Every serious club city has one room where the scene talks to itself. In Seoul that room is a bar in Itaewon with cameras in it. Seoul Community Radio, SCR to everyone who has been inside, is a live online station that has been broadcasting the city’s underground since 2016. This is how it started, how it works, and why a DJ who wants to be taken seriously here still needs a slot on it.
How it started: home recordings and a pirate radio idea
SCR was co-founded by Richard Price, a Londoner who grew up on the capital’s pirate stations and moved to Seoul for a corporate job he did not love, together with a friend known as Lee and the DJ BOWLCUT. The idea took shape in early 2016. There was no studio, so the first shows were mixes recorded at home and posted online, with the founders coaxing DJs who had never spoken into a microphone to do a proper radio show. Price has said the point from the start was to be the opposite of commercial radio: a platform for output people could not hear anywhere else, even in clubs.
Within a year it had a live studio in Itaewon and was broadcasting around the clock. Early takeover shows with London’s Radar Radio and Berlin Community Radio set the pattern that still defines it: import the best of what is coming through Korea, export the best of what is home-grown.
What it is now: a radio station with a bar attached
Today SCR Studio is a hybrid space in Itaewon: a bar you can walk into, with the broadcast booth in a small glass room surrounded by cameras and a green screen. The DJ plays to the handful of people at the bar and to whoever is watching on the stream, which is the part first-timers do not expect. You are the audience and you are also on camera. By its own count the station has hosted more than 600 domestic and visiting artists and runs around 200 residents with regular shows. It picked up a Mixcloud award for best online radio station in the Asia-Pacific region, and in 2026 it took a session slot at SXSW London.
Walking in feels less like a club and more like someone’s front room with better monitors. Stickers, posters from old nights, mismatched furniture, screens showing the live feed. It is unpretentious in a way that Itaewon’s bigger rooms have not always managed, and it is one of the few places in the district where nobody minds if you just sit and listen.
I have played the booth. It is small, the glass is closer than it looks on the stream, and the green screen behind you means the visuals people see at home are not the room you are standing in. You play on the house CDJs and mixer with a microphone on an arm you are expected to use, and the monitor level is set for the broadcast, not for you, so you learn to trust the meters. The bar is three metres away. Someone at it will nod at a record, and that nod and the chat scrolling on the screen are the whole crowd. It changes how you play: fewer big moments, more selection, and you talk between records in a way a club never lets you.
Why it matters to Seoul DJs
A residency at SCR is the closest thing this city has to a weekly apprenticeship. Clubs give you a Friday when you are already known. SCR gives you a recurring hour when you are not, in front of a small live room and an international stream, and it makes you talk. Several of the names in our Korean DJs to know built their audience there before they had a club booking to speak of. For touring DJs it works in reverse: a guest show on SCR is how a visiting artist tells Seoul they have arrived, and how a Seoul promoter checks whether the hype is real. That loop is a big part of how bookings actually happen here.
It also documents. When Cakeshop shaped the district and when Soap closed and came back, the SCR archive is where you can hear what the DJs were actually playing. Korean club history has a habit of vanishing when a lease ends. The station is one of the places it does not.
SCR and MIXMIXTV, side by side
Seoul has two institutions doing adjacent work, and it is worth being clear about the difference. MIXMIXTV, founded in 2014, is a video archive of one-hour sets shot Boiler Room style, mostly in Seongsu these days, with festivals as its live arm. SCR is a live station with a bar, built on the pirate radio model, where the weekly show is the product. One gives you the tape, the other gives you the reps. The DJs who last in this city tend to have both.
How to listen, and how to visit
- Live stream and archive at seoulcommunityradio.com and on YouTube
- Curated playlists on Apple Music
- Schedule, events and the studio’s opening nights on Instagram
If you are visiting Seoul and want one evening that explains the underground faster than any club can, go on a broadcast night, take a stool at the bar, and watch who walks in. For the wider map, start with going out in Seoul, district by district.
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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