Electronic Music as Community: An Interview with Hao, Director of Organik Festival and Pawnshop

On the eve of Taiwan’s National Day long weekend, Resident Advisor (RA), the Australian-born electronic music publication that clubbers around the world turn to when looking for a party, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a party at Taipei’s Pawnshop. After the show, Hao sat down with us.

To him, electronic music is a deeply communal form of music, a community that looks small but spans the globe.

Hao is the director of Organik Festival and Pawnshop. Through his eyes, we look at how Taiwan’s electronic music scene has developed, and at what community means to him.

▴ Photo: Organik Festival

A Dancer’s Memory of a Changing Scene

In the early 2000s, before he worked in the music industry, Hao was a regular on Taipei’s party circuit, and during those years he got to know many DJs. As he remembers it, Taipei was full of creativity then. Each venue had its own distinct music and style, and you could feel the energy of the city’s nightlife.

That energy, however, was shaped by the climate of the time. Public controversy over drugs, police crackdowns and a perception that tied electronic music to negative incidents all made it harder for party culture to grow. By around 2005 or 2006, Hao sensed that the scene he knew was changing. The people and places that had brought everyone together were gradually drifting apart, and he found himself listening to more rock.

Looking back, Hao believes that if Taiwan’s electronic music scene had been able to keep developing in a more stable environment, it could have built a music culture as complete and deep-rooted as Europe’s. The creativity of the venues back then, and the passion of the people involved, convinced him that Taiwan had that potential.

Before Korner opened, though, Taipei still lacked, as he saw it, a space that hosted underground electronic music parties every weekend: somewhere promoters could keep building their own party brands, and local DJs could count on regular gigs. He wanted a fixed place, so that everyone would know where to go for music every weekend, and promoters and DJs could keep doing what they wanted to do.

From The Wall and Korner to Pawnshop

In 2010, Hao joined The Wall to handle programming and operations. His work there mostly involved indie rock, but his years at electronic music parties left him wanting to do something in that world too. At the time, The Wall rented its space to various promoters for parties, Smoke Machine among them.

Working with those promoters, he saw the hard realities of throwing parties. Even with a great deal of time and effort, ticket sales did not necessarily cover costs, and if every event meant finding a new venue and shouldering all the risk, it was hard to keep going for long. He began to wonder whether the venue itself could offer steadier support. He wanted everyone to know where to go for music every weekend, so that promoters could keep building their party brands and local DJs would have a regular place to play.

In 2012, Hao and his team began running Korner inside The Wall, inviting promoters who shared their vision and musical direction to hold regular parties. Budgets were assessed jointly by the venue and its partners, with the venue covering agreed DJ fees, so promoters could focus on planning instead of bearing the cost of every night alone. Korner’s identity gradually took shape through the promoters, DJs and dancers who took part.

In 2018, Hao left Korner along with its original operating team. He then joined Smoke Machine and began talking with its founder, Josh, about how the team could carry on over the next few years. Those conversations led Hao to consider forming a company, to give Smoke Machine and Organik Festival more structure in their finances, division of labor and staffing. His work now covers financial management, venue negotiations, team building, and discussions of each year’s visual identity and curatorial direction. He talks things through with the team, then makes the final call. From the overall plan down to what the crowd eats on site and how artists are catered for backstage, these are all details he helps sign off on.

In the years after he left Korner, Final and B1 opened, and in 2019 Hao co-founded Pawnshop with Josh. Studio 9, Rabbit Hole, The Grey Area and other venues followed. With more people throwing parties and playing music, there were more places for everyone to go.

Underground Clubs as Community, Not “Nightclubs”

For Hao, an underground club means something different from what most people picture when they hear yedian(夜店), the Mandarin word for “nightclub.” Some media coverage has long tied nightclubs to men preying on drunk women, pickup culture and drugs, while rarely mentioning the music, or the people who come for it.

What he wants to build is a place people come to because they love music, where, over time, they get to know one another and are willing to look out for each other. Beyond who is playing on a given night or which party is on, he cares just as much about how people treat one another, and whether they can dance freely and feel safe enjoying themselves. That is what he means by “community.”

At the club or at the festival, looking out for one another is something he takes seriously. Beyond what the staff are responsible for, he hopes everyone will keep an eye on what’s happening around them. If someone seems unwell or in need of help, they can check in on them or find a member of staff. For him, it doesn’t need to be complicated: when you go out, enjoy yourself, and look after the people next to you, too. This is the idea of “awareness” the team keeps working to get across.

The ways people discover music are always changing. Streaming platforms, social media and friends’ recommendations can all lead someone to a new genre, or through the door of a club. Hao believes that when audiences choose a venue, it’s not only about the night’s lineup but also about whether they like the music, the atmosphere and the people they meet there.

Once audiences come to trust a venue’s choices, they may come out even when they don’t know the DJ playing that night. That gives a venue the chance to introduce different kinds of music, and lets audiences encounter sounds they wouldn’t otherwise hear. For Hao, running a club isn’t just about getting through each weekend’s events. It’s about making people love the place, want to come back, and feel comfortable bringing their friends.

Taiwan’s Strengths and Struggles

▴ Photo: Organik Festival

Over the past three years, Organik Festival has taken Taiwanese DJs abroad for takeovers, nights programmed by the team, in cities including Tokyo, Seoul and Bangkok. In 2025 it also took part in Thailand’s Wonderfruit festival, and in May 2026 it traveled to New York, Detroit and Los Angeles.

These trips made Hao even more aware of how open Taiwanese audiences are to different kinds of music. At the parties he knows best, a DJ’s selections can range widely, from techno and house to electro, Italo disco and UK bass, all within the same set, and the crowd usually keeps dancing through every shift in rhythm and style. In his experience, by contrast, audiences at some venues abroad have clearer expectations of a DJ’s genre, and a set that crosses styles doesn’t get the same response everywhere.

That’s one reason he loves Taiwan’s dance floors: DJs have room to experiment and don’t have to box themselves into a single genre. When foreign DJs ask what the crowd likes before playing Pawnshop, he usually tells them to play whatever they love and most want to play, without trying to cater to anyone. He has great faith in the crowd’s musical taste.

Hao has long hoped more international visitors would come to Taiwan. Compared with some of Asia’s popular tourist cities, he notes, Taiwan still draws far fewer international travelers, a pain point for his business. On the dance floor, though, that has an upside. On trips abroad, he has heard club owners complain about tourists who are unfamiliar with local culture and indifferent to a venue’s rules and etiquette, dragging down the atmosphere of the whole night.

Taiwan, by contrast, has a core of local dancers who have supported its venues for years, giving its dance floors a character of their own that outsiders can’t easily change. First-timers learn how to respect others here from the way the regulars around them behave, and from reminders on site. Hao wants more people to come, and he trusts the community to help newcomers understand and respect the place.

He knows Taiwan’s market isn’t big, but he doesn’t want that to limit what he can do. He wants people around the world to know that Taiwan, too, has DJs, parties and a music culture worth discovering. Even though the overseas takeovers almost never make money, he believes they’re worth continuing. Going once isn’t enough; showing up every year is how others get to know you, and how long-term partnerships are built. He hopes Taiwan can become a key hub for electronic music in Asia, drawing more DJs, promoters and dancers, and giving Taiwanese musicians more chances to go abroad.

▴ Organik takes Taiwanese DJs to WOMB in Tokyo for a takeover. Photo: Organik Festival

The Festival’s Dilemma: In Search of a Long-Term Home

Organik was first held at Niushan in Hualien, a seaside site reached by walking down a mountain path. With few residents nearby, its setting between mountains and sea became what many festivalgoers remember most about Organik. But as attendance grew from a few hundred to more than a thousand, the showers, toilets and accommodation could no longer cope, and the team had to look elsewhere. In 2022 Organik moved to Nan’ao in Yilan, and since 2023 it has been held at Peninsula’s Secret in Shimen, New Taipei, a coastal campground near Linshanbi where you can watch both the sunrise and the sunset.

▴ Since 2023, Organik Festival has been held at Peninsula’s Secret in Shimen, New Taipei. Photo: Organik Festival

For Hao, finding a suitable festival site in Taiwan is not easy. Beyond space and scenery, there is the impact of sound on nearby residents, transport access, and utilities such as water, power, showers and accommodation. Even once a site is found, the team has to keep talking with neighbors and deal with any disruption the event may cause. However beautiful the scenery, if the basic facilities can’t support the number of attendees, it is hard for people to stay comfortably for several days.

Night-time programming is another challenge. Organik’s schedule includes all-night performances, but the site’s terms of use, noise regulations and the lives of nearby residents all have to be weighed. He hopes to find a place suited to night-time events that can be run for the long term, so the team doesn’t have to face the same problems every year.

Conversations with the organizers of Wonderfruit reinforced Hao’s view that land which can be used, planned and built on over the long term is key to whether a festival can grow steadily. They told him it had been a crucial condition for their own development. With that long-term foundation, improvements to water, power, showers, drainage and event spaces carry over from year to year instead of starting from scratch each time. That’s what he hopes for Organik: a place where the team can invest with confidence and keep improving the site, giving the festival room to keep growing.

Yet these hard-to-find natural settings are exactly what makes Organik so appealing. For attendees who travel all the way from Europe and North America, listening to music between the mountains and the sea is a rare experience. Some still remember climbing the hillside at Niushan to look out over the ocean, and ask the team where else nearby they can soak in hot springs, hike or cycle. Hao hopes visitors will come to Taiwan not just for the festival, but stay a few extra days and see more of the island.

How Can Electronic Music Put Taiwan on the Map?

This year, the team received a Ministry of Culture grant for an overseas promotion for the first time. For a team that has long covered the cost of its overseas events on its own, it was very practical support. Hao also believes the public sector and the industry share the same hopes: to keep the industry growing, and to help more people discover Taiwan.

He hopes the public sector will see that Taiwan’s electronic music scene holds its own, and that many teams have already achieved results worth continued support. Taiwan’s dancers, DJs, long-running venues and party crews, together with festival settings between the mountains and the sea, give the scene a character that is hard to replicate. He hopes resources will be focused on these strengths, helping everyone build on what they already do well.

For that support to make a difference, though, the system needs to reflect the realities of the industry more closely. If an approved grant falls short of the proposed budget, for example, could the scope of the project be adjusted accordingly? Could exchange programs go beyond formal matchmaking sessions to include more relaxed occasions, where people can listen to music and talk, get to know each other first, and gradually find ways to work together?

He also hopes the public sector will have a dedicated point of contact who genuinely understands, from a business perspective, what resources a team has found abroad, which promising partners it has met, and how those opportunities could help it grow. After the team returns, both sides could keep following up, discussing next steps and what support is needed, so these contacts can turn into long-term partnerships instead of the conversation and the support stopping once a grant is closed out.

For Hao, the whole concept is a bit like running a company. Different teams have their own strengths; the public sector can learn what each one needs and offer the right support, so everyone moves in a shared direction.

And what he most wants to achieve himself is simple: make the events good enough, and fun enough, that people abroad will fly to Taiwan just for them.

 

 

 

 

 

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Author: Liyang / YSOLIFE