Pontoon Sank on Its Opening Night in the Mekong, and Phnom Penh Is Still Dancing There

Pontoon opened on the Mekong with an original Studio 54 DJ behind the decks and a crowd that wouldn't stop arriving. By 11:30pm, the floating club was taking on water. Before the night was over, Phnom Penh's newest venue had sunk.

That isn't a rumor passed around by old-timers. Eddie Newman, the promoter who managed Pontoon and still runs the Cambodian agency Code Red, told it to Mixmag Asia himself: the opening-night booking was Bert Bevans, a veteran of New York's Studio 54, and the overcrowded barge went under before his set ended. The club got hauled back out of the river. It kept going.

Newman wasn't just the guy running the club when it went under. He and his team at Code Red Agency, founded two decades ago, were among the first promoters bringing electronic music to Cambodia at all, booking names like Diplo, Grandmaster Flash, Goldie and, more recently, General Levy into a city that barely had a scene to put them in. Pontoon was one stop in that longer project, not the whole of it. Newman has kept going too: he's since opened a new venue, Room 2, still pushing the same kind of bookings into Phnom Penh.

Dry Land, Same Name

Pontoon isn't a boat anymore. It "ceased to be a literal pontoon some years ago and moved to dry land," as the long-running guide site Rusty Compass puts it, onto Street 172 off Street 51, where it still sits under the same neon sign. The name stuck because by then it had already become shorthand for Phnom Penh's rowdiest dancefloor, not because anyone wanted to remind people how the first night ended.

Newman dates the scene's best stretch to a specific window. "The golden era of Phnom Penh's nightclub scene was between 2008 and 2013," he told Mixmag Asia. "We had venues truly dedicated to quality music." Layo & Bushwacka! and DJ Zinc played Pontoon regularly in that run, alongside touring names like Eddy Frampton, Darren Mac, Tim Coates and Fred Jungo. Major Lazer played there too, years before much of the outside world was paying attention to Cambodia's nightlife at all.

The DJ Who Wouldn't Leave

Pontoon's longest-serving resident arrived the same year the golden era started. DJ Achaya had run a nightclub in Sri Lanka before relocating to Phnom Penh in 2008, and by his own account he was appalled at how little house music the city's clubs were playing. He set about fixing that himself, and in 2009 founded Dancin Mantis Records to push house and electronic sound into rooms that mostly wanted hip-hop and Khmer pop. He started with a regular Saturday house night at the club before settling in as its longest-running resident, a title he still holds. Nobody else on the roster has lasted that long, which in a scene where venues open and close inside a single year is its own kind of achievement.

Who Plays There Now

The club's pull with touring DJs never really stopped. On October 2, Pontoon booked three-time DMC world champion DJ Craze, one more name in a run of international bookings that has kept landing at the venue this year, on the same spacious dancefloor and island bar the club has run with since it moved onto dry land.

Pontoon is one stop on Loopliner's guide to Phnom Penh's house and techno scene. It runs seven nights a week at #80, Street 172, just off Street 51 in the Golden Sorya strip, the same stretch of road it settled on after leaving the river behind, open from 9pm to 4am Monday through Thursday and on Sundays, until 5am on Fridays and Saturdays.