#6: Ani Phoebe

Every Body🧍by Olivia Laing, latin house 💃🏻🏠, R.I.D.D.E.M 🥁🎸, underground parties in BKK 🕳️🎉🇹🇭

PUTTING THE “ART” IN PARTY

Ani Phoebe is a New York City-born DJ in Hong Kong. She’s the co-founder of Bad Times Disco, a music collective which organizes queer-friendly underground parties centered on community, radical inclusion, and kindness. While Lan Kwai Fong might be saturated with hip-hop songs and the top 50s, Ani’s parties bring fresh sounds like funk and jazz to Hong Kong’s dance floors. (Even better: she also DJs using vinyl!) “Nightlife is really good for mobilizing and influencing people, because it’s so fun,” Ani believes. And her work with Bad Times Disco transcends the dance floor: she organizes mutual-aid/solidarity events, advocacy work for migrant domestic workers’ rights, and pop-ups. When she isn’t DJ-ing, Ani is also a multimedia artist and writer (on VICE and TeenVogue). Here are her recommendations:

Read Everybody by Olivia Laing 🧍🧘🏻‍♀️

There's this great book by Olivia Lang called Everybody — it’s very much about the body, and the physical vulnerability that the body represents. She compares the physicality of being in a party to the physicality of being in a protest. These spaces can be very important moments for people to realize that they’re not just an individual, they’re part of a collective.

The party experience is not inherently radicalizing. But it’s a very important space for people to let their guard down, have fun. And the goal is to become not self conscious, and really to participate in this feeling of being connected, like, I am a part of this thing.

Listen to Latin house 💃🏻🏠

Right now I’m playing and listening to a lot more Latin house. It actually came from the U.S. but mainly pushed by Spanish speaking immigrants to the U.S.. Latin house was a genre that was kind of looked down upon — a lot of people who play “good” house and techno, they won't play Latin house.

But if you speak Spanish and Portuguese (and I speak both), if you're into really feel-good music, it’s worth a listen. And also it’s quite like sexy house. All of the songs are about sex or lovers or saying repetitive things in Spanish. And that’s kind of matches well with the sexiness of underground dance culture, which, in my opinion, is way sexier than mainstream music or mainstream clubs (those places are not hot at all).

Listen to local band R.I.D.D.E.M 🥁🎸🎤

They’re extremely talented, work extremely hard and they’re going to play more and more out of Hong Kong. In the past, they were more neo-soul/funk. And I think now, they're moving into a very clear 80s influence, spanning 80s pop to funk to disco.

If you notice, a lot of people who are singers today, they cannot even really sing. Music is like more self-expression to them: they’re whispering or they're like singing like a limited scale. But Reggie, the lead vocalist, is actually a really talented singer who has a lot of range. And it’s kind of rare to hear a vocalist with that type of range nowadays.

Attend underground parties in Bangkok 🕳️🕳️

One of the reasons why I tour is to find out about good parties. In Bangkok, there is a very strong underground scene. And what I like in Bangkok is that they all support each other: they all hire each other, they all know each other. It doesn’t really feel like that to the same extent in Hong Kong. I think we need to build more trust and people need treat each other better here.

But in Bangkok, you have so many options and I’ve played at really great parties there. Two parties that I really recommend — one is Transport, the other is Rom Rom, and both of them are very similar to Bad Times Disco and the way that we approach things.