Christmas Eve in Seoul is one of the best nights to play music in this city. The Koreans, who didn’t grow up with Christmas as a solemn religious occasion, treat December 24th with a genuine enthusiasm for the purely social elements of the holiday that can feel refreshingly uncomplicated if you’ve spent too many years at Christmas parties in the West where the mood is always slightly freighted with obligation.
In 2014 I played Dojo Lounge for an event called Disco 뿡뿡, yes, that is the actual name, and it captures something about the spirit of the night that a more dignified title wouldn’t. The room was packed with people who genuinely wanted to dance, specifically to the kind of music that requires active participation rather than passive consumption. Disco, funk, classic house. The stuff that was designed to move rooms in specific, observable ways and that still does, forty years after it was made.
This mix is the recording from that night. It’s not cleaned up or reconstructed, this is what happened in the room, in the order it happened, with all the imperfections that come with recording a live set. You’ll hear the crowd occasionally. You’ll hear the room’s acoustic response to specific 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 genres: they’re in continuous conversation with each other across time in a way that allows a set covering the 1970s through the 2010s to feel coherent rather than eclectic. The DNA is consistent. The joy is consistent. What changes is the production technology and, subtly, the cultural context, but the fundamental impulse, which is to make people move and feel good while they’re doing it, doesn’t change.
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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