Having been back a month now, I’m unfortunately remembering the many things I dislike about this city – thank the heavens for today’s event at Club Asia then, which turned out to be the perfect escape and a great gathering of ravers from the various sub-scenes around Tokyo. Of course I was mainly there to see Guld, and almost everyone from the NRG scene was there too, from the NRGetic Romancer crew to producers/DJs like Alabaster and Asahi.

I was a bit late arriving, and Guld was already on his third tune, a truly brutal new track from him that I’d heard before, but sounds incredible through a big PA (there’s a release forthcoming, so stay tuned). The rest of his set was dark, aggressive and heavy on the vocals, with Nomic’s New Shit remix and Einhander’s excellent One Immortal both making it in. As usual I was dancing through most of it, but stopped to take a video during the Einhander remix of Sagittarius, another Guld favourite of the past year. The whole set went down surprisingly well with the mostly tech-dance and cheery UK Hardcore crowd, but just goes to show once again that if people have the chance to listen to our genre it’ll make them move.

That’s a big if these days though, and a few of us were chatting about freeform’s worrying recent decline in Tokyo. The DJs and producers are (mostly) still around though, so hopefully we’ll be able to build things back up again during the rest of this year.

I was in a bit of a dancing mood last night, and decided to give this event a try after discovering it on mixi. I haven’t been over Asakusa way for a long time, so the post-midnight stroll from Kuramae up to Asakusa itself was really nice – it really is the best time of the day to walk around Tokyo, I reckon. Here’s a typical sight as I wandered around trying to find the club:

Anyway, HANA=KAWA=DOOR was a great little place, if more a bar/live music venue than a club. There was plenty of space to dance though and the staff were great, which immediately puts it a notch above most of the places you find in Shinjuku/Shibuya. I was very impressed by the tunes too, with almost the whole night being fairly high-bpm dark psy, with some more melodic stuff to start and finish.

Add in some quality mixing from the DJs and a friendly crowd, and it’s definitely an event I’ll head back to again. The video at the top of the post was taken during Baboooo’s 03:00 – 04:30 set – I should have paid a bit more attention to the lighting, obviously, but it’s quite cool that you can see the middle-of-the-night traffic trundling past in the background.