On my first trip to Japan at the end of 2014, one of the main attractions for me was visiting Club MOGRA for their New Year’s Eve party! MOGRA is a club that opened in 2009 and Akihabara, the tech and anime hub of Tokyo. This club gained an amount of overseas popularity over the years, thanks to the fact that they mounted a webcam to the ceiling and would stream video with line-out audio from the DJ booth onto Ustream.tv. I started watching their streams in 2010, and through the live chat I met a lot of other foreign fans of the rave scene in Japan.

These live streams helped me discover so many artists and so much music that helped me shape who I am today. The music and events put on there are really important to me, as well as the friends that I made through the online community. One friend I’d like to mention, is someone who went by the alias of TANUKI. I mentioned him previously in my writeup of HYPERNIGHT TOKYO but I met him through the chat for this club, where he would interact and drop links to his SoundCloud asking for feedback on music he made, inspired by many of the artists who played at MOGRA. Fast forward to my trip to Japan in 2014, I let TANUKI know I’d be at MOGRA for New Year’s Eve where he would also be playing a set that night.

Being able to visit the club for a first time was an awesome experience. The club is situated in a suburb, and the very kind bouncer reminded us in broken english that we should keep quiet when outside the club, as it was a residential area (which you can see in the Google Maps embed on the right). Once inside, you descend a staircase into a soundproofed basement that serves as the club area, outfitted with a bar on one end and a DJ booth on the other. The floorspace is tiny and can only fit about a hundred people shoulder-to-shoulder, which feeds into the energy of the club. Plenty of moderately famous artists in the music gaming and rave scene come through and due to the limited capacity, the energy and passion of the venue is through the roof.

As soon as I walked down the stairs into that basement, a bearded Scottish man came up and introduced himself to me as TANUKI! It was such a great moment to be able to meet after all those years online taking and supporting him. He played an amazing set as did the other resident DJs I had heard so many times in the past, especially DJ WILDPARTY, my favorite resident DJ at MOGRA. After each set, a new bottle of champagne was opened in the DJ booth, then passed through the crowd. Every DJ playing that night would be dancing along with you until it was their turn to politely cut through the crowd to hop in the DJ booth to take their turn! This night showed me how unique the music scene in Tokyo really is, and I would say there are hardly any other places or events outside Tokyo that match up to the passion and energy of these small, cramped clubs.