Snug @ Savage, Hanoi (07/01/23)
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A basement, a red light and a feelin’
That’s what Kerri Chandler suggested was the recipe for a good party, all the way back in 1992, and although it’s a somewhat romanticised view I’d say it still holds in the majority of cases. Leave it to the commercial events to overcomplicate things; for the real underground (literally, in the case of a basement), just focus on the essentials and let the dancers do the rest. To the original list I would of course add a few other fundamentals, maybe in a subtitle:
A basement, a red light and a feelin’
(and a good sound system, and a good crowd, and functioning toilets)
Though I guess I can see why Kerri opted for brevity.
Nevertheless, I reckon with the above ingredients you have the makings of something pretty special. Beyond that we’re getting into the realm of mere ornamentation, the icing on the cake, the cherry on top.
Well, after Saturday night, I can safely say that Savage Club in Hanoi has all of the above except the basement. It has the red light and the feeling, the sound system, the crowd, the (many) functioning toilets. It has the cake, the icing and the cherry, and much more besides. In fact it may even have a basement for all I know, but as a three-floor ex-Embassy with more than enough space (and sound insulation) above ground it doesn’t really need one. Anyway, if you want underground, it has an empty outdoor swimming pool where they hold events in the summer.
Friday
I played on Saturday night, but my first visit to the club was on Friday night around midnight: a recon mission made after two 6+ hour flights from London but which was relatively painless thanks to the fact I was still on European time and staying in a hotel approximately three minutes’ walk away. The area Savage is in is called Tây Hồ / West Lake and apparently when the club originally opened seven years ago, slightly further down the main road into town, there wasn’t really anything else happening in the vicinity, at least not in terms of nightlife or food or bars. In the intervening years the area has clearly developed rapidly and now has futuristic-looking hotels, plenty of hipster cafés, burger joints and so on, though it retains the appearance of barely-controlled chaos I have quickly come to associate with Hanoi in general.
The building that Savage moved to during the pandemic is off the main road, surrounded by trees and somewhat dwarfed by the large and over-illuminated modern hotels nearby, but it’s still a grand old edifice worthy of an ambassador — originally Australian, then Angolan, before becoming the club it is today. As Kerri implied, you don’t really need architectural drama for a good party, but in the case of Savage it definitely contributes to the experience. The approach to the mansion already bestows a sense of grandeur or glamour, but faded and slightly shabby, cool rather than chic. It’s a building that’s full of history but now, thanks to its new lease of life, also very much alive in the present.
Over the course of two nights I came to see the building’s central staircase as the principal actor in the performance: tiled floors; sweeping wooden banisters; on the first floor an opaque wall of glass bricks illuminated from behind to reveal the silhouettes of people in the bar; an unexpected conservatory-style area with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the surroundings and decorated with delicate hanging mobiles; and best of all, the small stairway windows protected by ornate metal grills that provided the inspiration for the club’s logo.
Climb this inviting staircase to the top and you find an outdoor roof terrace for chilling out. Stop on the first floor and go behind the glass wall to find the main upstairs bar, a room that’s lit and decorated in a way that suggests a fun party can be had, and with sufficient bar counter real estate to handle the many many people who would gather there on Saturday to see the Peach collective’s drag show. On Friday, however, the bar was closed, the action taking place solely in the downstairs room. You’d actually be forgiven for missing it, as it is hidden behind sturdy double doors and heavily insulated in a room-within-a-room style, so even at full pelt the sound can barely be heard outside the building.
This is the ‘red light’, in fact christened the Red Cube due to the geometric neon strips outlining the DJ and, it seems, for the way that the dancefloor wraps around the back of the booth in a square shape. I asked if there was latitude in the lighting choices for it to ever become the Green Cube, or the Pink Cube for that matter, but — I guess in deference to the scriptures of Kerri — I was told no, it’s the Red Cube in perpetuity. It’s also a Smokey Cube, a fog machine hidden under the booth seemingly on permanently, isolating the DJ in their own misty bubble and regularly doing the same to the dancers. It has a chunky, dynamic Funktion One system that to my ears (and earplugs) sounded great up to around 104db but a bit OTT if pushed much higher.
On Friday night I saw a DJ called Piezo playing at just the right loudness and velocity for my taste and got a good body-feel experience dancing in the sweet spot in the middle of the floor, though naturally I lost some of that physical oomph if I moved too far to the side or took a breather round the side of the booth. I actually enjoyed having this latter option, though, because there was still clear sound from two tops in the back corners, and it also gave me a chance to watch Piezo being really interactive on all three CDJs simultaneously — something I’m quietly curious about getting into myself. What I liked most about his set was how he adapted his mixing style to the tracks he was playing, being quick here or more patient there or sometimes ambitiously layering percussion loops for minutes at a time, but not (in my opinion) gratuitously. I was reassured to see the crowd responding to a range of textures and grooves, and by the time I beat a retreat I had that rare but satisfying feeling of confidence about what I could do in there the next day.
Saturday
When I shared the poster for this night and the rest of my trip in East Asia on Instagram, I paused for some time over how to say something about my attitude to the gigs in question. I’d been told so much about these clubs — Savage, The Observatory in Saigon, Modeci in Seoul — and the musical approach they have, that it was bringing up an issue that I’ve been dwelling on for what feels like the past six months or so: how to keep things fresh, when there’s a danger of things going stale. I felt like I needed to put this dilemma into words as a kind of kick up my own backside, to take this opportunity up to its fullest and push myself out of my comfort zone. So in the spirit of what I’d been wishing everyone I know for 2023 — “happiness and expansion” — I wrote that it was time for some creative expansion of my own, and added a star emoji for good measure. (Such are the preoccupations of a social media-ing DJ in 2023.)
The point I’m rather inelegantly trying to make is that although my gigs over the past six months have been wonderful, as their frequency has increased I’ve had this growing feeling of complacency, of leaning on what I know works well at the expense of exploring new ground. The trade-offs between preparation and spontaneity and safety and risk, and their relationship to the digital medium, have been a recurring theme on this newsletter (cases in point here, here, here and here), and there’s also no doubt that since I stopped doing a monthly radio show, my intake of fresh music has declined. I’ve been trying to compensate for that by ripping or re-purchasing more of my existing physical collection digitally to broaden the pool I’m drawing from for each weekend, though I personally find this a rather unedifying task. All in all this has led to this creeping suspicion of staleness, even as I still gain pleasure from putting old favourites together in the best way I know how.
So at this point you might be expecting me to say I followed through on my self-made promise to push my creative boundaries, taking full advantage of the highly favourable conditions in this marvellous club to really take risks and surprise even myself with my daring selections.
Well, you’d be wrong.
Thanks to the wonders of Rekordbox I can give you the following statistics:
30 tracks played in two hours
16 tracks that have been staples of my sets over the past 2 years
Around 10 tracks that I have played out consistently over the past decade
Just 2 tracks I had only played out once before
And one lonely track that I had never once played out before, that being the not-exactly-under-the-radar ‘Sfire7’
What does this all mean?
I don’t really know. It’s a weird mixture of the Rekordbox receipts telling me I’m repeating myself, resting on my laurels, coasting…but my heart and my body telling me that my set at Savage on Saturday was a really fucking good one, me in my element, me doing what I do best for the enjoyment not only of everyone there but my own enjoyment too. I had the best bloody time in that booth, cocooned by the smoke they intentionally fill the cube with yet feeling the positive vibe emanating from around me, and knowing — because the sound and monitoring is so good, and because I’d felt it the night before — that what I was doing must be translating fully to the floor. It felt like I was transmitting something of myself, and that after all is what I think we’re all in this for.
And just because the records were old hat (for me at least, if not for the crowd), that doesn’t mean there weren’t surprises, or pleasures, or even triumphs along the way. At one point the sound cut out completely and it took me longer than was truly reasonable to work out why: in the act of adjusting the gain and, I guess, dancing too much while doing it, I’d accidentally pushed the phono/line button. “It wasn’t me!” I said out loud, when in fact it 100% was. (Yet another thing to add to my long checklist of DJ Mistakes And How To Identify And Correct Them.)
I smugly mixed a version of ‘Keep On Jumpin’’ into a version of ‘Jump ’N Shout’, and then sexily mixed ‘Boys’ into ‘Boys In Furs’. Soon after the two-minute squall of ‘Sfire7’ I played ‘Sophie’s Theme’ — somewhat sentimentally this time rather than smugly or sexily — and I finished my set with what I felt was a smoothly seductive glide into deeper, loopier techno territory before Partok took the reins for a closing set that saw me dance until 5am.
That’s the best I can do to communicate what it meant to me. Sexy, sentimental, smug, at times smooth at others error-prone, silly, physical, joyful…in essence, empoweringly human, not in spite of but because of its sense of familiarity. On Saturday, repetition wasn’t a sign of weakness or laziness but of strength and affirmation — representing myself fully in a strange but welcoming setting, and doing it with conviction. Sure, you can access some of that fulfilment with any old basement, a red light and a feeling. But with all the other elements of this experience — the drama of the setting, the mayhem of the drag show upstairs before I played, the care and appreciation shown by the whole of the club’s team and regulars, the fully functioning toilets (joke! though actually serious) — I reckon I moved fully into creative expansion territory, no matter how well-trodden my own particular musical path ended up being on the night.
The question I have now is: will the itch for freshness, or the fear of complacency, be strong enough to lead me down new musical paths in the coming weeks and months? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.