Jakarta club scene comes a long way in short time

Jakarta club scene comes a long way in short time

Joseph Mangga, Contributor, Jakarta

So you've already drunk several gallons of low-budget Bintang, and battled your way through a pub crawl of the capital's finer after-work drinking establishments.

Then its on to a tortuous traverse of all the hotel hot-spots featuring live funky entertainment and top-40 mayhem.

It then reaches to midnight, a second rush of adrenaline kicks in and your mind turns to a night out at the discos and clubs.

To explain the present bipolar nature of the local music scene, we need to delve a bit deeper into Jakarta's past club and disco history.

"In the '80s, most of the club music was top 40, hip-hop, R&B, funky and rap songs," said DJ Deny Sastrawijaya, the two-time Indonesian DMC DJ champ, who has opened for most of the major international DJs that have visited Jakarta, such as Sasha, Dave Seaman, Danny Howells and Sander Kleinenberg.

"Then in the late '80s to early 1990s, clubs in South Jakarta starting playing the first acid house, like David Morales and Roger Sanchez, creating a split between North Jakarta and South Jakarta DJs, clubs and clubbers."

Later, around 1994-95, the house music scene exploded in Jakarta, as the northern clubs in Kota also fell prey to the infectious spell of house, as well as the many evolving splinter genres coming out of the Netherlands, Italy and the UK.

"Things finally became united by around 1996 to 1997, when all the major clubs like Hai Lai, Fire, Bengkel, M-Club and Zodiac were playing the same great dance music," Deny said.

"It was all progressive and epic trance, like Robert Miles' Children, Blue Amazon's No Other Love, early Paul Van Dyk, Sasha and Digweed. Great uplifting emotional music! Those were the golden moments for all of the clubbers and DJs on the Jakarta scene!"

Then in the late 1990s, emerging new styles, changing musical tastes and the monetary and political crisis caused Jakarta to once again splinter into separate "north" and "south" club scenes.

"Around 1998-99, a number of crack veteran Jakarta DJs introduced a new harder, dirtier, faster kind of vocal house called hard house," Deny said.

"This was stuff like DJ Tony De Vit; releases on the Tidy Trax record label -- all played at high speed, around like 160 bpm. All the North Jakarta clubs shifted to playing this style, and by year 2000, most of the progressive/trance clubs were shutting down.

"Stadium was just about the only club that survived playing progressive or mainstream underground music. Then within the last three years, there's been a resurgence of progressive clubs, but mainly in South Jakarta."

Much of the current "progressive" music is actually a broad fusion of different styles, incorporating diverse elements from house, trance, techno, electro, tribal, funk, hip-hop, garage and soul.

This has led to a load of bastard music terms like "tech- house" or "tribal trance" that nobody knows how to define, except for maybe DJs and the most devoted disco junkies. The main philosophy behind "progressive" dance music is probably best stated as creativity, intelligence and emotion, all layered on top of a basic pumping 4/4 bass beat.

At the moment, the top Jakarta club and discos specializing in progressive music include are mainly located in South Jakarta and include Stadium, Embassy, Retro (Crown Pacific Hotel), Musro (Borobudur Hotel), the a2 Club and the newly opened club at Semanggi, The Gate.

As for the Jakarta "hard house", it has now mutated into an ultra-high energy form of vocal-house, often referred to as "happy hard-core" by local producers and remix artists such as DJ Patrick Tan. The tracks themselves are relentless, set at a breakneck speed of 170-180 beats per minute, with virtually no bass drop-outs.

In Singapore and Malaysia this music is sometimes called "Feng Tau" or "shake head" (in Chinese), since that is what the clubbers are usually doing while listening to it.

The top venues for happy hard-core include Millennium, Mille's, the Grand Manhattan (Borobudur Hotel), 1001, Sydney 2000, Batavia and Raja Mas, and yes, nearly all these clubs are located in North Jakarta. Virtually all the smaller discotheques in the Jakarta metropolitan area also specialize in happy hard core dance music.