The freetekno movement originated in Europe in the 90s. It was a movement that promoted free techno parties organized within the community at locations that were not limited to urban settlements and the suburbs.
The music that you could find at these parties transcended common genres like techno and also included sub-genres such as hardtek, psytek, psytrance, drum&bass, bass music and many others. In other words, it was music your friends probably have never heard of.
However, two brothers from France who grew up raving in these parties back home saw the opportunity to bring this movement into Asia, and specifically into Saigon. Trained as DJs themselves, they started a company called Asian Rave Connection, started organizing and promoting events and not long after, Josselin and Florian Ferruza, also known as Goss and Flo, respectively, decided to go one step further by opening their own club: Arcan.
Psytrance was still at its infancy in Saigon when Yevhenii Kurtov, a DJ himself decided to start Chillgressive Saigon with his friends. With a small team, they organized an outdoor psytrance party in Vung Tau called Transcend that pretty much laid the foundation for the group’s mission. They began organizing monthly psytrance events in Saigon thereafter.
Roman Sholomitxki, who manages their events, noted that most of the participants and attendees to these events have been foreigners but that has slowly started to change. With a new generation of Vietnamese DJs joining the fray by including psytrance in their sets, or even getting dedicated to it, names such as Cattadose, Digital Code (Kaiser T) and Hillusion are starting to get known in the psytrance community across the region, and attracting a more local crowd for their shows.
Arcan opened its doors in April this year and has been organising events almost weekly as well as attracting international bookings with their psytrance programme “Samadhi.” Chillgressive Saigon has plans to organise sequels to Transcend in Da Lat and Phu Quoc Island this year. With all these in place, the psytrance scene in Saigon looks set to grow and to a certain extent, giving more depth to an already-deep underground scene in the city.
