If you have watched a Korean DJ play a one-hour set on YouTube, filmed from the side of the booth with the Seoul skyline going dark behind them, there is a good chance the channel was MIXMIXTV. It has been recording the city’s underground DJs since May 2014, which makes it older than most of the clubs it films in. This is what it is, who built it, and why it matters more than its subscriber count suggests.
What MIXMIXTV actually is
MIXMIXTV is a Seoul-based DJ streaming and video platform, not a club. It was founded in May 2014 by DJ Kuma and the video director Jang Jin-seok, and in 2018 the DJ Beejay joined the team. Since then the format has settled into something recognisable: one or two DJs a week, one hour each, recorded and broadcast in a Boiler Room style with the DJ front and centre and the room behind them. The focus is deliberately on DJs working underground rather than the names already on festival posters.
The archive is the point. Korean namu.wiki lists several hundred DJs who have recorded a MIXMIX session, from KINGMCK and Tiger Disco to Closet Yi, Jinwook, Salamanda, Yetsuby and Bagagee Viphex13, alongside touring guests from Tokyo, Munich, Bogota and New York. If you want to hear what a Seoul DJ sounded like in 2016 rather than what a press release says they sounded like, this is where the tape is.
I have recorded there. The thing nobody tells you about a MIXMIX session is how quiet the room is. A few people at the back, a camera operator, the director checking levels, and the city behind you doing its own thing. There is no crowd to read, so you read the light instead: the session starts in daylight and ends with the skyline lit, and a good hour follows that curve. You set up on a single pair of CDJs and a mixer facing the lens, monitors low because the stream mix matters more than the room, and you play for a listener who is not there yet. It is the most honest hour a DJ in this city gets to record.
Where it films: a rooftop in Seongsu
Most recent sessions are shot at XIMXIM Bar, a rooftop bar inside S-Factory in Seongsu-dong, the converted factory complex on the east side of the city. That location says something about where Seoul’s scene has moved. Ten years ago a channel like this would have set up in an Itaewon basement. Today the interesting rooms are as likely to be in Seongsu, Euljiro or Mullae as they are in the old nightlife districts, and MIXMIX followed the energy east. We wrote about that shift in how each Seoul district was made and in the piece on Euljiro.
The festivals
The channel has always been half broadcaster, half promoter. It ran a MIXMIX stage at World DJ Festival as early as 2015, a Luna Park DJ event at Seoul Land in 2019, and broadcast with the Woldipe untact festival in 2020 when nobody could gather in a room. In 2022 it staged the Let Korea Dance festival on the walking street in front of Hongik University, which is about as public as a rave gets in this city. Then came the two that defined it: the MIXMIXTV Open Air Festival at S-Factory in 2023 with 51 DJs across four stages, and the tenth anniversary festival at the same site in 2024 with 71 DJs.
Seventy-one Korean and visiting DJs on one bill, in daylight, in a factory yard, is not something the Gangnam megaclub model could ever have produced. It is closer to what we described in the daytime and coffee rave scene: a crowd that comes for the lineup, not the table.
Why a YouTube channel matters to a club scene
Three reasons, and none of them is subscriber numbers.
First, it is a booking tool. A promoter in Bangkok or Berlin who wants to hear a Seoul DJ before flying them out does not go to a club night; they watch a MIXMIX session. For a lot of the names in our Korean DJs to know list, that one-hour video is the calling card. We covered how that works in building a DJ career in Asia.
Second, it is a record. Korean clubs close fast and quietly, as the Gangnam collapse and the years around COVID showed. Rooms disappear, and with them the evidence that a sound existed. A decade of sets in one place is the closest thing this scene has to an archive.
Third, it changed what a good Seoul set looks like. When you know the hour is being filmed and will sit online for years, you play differently. Less crowd-pleasing, more statement. That is not always better for the room on the night, but it has raised the floor for what Korean DJs are willing to put their name to.
MIXMIXTV and Seoul Community Radio
The obvious comparison is Seoul Community Radio, which started about a year later in Itaewon. They overlap in artists and in spirit, but they are different animals. SCR is a radio station with a bar attached, live most days, built on the London pirate radio model. MIXMIX is a video archive built on the Boiler Room model, shot in sessions, with festivals as its live expression. A DJ coming up in Seoul today wants both: the SCR residency for the weekly reps, the MIXMIX session for the tape.
Where to start
- YouTube, the main archive, sorted newest first
- SoundCloud and Mixcloud for audio-only versions
- Instagram for festival announcements, usually the first place they land
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for 25 years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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