Over & Above Turned Six KL Shophouses Into a Techno Room Built Like Berghain

Walk past 53 Jalan Tun H.S. Lee in the middle of Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown and you could miss it entirely. The facade is just another stretch of heritage shophouse: peeling paint, window-unit air conditioners, a shuttered textile shop next door. Open the door at Over & Above and six of those shophouses disappear into one room, steel I-beams holding up a double-height ceiling, a luminous tube installation strung over the dance floor, and up to 800 people moving under red light that looks lifted straight out of Berlin.

The club's grand opening followed a soft launch that mixmag.asia reported had already run "for a few months."

Six Shophouses, One Steel Skeleton

The design is the real story. KL studio Empt Studio spent 2024 merging six separate historic shophouse lots into a single 6,000-square-foot venue, a job that meant reworking the floor levels from scratch with new steel I-beam structures rather than just knocking through a few party walls. What's left keeps the raw brick and exposed steel of the original buildings but adds warehouse-scale proportions no single shophouse could offer on its own. The venue's own framing of the room cites Berlin's Berghain and London's Printworks as reference points, and for once the comparison isn't just marketing copy: the light installation over the dance floor was built in collaboration with a Russian lighting-artist studio, not bought off a catalogue.

Step back outside and the illusion breaks immediately. The entrance is still flanked by the same heritage shopfronts as the rest of the block, which is either the best or the worst thing about the venue depending on how you feel about queueing next to a shuttered shop at 1am.

A Booking Policy With No Single Lane

Over & Above doesn't pretend to run one genre, and its calendar since opening makes that obvious. Resident TCHUNO holds down the regular techno, hard techno and hardstyle nights, while the booking sheet since 2024 has run from Nakadia and ryota at the soft launch to Panjabi MC playing a UK garage, grime, house and bhangra set on December 19, 2024, to Hannah Laing two nights later on trance, techno and hard house, to Angerfist, one of hardcore and hardstyle's most recognizable names, on January 16, 2026. That's a wider net than most clubs this size throw. It also means a night here is a genuine bet on what you'll hear, not a guarantee of the straight techno the Berghain comparisons up front might suggest.

Chinatown's Unlikely Nightlife Corridor

Over & Above isn't an isolated bet. Kuala Lumpur's house and techno scene has spent 2026 moving into exactly this kind of repurposed heritage space: fono, the listening bar inside the Zhongshan Building, closed its own weekly series after eight years in February, by choice rather than failure. Ohrwurm, the promoter collective founded by Kenny Wee, Callen and Alam, has thrown club nights across the city since 2010. Over & Above's bet runs the opposite direction from fono's intimacy: go bigger, inside buildings nobody else wanted, and keep the booking policy loose enough to fill 800 people on a Tuesday as easily as a Saturday.

If You Go

Over & Above is at 53 Jalan Tun H.S. Lee in Chinatown, a two-minute walk from Masjid Jamek LRT station. Capacity runs to 800. Lineups change weekly; check Over & Above's own site or its Instagram, @overandabove.kl, before building a night around a specific name.

Cover photo: Over & Above KL. Facade and interior photos: Empt Studio, via e-architect.