Loopy Club (29/03/24)
Hello from Vietnam! Before I get into today's missive about my trip to Hangzhou last week, I want to apologise to paying subscribers who have probably received notifications about Substack re-subscriptions and confusing payment receipts. It's a bit of a mess and I'm doing my best to sort it out with Substack's rather unhelpful support team. I'll keep you posted.
I'm here in Mai Chau, about 4 hours' drive from Hanoi, for Equation Festival this weekend. I'm playing tomorrow (Saturday) at sunset on the outdoor stage. But before then there's today's music to enjoy!
Right, on with my report from Loopy Club last Friday.
Hangzhou is a city of about 10 million people a hop skip and a jump from Shanghai onhe East coast of China. On the drive from the airport into town you cross the Qiantang River, which is absolutely vast and goes, so Mike my transfer driver told me, all the way to Beijing. You can do the trip by boat — it takes two whole days. I was only in Hangzhou for just over 24 hours, arriving on Friday morning, playing in Loopy club on Friday night, and then heading on to Seoul at 3pm the next day. If you’re in China for less than 144 hours you can apply for a transit visa at immigration, which saves a lot of stress with advance visa applications, though on my way through the border the agent took my passport away for about 15 minutes without explanation, which didn’t bode well. In the end they let me go.
After a 12-hour flight I was in a bit of a daze, but a lovely chat with Mike and a delicious wonton soup lunch with Yifei, the owner of the club, helped me settle. The two of them met studying at London College of Communication back around the same time I lived in London, so we reminisced a bit about nights in Shoreditch and so on. Yifei, who’s from Hangzhou, came back from London about 10 years ago and after a couple of years set up Loopy. He had a son just before that, so it's nice to think that in a way the club is his second child. I had heard interesting things about the place — that it was in a shopping centre, that it had excellent sound — but there’s nothing that can really prepare you for seeing it yourself. First, though I needed a goddamn nap.
After some bizarre jetlagged sleep and a bit of rekordboxing in the hotel, I set off for what turned out to be a very long walk along a road through a densely forested area and out onto the waterfront at West Lake. It was dark by this point and the Leifeng Pagoda, a giant, brightly illuminated replica of a much older pagoda that was destroyed during the cultural revolution, was shining brightly out across the lake. Hangzhou is apparently one of the most popular destinations for domestic tourism in China and on this warm evening the lakefront was bustling. I sat and ate possibly the stickiest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, a sweet, lurid green rice cake filled with red bean paste. I had my tote bag of 12 records — carefully selected to give maximum choon options for minimum baggage weight on this month-long tour — with me ready for a sound check, but first there was dinner. I met Yifei and Mike at a place round the corner from the club and we ate delicate pieces of fried fish, delicious spicy chicken, something resembling bamboo that was not bamboo, eggs, intestine and stinky tofu.
Yifei told me the club had been pretty much thriving before the pandemic hit, but then the three years of lockdowns and closed borders in China put it back to square one. He's been pushing an adventurous programme since the authorities reopened borders in early 2023, but it’s been difficult to build up a reliable crowd again. It’s interesting to compare this with the mood in somewhere like, say, New York, where the scene seems to have taken on a new lease of life post-pandemic. Younger people in China aren’t going out so much it seems, or at least not to underground nightclubs. I tried to reassure Yifei that my enjoyment of the night was not contingent on there being lots of people there, even though I knew that’d be good for business. Once we’d walked over to the club, I found myself reiterating this point even more strongly: the moment I saw the place I knew I’d have a great time no matter what.
To get to Loopy you go up in the exterior lift of a shopping centre, three floors, and walk along shiny halls between Pizza Huts, KFCs and karaoke bars until you reach a long and increasingly grungey corridor. This opens out onto a curious space inhabited by a large box, vaulted arches, bridges and a balcony, a configuration that, it turns out, was designed from scratch by Yifei’s brother, an architect. That is: Yifei got hold of this empty space in a shopping centre and gave his architect brother carte blanche to design a Berlin-style nightclub in it, complete with two bars, an upstairs live music room (where a cool young punk band were playing to an audience of equally cool young hipsters), a seating area where they also serve food, and the big black box of the main club room itself. This latter houses big Funktion One stacks, a solid concrete DJ booth and subtly effective lights. The whole thing is treated head to toe in perforated acoustic panels, and it sounds incredible.
When I first walked in, DJ Rú was playing amapiano and it sounded round, heavy and almost squidgy, as it should. I left my earplugs out just to soak it in briefly before putting them in. I was enjoying the amapiano so much it was almost a shame when Rú moved onto carefully paced dusty house and italo. It was around this moment when one of the punters, a kid of about 19 I reckon, turned to me on the dancefloor and, rather out of the blue, asked “What do you think happened to Kate?” I was a bit baffled, until the follow-up question clarified which Kate he meant: “As a British person, what’s your opinion on Charles’s new wife?” This was the first time I’d ever been interrogated about the royal family on a dancefloor and, even though I had absolutely no idea what had happened to Kate, for some reason it just put me in a really good mood. We bopped away to more of Rú’s set, I drank a couple of gin and tonics, and then it was time for me to go on.
Just before that, though, something happened that I’ve never experienced before: the tune that Rú had cued up as his final track was playing, but then somehow switched to a completely different, much faster and heavier track, even though the display on the CDJ continued to display the original selection. Since the new track playing was about 10bpm faster, we tried to slow it down, but the pitch had no effect. It was a bewildering end to Rú’s otherwise immaculate warm-up set. The next day he told me his USB was corrupted, but on the night neither of us had any idea what was going on. Essentially what it meant was that I started my set mixing into a fast and heavy techno track that was completely out of keeping with what had gone before, and which I couldn’t pitch adjust. It was very bizarre.
In years past this would probably have freaked me the fuck out but thankfully I’ve learnt a kind of zen when it comes to the unexpected — especially with CDJs — so I just breathed deeply, looked serenely at the ‘40 seconds remaining’ indicator and sort of cross-faded relatively quickly into Miagma’s ‘Midnight At The Flower Bar’. It wasn’t beatmatched but it didn’t really matter. I took my time setting the stage again, enjoying a series of pristine minimal house tracks over that beautiful sound system, Ali Akram’s ‘Primary Tactic’ (which I reviewed here) a new favourite among them. After my recent Todd The God splurge I had to play ‘Can’t You Believe’, which was the cue for one of the dancers to loom out of the fog and shout “Todd Edwards!!” Todd: transcending geographies since time immemorial. It was great to look out from the security of the booth and watch the room, not much more than half full but with everyone seeming to be dancing and enjoying the vibe. I went a bit pumpy with Hannah Holland’s ‘Roller’ and a bit bassy with DJ Satyrias’s ‘Sippin On’, and I played a significant proportion of my 12 records along the way. The vinyl setup worked perfectly and sounded great. I finished with Roland Simmons’ trippy ‘Sól’ before the next DJ, Butterfly, came on for a more pumping closing set that featured, if my memory serves me correctly through the gin and tonics, a hit of Cerrone.
I left around 4am, drunk and extremely satisfied. I kept having the same thought: if only more venues in Europe would invest this much attention and money into the things that really matter: layout and sound. I think many places at home just don’t feel the need to do that because there’s enough demand without it; whereas in Hangzhou Yifei is fighting to rebuild a regular crowd despite having this amazing place waiting to welcome them. The punk band playing upstairs, and the drag night scheduled for the evening after, were examples of him diversifying the programme — not only to try and attract more people to the space and therefore support the business, but also because, as he told me over lunch the next day, he’s driven by a passion to really contribute something to the cultural life of his home city. I have nothing but admiration for his attitude and perseverance and for the sheer quality of what he and his brother have put together.
If any of you are passing through Hangzhou, or even Shanghai (it’s less than an hour away by high-speed train), I highly recommend you make the effort to check Loopy out.
Loved the read as always - Loopy sounds like an incredible venue! Random (and unsolicited) idea - would love a run down of your favourite venues from your time on the road (similar to your Top Tracks of 2023 series) if you ever get around to it. Signed - a frequent solo traveler who bases their trips / itineraries around good tunes :)
The way you wrote about the Zen attitude amidst the chaotic CDJ problems was interesting, very detailed emotions. Looking forward to your review and story about OIL and hope you enjoy the sound system there.