Red Lounge

Being on the road in Asia has been a fantastic experience so far.  Seeing different parts of the world and experiencing different cultures has been great but living as a backpacker has its drawbacks, especially when it comes to exposure to good shows and live performances.  So after 6 weeks of bad hip-hop, cheesy electro remixes of the same bad hip-hop songs, poorly mixed by local DJ’s and blared through shitty blown-out speakers, I was ready to get my club on.  Looking through the Singapore club listings, I found out that one of my favorite DJ/producer would be in town the following weekend, playing the legendary Zouk nightclub.  A string of emails and Facebook messages later, we managed to convince our friend Steve, who was in the Philippines at the time, to come meet us for a party weekend.  Pulling a few connections, Steve managed to get us guest list and VIP entrance.  We felt like rock stars walking through the neon-lit tunnel leading to the club’s main room.

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Living up to the expectations, Zouk offered an impressive sight, with its multi-level room that managed to create a fairly intimate vibe for the size of venue.  Modeled after Pacha Ibiza, it is by far the nicest nightclub I have seen in Asia.  DJ Hong was on opening duty and played a nice mix of funky tech-house, doing a great job at getting the crowd primed for the headliner.

About an hour and too many $22 Vodka/Red-Bulls later, Tocadisco took to the stage.  Playing off his Mac and using Traktor Scratch Pro, he kept things in the same vein as the opening DJ and started his set with some darker sounding tech-house tracks, slowly working the crowd up to a hands-in-the-air frenzy when he dropped his remix of Whippenberg’s Pong.  He then followed with what seemed like an interminable set of really noisy Dutch electro, even including a remix of Day n’night by Kid Kudi.  I mean, really???

Fortunately, he slowly backtracked and came back to my preferred style of driving tech-house and spent the rest of his 3-hour set alternating between tech and cheesy poppy electro, which allowed for nice long smoke breaks and some mingling with locals and tourist from exotic places such as West Vancouver.  Yes, the world is getting that small…

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Overall, I would give Tocadisco a 8/10 for mixing an track selection (even though I didn’t like a lot of it, he did get famous through more commercial remixes and it was to be expected that he would play in that genre), 6/10 for charisma and stage presence (smiling shouldn’t be this hard), and 11/10 for wife hotness.  Memorable moment of the night: playing Chinese drinking games with the Taiwanese firefighters in the smoking room.

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Photos courtesy of Steve Geszler.