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Nightlife across Southeast Asia: venue openings and closures, licensing, after-hours culture and where the dance floors actually are.
115 articles / Page 4
While RA's anniversary tour picked Taipei over every Southeast Asian capital, Hanoi's Unmute booked a Smoke Machine-affiliated techno DJ for a normal Friday night, no world tour required.
NotYuTing came up through a Saigon hip-hop club that turned itself into a record label. Her newest single weaves a Vietnamese folk instrument into trance to mark 50 years since reunification, and nobody outside a small SoundCloud page has really noticed yet.
Resident Advisor is marking 25 years with ten parties worldwide. The only two stops in Asia are Tokyo and a basement club in Taipei called Pawnshop. Not one Southeast Asian capital made the cut.
From a studio on Bangkok's Charoen Krung to the inside of an actual Manila jeepney, community radio has quietly become Southeast Asia's cheapest, most durable piece of nightlife infrastructure.
House and techno in Hanoi now runs through Unmute and Mirage, and a handful of bars and burger counters doing a club's job, as the scene adapts to a nitrous oxide ban and near-routine police raids.
DJ Harvey handpicked her to lead Klymax Discotheque's resident roster in Bali. Three weeks ago, DITA was behind the decks at Panorama Bar in Berlin.
bani haykal's new record turns bicycle frames into more than 90% of its sound. Every sale of the Strange Weather Dunia cassette goes to Palestine solidarity groups.
Savaya Group, operator of Asia's top-ranked club, has opened a second Bali venue on the Kuta coast. Zumana's Grand Opening Weekend on September 25-26 brings the Martinez Brothers and Satori to a beachfront space built around a 10-metre wooden sculpture.
Eri Septian has been releasing tracks under the name Cyda since 2016, scattered across half a dozen small labels. It took a Paris imprint called Minitel to finally give him a full album: nine tracks of 90s progressive house dressed up as a fake in-flight announcement.
ZoukOut turned one nightclub's beach party into Asia's biggest dusk-to-dawn festival. Here's the real history, what 2023's tickets cost, how to actually get to Siloso Beach and why the 2026 dates still aren't out.
Bangkok doesn't have one closing time, it has four, and which one applies to the club you're standing outside of depends on a street name most tourists have never heard of. Here's how the zoning actually works in 2026.
Vu Phuong Thao grew up on an organ in Son La, dropped out of diplomatic training, and built her name in Ho Chi Minh City's underground. This July she became the first Vietnamese woman to play Tomorrowland, and Vietnam's own press called it a Vinahouse homecoming.
The Ukrainian duo behind Upperground make their long-overdue Singapore debut on October 17, inside a decommissioned power station Collective Minds is turning into a venue for the night.
There's a stone quarry on the festival grounds that turns into a minimal house and techno room after dark. Here's what a first-timer actually needs to know about dates, tickets, camping and where the electronic music lives at Thailand's biggest arts and music festival.
House Cartel spent over a decade as outsiders fighting Jakarta's big room dominance from the DJ booth. Now the collective has quietly turned itself into a label, House Cartel Records, two EPs deep and counting.
In April 2024, Yangon's Red Room club put its own scene on record: twelve local producers, one compilation, no label behind it. Two years into a civil war, the room that made it is still open.
Cebu's underground fits in one converted pizza-building basement. Boracay's four stations each pick a different kind of night. Real venues, real prices, and what to skip on the Philippines' two biggest party islands.
Before you book a flight to dance in Bangkok, Phuket or Chiang Mai: how many visa-free days you actually get, why the digital arrival card matters, and what's changed about closing times, drinking hours and cannabis since 2025.
Singapore's most storied nightclub reopened its rebuilt Mainroom in June and marks 35 years on Friday, August 21, with the resident DJs who built the room, not a flown-in headliner.
Chiang Mai's electronic scene doesn't live on a strip. It's scattered across a converted shophouse, a top-floor room above Huay Kaew Road, and a hillside outside Mae Rim where the party runs until 6am.
Bangkok has dozens of sky bars selling a view. Very few of them book a DJ who actually plays house. Here's how to tell the difference, floor by floor.
Zamaera self-funded the first national Malaysian showcase in SXSW's history. The lineup was mostly rap, R&B and indie folk, but the set that closed it belonged to a techno producer nobody outside Malaysia had heard of yet.
Phuket's clubbing scene isn't Bangla Road neon. It's four rooms spread across the west coast: a sunset beach club, an Ibiza import with a real booking policy, one underground bar in Rawai, and a 5,000-capacity room if you want the big room instead.
Southeast Asia doesn't really have record shops built for house and techno the way Berlin or London does. What it has instead, city by city, is more interesting: soul, funk and reissue specialists who happen to stock the electronic stuff too.