Christmas Eve is one of the best nights of the year to play music in Seoul. Christmas Day (기독탄신일) has been a public holiday in South Korea since 1949 (Korean), so for most people December 24th is the night before a day off.
Roughly 28 percent of the population identified as Protestant or Catholic in the 2015 census (Korean), but most Koreans didn’t grow up with Christmas as a solemn religious occasion. They treat Christmas Eve as a purely social night, and if you’ve spent too many years at Christmas parties in the West, where the mood is always slightly freighted with obligation, that feels refreshingly uncomplicated.
On Christmas Eve 2014 I played a small Seoul lounge for an event called Disco 뿡뿡. Yes, that’s the actual name, and it captures the spirit of the night better than a more dignified title would. The room was packed with people who wanted to dance, and specifically to music that asks you to join in rather than just listen: disco, funk and classic house, records built to move rooms in specific, observable ways that still do, forty years after they were made.
This mix is the recording from that night. It isn’t cleaned up or reconstructed; it’s what happened in the room, in the order it happened, with all the imperfections of a live recording. You’ll hear the crowd now and then. You’ll hear the room respond to particular drops. You’ll hear me making decisions in real time that I’d probably make slightly differently today, but that felt exactly right that night.
The music spans roughly four decades of disco and house, which is one of the things I love most about both. They’ve been in conversation with each other for so long that a set running from the 1970s to the 2010s feels coherent rather than eclectic. The production technology changes, and so does the cultural context, a little. The impulse to make people move and feel good while they’re doing it doesn’t.
The set is also available on SoundCloud if you prefer that format for longer listening.
Play it loud. It was recorded loud for a reason.
🎵 If you liked this mix, try these: Get Down Vol. 6 | Feeling Factor Vol. 46
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The records in this set sit between disco and nu disco on the family tree. Since it was recorded live, my piece on reading a room says more about the choices behind it than any tracklist could.
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