Birthday Beats is a series where we check in with Shanghai staples to pre-toast their anniversary.
United by their love of intergalactic disco, the Discosmic Adventure crew has been rocking Shanghai's clubs for four years. As they celebrate their anniversary on Sep 3 at DADA, we chat with crew co-founder Nik Hilp about keeping the dance party going.
Congratulations on Discosmic Adventures' anniversary. What birthday plans are in store?
Thank you! There are five people in Discosmic Adventure (DA). Usually between two and three of us will play at a regular DA party but as it’s an anniversary party it will be all five of us this Saturday. So, lots of vinyl, lots of disco heavy hitters and our own cosmic video reel playing in the background.
Taking it back to the beginning, why did you start Discosmic Adventures? Was there one original idea that sparked it off and how did you fine-tune the concept for the opening?
We started Discosmic to give ourselves a night where we could play all this weird, late 70s/early 80s European disco we all loved - lots of Italo disco (which itself runs the gamut from cheese and fun to dark and moody), lots of obscure(ish) space/cosmic disco and, of course, the influence of Giorgio Moroder was obvious in many of the tracks we played during the first year of discomic.
With each party - and each birthday - our playlists have opened up more and more to cover disco and disco influences in it’s widest definition. So that goes all the way from Donna Summer, Abba, Boney M to Hong Kong disco vinyl from the early 1980s, to amazing disco tracks from Turkey, Eastern Europe and South East Asia, to modern disco influenced productions, remixes and edits, to African disco, Japanese boogie, and electrofunk. Plus all the good stuff in between.
We’ve all gotten good at doing a night where all this variety - in tempos and moods of outer-disco, boogie, porto-house, synth music, italo, afro and cosmic styles - can be stung together so it all makes good dancefloor sense.
Given that we play music from all over the planet and that our party nights will include tracks from each of the last five decades, it’s not exactly fine tuning but finding out about, being excited by and digging for the outer reaches of disco’s influence.
The disco in the name ‘Discosmic’ doesn’t hold us back from switching things up if the mood takes us. If the energy of the people, the mood and situation all feels right we’ll play acid house, deep house, new wave, synth pop or even techno for a little while.
What have been some of the biggest challenges in operating in Shanghai?
The lack of mirrorballs in venues.
As a party night, how do you keep things fresh while staying true to the concept?
Discosmic in its present form has a Chinese, Taiwanese, Swedish, German and British national. That’s due to Shanghai’s unique mix of people that are interested in nightlife and have a genuine love of music.
That mix of backgrounds and our own journey with music and ‘how we got into dance music, clubbing and especially disco music’ means that we all are doing our own digging and discovering tracks each other would have never heard before.
The amount of choice and quality of bookings by promoters in the last two years has made Shanghai a fantastic place for a dance music fan. Each of us also promotes a party outside Discosmic, pushing our other loves. Lindberg and Tobias do 12 Inches of Fun which is similar in breadth but more house music. Velvet Robot does Synth Crush! with Illsee from the Stockholm Syndrome night. That’s their interest in darker and more synthesiser heavy music - minimal wave, dark italo, techno. Nik HilP does 'Drum Clap' which is genre free.
With Discosmic, we are inconsistent with our party schedule and pretty low-key in terms of marketing ourselves. In our four years have only brought in two DJs from overseas; we had Horse Meat Disco from London, whom we booked twice as the first time so good - and this April we hosted Jackie House from San Francisco’s Honey Soundsystem. We like the slow burn, just like the way we build the energy at our nights.
What are Discosmic Adventure's future plans?
World peace through diplomacy and disco music.
Sep 3, 10pm-late, free entry. DADA.
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