Welcome to Mixmag Asia

[Photos courtesy of: Siam2nite]

A lot of people didn’t see it coming. It happened overnight while most people were sleeping, nocturnal dance music devotees multiplied into masses and began occupying esoteric underground clubs all over Asia and the region was transformed from a stagnant one five years behind in the dance music industry to a supersonic landscape of exciting artists, events, festivals, and music culture. Tokyo has long been harboring one of the world’s most creative underground music communities and just a few steps outside of Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong is Asia’s capital for French house. Also once better known for its copious amounts of happy hallucinogens, Thailand’s full moon parties are emerging as one of the world’s most progressive trance music scenes and Zouk in Singapore has been called one of the best clubs in the world by prolific DJs like Above & Beyond.

I mean, considering Asia’s notoriously crammed capitals it was only a matter of time before its billions of residents caught on and suddenly Asia has materialized into a massive market of opportunity for everyone in the industry. It did take a little bit of nudging and a lot of educating, but finally it’s time for things to get serious. Enter Mixmag and its plan to help push Asia through its glory days, or at least report on it.

The only thing that has been lacking is a music centric hub that unites all the little eclectic scenes that are thriving in the surprisingly abundant underground clubs throughout Asia, which are there but have until now just been hard to find. It is the perfect time for Mixmag Asia to get in there and offer the rest of the world a window into what’s happening down the Asian rabbit hole.

To kick things off, over the next few months a series of high-profile launch events are set to happen around the region but we were excited and threw a string of prelaunch events too. And since 2013 was the year of the garage revival, which is thanks to last year’s massive album by Disclosure, we thought whom better to invite to the party than the man who started it all, DJ EZ.

The founder and undisputed kingpin of UK garage music played in September at Ku De Ta in Bangkok, which you can look forward to being the city’s beautiful new home for many future Mixmag Asia events, and he played to a packed house that was very obviously there because they were bored of running with sheep and interested in a higher level of clubbing. EZ did a fine job of finding a balance between the genre he helped birth more than twenty years ago and the variation that the world was introduced to last year by Disclosure.

It takes a certain kind of person to embrace the success that Disclosure are reaping, considering the young garage music prodigies weren’t even born when EZ was prowling incognito around London setting up makeshift and illegal radio stations wherever he could just to push the sound. But he credits the newfound appreciation and respect that the genre has received to both pioneer producers and DJs as well as younger artists. He’s also worked with Disclosure and says they are great guys.

“Like with anything that is created, for it to continue be strong it has to grow. Therefore garage will always need fresh, new, young talent to help it progress further. Disclosure and many other artists have certainly helped the garage scene revival, and I hope they will all continue to produce even more great garage tracks in the future.”

Of course, they will never get to experience the exciting hunt for vinyl that came with pioneering the genre but EZ is just grateful for what the ease in access to music online has done for garage music because it now reaches new audiences on a universal level and this means the scene is growing and fast. He’s also happy to be a part of its renaissance, although at least for him it never actually died. Like with so many subgenres of electronic music, the scene in the UK has always been relatively healthy and he says its because despite beginning in underground clubs across the US, the history of the genre and its legacy belong to the UK. “It’s not just the music, but the whole lifestyle built around the sound as there was a whole generation brought up on garage music and this to them, represents their childhood.”

He’s referring to the history that he helped make. He was only 15-years-old when he first hit waves on pirate radio stations and says they were some of the dearest years of his career. Eventually all his shortwaves were shut down by authorities and he had a lot of equipment and precious vinyl confiscated in the process, but it was these pivotal years that led to a 14 year run on a legal station and subsequent mainstream success. And he says he owes it all to pirate radio.

“Pirate stations were the medium where people really got to know about garage music as the legal radio stations weren’t playing the sound initially. As soon as garage was being played on the legal radio stations it was catapulted into the charts and hit the mainstream.”

But even before this and before he owned turntables too, he had already began honing the craft that would later award him with a swift, technical, and seamless mixing style and also the stamina to showcase it all throughout his epic 8-hour sets. His mum would go out and he would sit in front of the family’s tape deck and mix two tracks together by slowing down the pitch enough on one and push its inner workings until two songs finally locked together. “Thankfully after saving up my pocket money I got my hands on my own belt driven turntables to practice the technique of mixing properly and the rest is history so they say.”

History does indeed seem to be repeating itself for garage music but for every genre that makes a comeback there are five more subgenres that are created. But it’s not at all blasphemous to its roots and is in fact a good thing says EZ, because it’s what keeps the music industry exciting and gives DJs choices. Now he is able to incorporate house and all sorts of subgenres of bass music into his sets and he even gives a nod to dubstep as being born from garage. But only time will tell if the many subgenres of today will stay as popular as their godfather, whose soulful, bass heavy, and melodic style has stood the test of time and reemerged as this year’s biggest sound. From then until now, Mixmag has seen it along its entire run and here we are again, excited to be introducing it to Asia.

See you on the dance floor!