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Text by Guy Mackinnon-Little

On 17 August 2020, Resident Advisor released a mix from techno producer Tzusing recorded in front of a packed dance floor at Taipei nightclub FINAL. For Western listeners – the majority of Resident Advisor’s audience – the mix offered an uncanny facsimile of a world where partying was still possible without risk of infection or cancellation, a weird proxy – true to the time-bending powers of the pandemic – of both the near-distant past and a best-case-scenario future. Opening the mix is a sample from the 1971 film The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

Nights like the one Tzusing played at FINAL are possible because, at the time of writing, there have only been 563 recorded cases of Covid-19 in Taiwan. Owing to a rapid and coordinated government response, the island nation has been able to dodge the worst of the pandemic. Clubs took a voluntary month off in April, but there was never a hard lockdown. “People were pretty confident in the government here in Taiwan,” Tzusing tells me when I ask him what things were like on the ground. “We were a little stressed at the start, but daily numbers in Taiwan never hit more than 30. People couldn’t travel internationally and that was about it. Life was pretty much normal here besides a few weeks in March and April of watching the news every day, hoping for no new cases. We hit zero local infections in late April and have been like that since.” Malaysia-born Tzusing normally splits his time between Shanghai and Taipei, but has been waiting out the pandemic in Taiwan after China shut its borders to all foreign nationals in March. While China has since eased these restrictions, the tense political situation between Taiwan and China has made it impossible for Tzusing to apply for a working visa in his current location. When we speak, he’s planning a workaround. “I will soon be flying to Hong Kong, quarantining in a hotel room for 14 days, applying for my Chinese visa, and then flying into Shanghai to quarantine another 14 days,” he tells me. “I’m pretty much going to be stuck in a hotel room for over a month. I cannot stress enough that I hate national identity and borders.”

Escapism has always been intrinsic to dance music, but Tzusing’s mix doubled-down on this phenomena, offering an escape to a world where escapism is still possible for those of us still nervously pent up in our apartments. Perhaps what’s thrilling about the mix is how it is rooted in a discrete location and time, an antidote to the placeless torpor with which most of us have experienced the pandemic. Writer Venkatesh Rao has described the unravelling of time induced by Covid as a shift from chronos, objective, linear time to kairos, subjective, nonlinear time. Robbed of the organising inertia of shared routines and schedules, our lives descend into isolated “indoor temporalities”. My most vivid and vertiginous encounter with this temporal patchwork has been attending Zoom parties from home and scrolling through the cameras of attendees in different time zones. In one window there’s me, vaping in my bedroom in the early evening; in another is someone eating a polite desk lunch in sunny Los Angeles; in yet another, I can see a group of friends doing lines in the early hours of the morning in Australia. It’s like a bad net-art triptych miming Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

One of the things clubbing offers that a Zoom party doesn’t is a rupture within our ordinary experience of time and space, a galvanising collective ritual in which the rhythms and routines of our daytime lives are drowned out by thumping kick drums. When time itself lacks a solid structure, the absorbing overload of a powerful sound system is even more appealing. But the absence of parties seems as likely to me to result in misplaced nostalgia as a renewed commitment to their true potential as engines of collective joy. Not leaving the house for a few months has made all of us extra-attuned to the value of shared experience, but misty-eyed appeals to “community” are easily exaggerated in dance-music circles and are often deployed to brush over exploitative business practices. Resident Advisor, the platform that put out Tzusing’s mix and which makes its money through a ticketing service for events and branded content, was recently embroiled in a scandal after accepting £750,000 of Arts Council funding while numerous grassroots venues in the UK, the kind Resident Advisor sells tickets for, missed out. Contributions to the mix series are usually uncompensated.

With all this in mind, I began trawling my contacts to see if I could find an attendee at the night Tzusing recorded his mix to brief me on the realities of post-pandemic nightlife. Before long, the producer Dasychira connected me with their Taipei-based booking agent Allen Huang. Huang spoke of the night with effusive praise: “As a beloved son of Taiwan, Tzusing always brings in a great crowd when he plays out. He’s also very good at not doing it so often as to oversaturate. I remember sitting at a table of friends in FINAL as the set was wrapping up and even though we’ve heard Tzusing play a dozen times at this point, we agreed this was one of his best sets ever. I think he got into that in the Resident Advisor interview, of wanting to do something specifically for the nervous energy built up by people around the world. Taiwan, while less adversely affected by Covid, has a wealth of that nervous energy already, due to politics and uncertainty for the youth. So we’re all down for escapism, and for euphoria, which I think Tzusing captured better than ever in that party.”

I ask Huang to tell me about the ways the pandemic has shifted the mood at these parties, whether an apocalyptic hedonism or something more utopian prevails. It turns out that things have stayed much as they were. “I don’t really feel a huge difference pre- and post-shutdown,” he says. “I think mainly due to the fact that the underground scene here is small and has always been interdependent and vulnerable. Not to be too corny about it, but one of the best things about Taiwan is that there is kind of a default compassion built into the society. We don’t want to get people sick; we want people to feel safe; we’ll sacrifice a little bit for the greater good, without being mandated to do so. I think the biggest impetus in people’s readiness to get back into clubbing is the awareness that it’s just not much of an option for most of the rest of the world, so it’s almost kind of a duty.” Rather than a dramatic before and after, Huang talks in terms of an “accelerant” pushing weirder parties that had been gathering steam on the peripheries of the scene centre stage. “Recently at FINAL, there was a show produced by an art project-betel-nut-stand called Baby Betelnut. For the headliner they brought in DJ Jerry, a former popstar-turned-hardcore-DJ who has become this icon for the current underground. That party was absolutely slammed, a good majority of people who came to the party were probably at FINAL for the first time in their lives. People sprawled into the street above until the early morning.”

In mainland China too, people are going dancing again. “I remember performing at one of ALL’s first nights after re-opening in late March,” then-Shanghai-based producer felicita tells me. “I played back to back with the Shanghai DJ XDD all night and Andy Rolfes kindly made us a flyer at very short notice. Not that many people showed up; many were still either stuck in their hometowns, or too broke or nervous to come out. But the people who did come danced enthusiastically until we had to close around 1am. From that point things gradually returned to normal, apart from a strange period when the police would storm in with torches and shut down parties early. At first, we interpreted this as a kind of organised conspiracy, but it turned out to be a local strategy to prevent new infections spreading.” Cautionary measures like temperature checks and QR code scans at the door have remained, but trepidation among clubgoers has now all but vanished, with many of those I speak to in Shanghai citing a heaving mid-April party thrown by FunctionLab at ALL Club as a decisive signal that it was safe to return to the rave. Since then, in keeping with the trend identified by Huang in Taiwan, the nights themselves have only gotten weirder as audiences and organisers recalibrate to a world where it’s no longer possible to crest off crowd-pleasing international headliners. Kilo of label and party series Genome 6.66Mbp tells me he feels confident throwing nights with esoteric themes like “Should We Accept Trance?” and “Young Ambient Thug Core” in the wake of clubs reopening, while Juan Plus One, one of the organisers of FunctionLab, tells me about an ambient night where attendees flop around on the floor like kids at a sleepover.

The image of a club night where everyone just lies down together, close enough to soak up the simple chemical pleasures of co-presence without any of the usual hedonistic flourishes of partying, strikes me as a neat, maybe overly obvious demonstration of what we’re really chasing when we get drunk and dance on a Zoom call in an empty apartment. We miss parties because we miss the porous edges of other bodies, and given the chance we’ll fast-forward through all the normal protocols of a night out to get straight to the mushy post-party-pre-comedown collapse where we can most easily melt into each other.

Despite this, many in Asia have found in the awkward space-time compression of conference-call parties a model for new hybrid approaches, which in turn bring with them a novel solution to the problem of booking international acts. While Western audiences have consigned themselves to listening to DJ mixes and imagining their way into a club in East Asia, clubgoers there are being treated to livestreamed sets of international performers. felicita tells me about a night they threw at ALL Club featuring livestreamed sets by London-based Hannah Diamond and LA-based Astra King: “An artist friend built a live ‘bullet comment’ function where the audience could scan a QR code and text live comments onto the club’s LED screen. At one point we considered setting up a separate screen in the bar area, so the artists could virtually meet and hang with their fans after the show, but it proved impractical. The audience loved both sets and didn’t seem to notice or care that the artists weren’t there IRL. Clubbing has never really been about staring at the DJ anyway. I did notice an interesting reversal in the amazed reactions of both Hannah and Astra, though. Neither had performed IRL for months, and both were shocked at the sight of a club full of people dancing, even more so than the club was struck by their on-screen presence. In a sense, the club became the giver of the same awe-inducing energy and tension the artist is usually there to supply.”

Tzusing in transit to Hong Kong wearing full PPE.