Pawnshop Is the Basement Where Taipei's Techno Scene Never Stopped

Korner shut down in 2018 and took the room where Taipei's underground techno scene had lived for the better part of a decade with it. Fourteen months later, the same operators reopened one floor beneath a gym on Xinyi Road, called it Pawnshop, and kept booking the same DJs who never left.

That basement is still running. Smoke Machine, the crew who anchored Korner in the first place, was still throwing Saturday nights at Pawnshop well into 2025. In a scene where venues open, get discovered by Instagram, and close within a few years, six years underground is closer to an institution than a club night.

Built From Korner's Ashes

Smoke Machine started in 2009 as a loose run of DIY parties around Taipei, co-run by Diskonnected and Josh Dartz. When Korner opened, the crew finally had somewhere to gather every week instead of chasing warehouses and borrowed rooms. DJ Mag has since called Korner the birthplace of Taipei's current generation of clubs, and it's not an exaggeration by much. When it closed in 2018, the city lost the one room that had trained most of its current DJs.

Pawnshop opened on December 6, 2019, with François X and Hibiya Line behind the decks, pitched at the time as bringing that experience back to the city, only better. Two weeks later, on December 21, the new club threw a party marking ten years of Smoke Machine. Do the arithmetic and the crew is now closing in on two decades, which makes them older than most of the region's dedicated techno rooms, Pawnshop included.

Three Rooms, One Rulebook

The club is split into three spaces that don't pretend to be one big room. Pawnshop, the main space, is techno. Downbar runs house and disco on the same nights. Known, added later, is set aside for live performances, workshops and art events rather than club sets. The main system is Funktion-One, tuned, according to the opening coverage, to rival some of the better rigs in the region, and the photos from that first week still show it stacked floor to ceiling either side of a bare concrete booth. It looks less like a nightclub than a mastering studio someone forgot to finish, which is more or less the point.

Find it at B1, No. 279, Section 4, Xinyi Road in Da'an District, underneath a gym with no sign announcing what's downstairs. That's deliberate. Pawnshop's bookings have always leaned toward developing regional talent over paying for a headliner's flight, and the venue's opening run featured Andy Chiu, Diskonnected and Kikiorix alongside the touring names, not behind them. The club describes its own mission, in its own words, as demarginalization and liberation for the LGBTQ+ community alongside otherness, rebellion, pleasure and euphoria, and it survived its own scare during the pandemic, a three month shutdown in 2021 that forced an emergency fundraiser, while plenty of Taipei's other rooms never reopened at all.

The Night That Outlasted the Venue

What's notable in 2026 isn't that Pawnshop survived, plenty of clubs limp along on inertia. It's who's still on the flyer. Smoke Machine's Saturday nights ran deep into 2025 and straight into this year: Askkin, Diskonnected, Andy Chiu, Umbra and Other Shore in February 2025, Doctor Jeep, Diskonnected, Pocari Sweaty and L-CC that July, and a Pawnshop Night lineup of AP-C, L-CC, Elinnn, Loey, Gemnital and Arnav this past January. Diskonnected, one of the crew's founders, is still on the bill sixteen years after the first DIY party and six years into this particular basement. That's residency in the old sense, not the marketing sense.

Smoke Machine's reach goes past the club anyway. The crew also runs a label, a long-running podcast series, and Organik Festival, the annual coastal weekender that Loopliner covered when its 13th edition landed in Shimen District this April with Helena Hauff and DJ Nobu on the lineup. Pawnshop is the version of the same instinct that happens indoors on a Saturday: book the people you trust, keep doing it, and let the room be secondary.

Taipei has flashier clubs now than it did in 2019. OMNI runs lasers and a wraparound screen a few districts over, and newer rooms like FINAL have their own Boiler Room credits to point to. Pawnshop doesn't compete on production. Its case is duller and more durable: the same handful of people have been doing this since 2009, in three different rooms across two different decades, and they still haven't gotten bored of it.

Cover and figures: Mixmag Asia, from Pawnshop's opening week coverage, December 2019.