites don't even work.

Four Winters on Phu Quoc

Epizode launched in 2016 on Phu Quoc, an island off Vietnam's southwest coast better known for pepper farms and empty coastline than for techno. Its organizers, credited on the festival's second-edition poster as coming "from the creators of Kazantip, Befooz and Sagrado," three names out of Eastern Europe's festival circuit, picked the New Year period as its fixed slot and, in its later editions, settled on a stretch of Sunset Sanato Beach Club on the island's west coast.

By its second season, running December 31, 2017 to January 10, 2018, the bill already read like a serious techno festival rather than a tropical sideshow: Dixon, Chris Liebing, Loco Dice and Luciano headlined. The two editions after that pulled in Ricardo Villalobos, Nina Kraviz, Jamie Jones, Dubfire and Nicole Moudaber, alongside Carl Cox and Peggy Gou. Its December 2018 edition drew more than 10,000 attendees from 79 countries, according to the audio supplier that fitted it with line array speakers that year. Its fourth edition, the last one that actually happened, ran the full eleven days.

The Postponement That Was Never Lifted

A fifth edition was booked for the 2020-2021 New Year. In October 2020, with Vietnam's borders effectively closed to international arrivals, the organizers pushed it back a full year, to December 29, 2021 through January 9, 2022. Their statement at the time was plain enough: "After careful consideration of all global factors, we have made a difficult decision to reschedule EPIZODE5 to 2021." Ticket holders could roll their passes forward or ask for a refund. The rescheduled bill kept most of its names: Villalobos, Goldie, Jamie Jones, Loco Dice and Dubfire, plus regional artists Binh, Nastia and Satori.

That edition never happened either, at least not publicly. There was no second postponement notice and no cancellation statement. The trail simply goes cold after October 2020, which is a strange way for a festival that once drew ten thousand people a year to end.

A Website That Doesn't Load

Six years later, nothing has changed. epizode.asia returns a connection error. epizode.com, once the festival's main address, now 404s. No 2026 or 2027 edition has been announced anywhere a festival this size would plausibly announce one. Vietnam's biggest electronic music festival, covered across four editions by Mixmag Asia, simply went quiet without ever saying why.

The Gap It Left

Vietnam's house and techno scene didn't fold when Epizode did. Phu Quoc still draws dance music travelers, though the programming that's left runs smaller and more local now (our own guide to Nha Trang and Phu Quoc nightlife has the current rundown, and it is nowhere near eleven days long). What's missing is the specific thing Epizode offered: an internationally booked, beach-camping festival that put Vietnam on the same list as Thailand's Wonderfruit or Bali's big New Year's bookings, instead of treating the country as a stopover between them.

Whoever eventually tries to build something like it again, on Phu Quoc or anywhere else in Vietnam, will be rebuilding a reputation that already existed once and then evaporated in a single unexplained year. For now, the UFO-shaped canopy is somewhere in storage, or gone entirely, and the beach it stood on hosts nothing more ambitious than sunset drinks.

Cover photo: Epizode's main stage, via Mixmag Asia.