“Piu Piu is a music ecosystem,” says Saigon’s Lee Lam, co-founder of the eponymous nightclub and record label. They create and release songs, play them at the club, cultivate an audience, book those artists and producers, cycle money back into the music, and educate promising artists and DJs. The club is mainly thought of as a rap spot and their label started in hip hop as well, but they’ve managed to carve out an eclectic lane, drawing edit culture and electronic sounds into their orbit while attracting a diverse crowd to their dancefloors. “We push all our friends to become DJs. We met a lot of them in the club. It’s a natural thing to happen, but we also teach people free of charge.” They encourage DJs to become producers as well, using their studio as another means of growing that ecosystem.
Lee grew up between Paris and Saigon and was mainly into French hip hop. When he moved to China at 18 years old, he became deeply involved in the rap and music scenes there. He had continued visiting Saigon twice a year until 2016, when he noticed that the scene there was rapidly starting to progress, so he decided to move back and start Piu Piu with his partners. “That’s when I got a crash course in the scene here,” he laughs. “I decided to make the move because they were already in the second generation of rappers; now we’re at the fourth,” he says, now 35.
“The club was great from the start,” Lee says. “It was really popular but made zero money. It was too big and too central with a huge rent. We were also still young. Half the time we had no idea what we were doing.” When the pandemic hit, they rebooted and switched locations, taking over the rooftop from another venue called Broma, which is their current location. They now have two floors; the rooftop plays hip hop, R&B, afro, and baile. The second floor, called The Grid, spins electronic, trap, Jersey, garage, and dnb. “We toe the line between underground and mainstream. We want to be cool but really try not to be pretentious. The only motto is quality. People come here for how many sounds we play. If you want nothing but techno you can go to a techno club.” They book at least 12 DJs each night for one-hour sets.
Lee is adamant that diversity is key to Piu Piu’s popularity, and that includes their audience as well as the music. “We have everybody,” he says. “Young Vietnamese people, foreigners, people in their 20s and 30s, people from the LGBT community, gangsters. That rarely happens and we try to cultivate that.” It’s important both culturally and from a business perspective. He says that the older and foreign crowds tend to spend more but that keeping the crowd mixed makes it more exciting. “There’s no door policy and we try to keep our prices reasonable. Everyone get to meet new people.” They’re also pushing for more women to become DJs and have a long-running monthly party called Girl Gang.
The label has changed over the years as well. When it started, it was more of a traditional label releasing hop hop and R&B, and they were trying to sign everybody at once. But as they’ve grown they’ve limited the artists they sign to those they’ve worked with for a long time and expanded into dance music as well. Lee was always done production on the side but dove back into it during the pandemic alongside his managing partner at Piu Piu, Bobby D. (They produce as a duo called The Good Hood, but Lee DJs under the alias Scarry Potter). They also opened a studio and now produce most of the beats for their vocalists rather than commissioning them.
This month Piu Piu dropped Vina Club Tools, a compilation featuring Viet and international producers making edits aimed at the dancefloor. It’s the first dance music-focused project they’ve released. “It’s just producers from Saigon doing cool stuff,” he says. “All the DJs are residents at the club. There are even two or three edits of artists from our label.” They’re calling this new wave the Saigon Edits Club.
“There’s been a bit of a delay in the international scene for Asian producers—and especially from Southeast Asia,” Lee says. “We’re waiting to find our own sound that we can identify with that also works in the club.” He thinks it’s just a matter of time until a genre grows out of the regional scene that will go global along the lines of something like amapiano. “We’re all trying to make it happen, but pushing it through styles that exist already. The more we do it, the better chance we have to create something under our own name.”
This leads back to the final stage in the ecosystem: pushing people towards production: “I’m really trying to push all our people who get too comfortable DJing to become producers. It’s the logical next step.” He says DJs who don’t evolve into producers risk playing the same gigs repeatedly, working five nights a week at mid events just to make a living. But if they succeed at production, they can live a much better life off three gigs per month. “My life revolves around DJing, I love it. But in the end, we’re just playing other people’s music. We need to make our own music.”
