RA's 25th Anniversary World Tour Picked a Taipei Basement Over Every Southeast Asian Capital

Resident Advisor turns 25 this year, and it's marking the birthday with ten parties on five continents. London. Tokyo. Taipei. New York. Mexico City. Amsterdam. Dublin. Paris. Berlin. Sydney. Zero of them are in Southeast Asia.

RA announced the full itinerary in a pair of posts on 27 and 29 July, then revealed the first lineup, for London's opening night at Outernet on 25 September, on 4 August: Mala and AliA on decks, Blawan and Bitter Babe performing live, the latter with a commissioned AV show built with Koch.a. The other nine cities are still waiting on their bills. What's already locked is the map, and the map runs London to Tokyo (3 October, HVEN) to Taipei (8 October, Pawnshop) to New York (Good Room) to Mexico City (Fünk) to a free Greenhouse Session in Amsterdam during ADE, then Dublin, Paris and a three-venue Berlin takeover across Tresor, Globus and OHM, closing 5 December at Sydney's Club 77, the city where RA was founded in 2001.

Two stops in Asia, and neither is where you'd expect

Ten cities, and Asia gets exactly two: Tokyo, which nobody would argue with, and Taipei, which a lot of promoters in this region probably would. Not Bangkok, where Mustache and INAKOMA have spent years building the kind of room-specific culture RA usually likes to celebrate. Not Singapore, fresh off doubling Zouk's dancefloor for a 35th birthday. Not Jakarta, Manila, Kuala Lumpur or Ho Chi Minh City, all cities with clubs this site has spent the past two weeks writing about precisely because they're doing something worth noticing. RA picked a basement in Taipei instead.

What Pawnshop actually is

Pawnshop isn't a flagship superclub, which is the point. It's the room the Korner crew rebuilt after Korner itself closed in 2018, reopening on 6 December 2019 as a three-space setup: Pawnshop for the heavier club sound, Downbar next door for something more uplifting, and Known upstairs for live sets, workshops and art. It's also home turf for Smoke Machine, the night Diskonnected and Josh Dartz started back in 2009 and never stopped running. We wrote about the place last month: a scrappy, low-ceilinged room that has outlasted flashier clubs on the same street by simply booking well and staying open. That's a very RA kind of pick, a scene room over a superclub, which makes the Berlin stop (Tresor, the actual superclub) look almost like the outlier on this list.

So why not here

Nobody at RA has said Southeast Asia was considered and passed over, and it would be unfair to read malice into a ten-city list that also skips most of Europe and all of Africa. But the pattern is hard to miss from this side of the map: RA's own coverage of Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia has always been thinner than its Tokyo, Seoul or Taipei output, and a tour built to reflect "the past, present and future of electronic music" landing nowhere between Tokyo and Sydney says something about whose future that is. The nine remaining lineups haven't dropped yet, so nothing about the format is final. The itinerary is.

Cover photo: Mixmag Asia, from its 2019 coverage of Pawnshop's opening in Taipei.