Raving In Azerbaijan - How Tbilisi’s Club Culture Inspired A New Techno Scene In Baku

1. Raving in Azerbaijan - How Tbilisi’s Club Culture Inspired A New Techno Scene in Baku Baku's iN nightclub was started by a group of Azeri techno heads who cut their teeth raving in the Georgian capital. For more information, visit: http://www.welovebaku.com/baku-nightlife/ Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, straddles a bay in the Caspian Sea. It’s an oil-rich city that lies at the intersection of the Middle East and Central Asia, and it’s had a tumultuous history. The influx of money that its natural resources has brought in has been accompanied by designer clothing shops and luxury car dealerships, as well as posh and glitzy nightlife. The majority of Baku’s clubs are still largely defined by people smoking hookah and listening to a mix of Western, Russian and Turkish commercial pop music with rows of expensive SUVs double-parked outside. Hidden behind Baku’s deceivingly opulent façade, however, is a city that many local young people describe as stifling and despondent, where good places to go out are few and far between. Unlike Tbilisi, which has recently gained international recognition for its innovative club scene, Baku offers surprisingly little in terms of dance clubs despite being the largest and wealthiest city in the Caucasus. But a group of techno enthusiasts are trying to break the mold. iN, a club that recently re-opened in a new location, offers locals a taste of rave culture as epitomized by such clubbing behemoths as Berghain and Bassiani. The club’s name comes from the

2. Azerbaijani word “indi,”—which translates to “now”—and captures the now-or-never mentality of the people behind the project. Natig Ismayil, a techno head in his early thirties who is also the club’s co-owner, has played a pivotal role in bringing quality electronic music to Baku. Back in 2014, Natig and a group of close friends discovered Tbilisi’s bustling club scene and became enamored with techno music and rave culture. Undeterred by the seven-hour drive from Baku to Tbilisi and the long queues at the border, weekend trips to Georgia became something of a ritual for the six-person iN crew, which is comprised of Farid, Mikael, Elvin, Mamed, Minira and Natig. “At some point, Iwas going there every other weekend for six months straight. That’s how dedicated I was,” Minira, one of iN’s core team members, explains. Deprived of access to techno clubs at home, a generation of Baku partygoers made Tbilisi their clubbing home, earning themselves a reputation as some of the most ardent ravers on the dance floor. “We were always the crew that stayed until the very end, danced the hardest and just really went all out. That’s how people in Tbilisi started noticing us, and we eventually became really tight with the whole Tbilisi techno crowd,” Natig recalls of the days when dancing into the early afternoon was not an option in Baku. The story of iN is one of a persistent uphill battle against a series of setbacks ever since the club first opened in 2015. The club’s first location in central Baku was quickly shut down following noise complaints from neighbors who, unfamiliar with electronic music, accused the club of playing the same track over and over again. During the interim, the club found a “home away from “home” in the Tbilisi club KHIDI, which hosted a number of iN nights featuring Azeri DJs, and the connection between the two clubs remains strong to this day. iN’s second reincarnation at a bigger location also ended in a flop after the iN crew realized they couldn’t afford the exorbitant rent. Another opening attempt ended just after the first party with the club’s suspicious landlord calling in the police to evict his own tenants. Since the beginning, iN has been entirely self-funded—a rare occurrence in a city where most private initiatives depend on government support or funding from the oil industry.

3. Honestly, at this point all my friends thought I was completely crazy to carry on with the project in the face of all these financial and administrative roadblocks,” Natig admits with a smile at his favorite coffee shop in central Baku. After almost three years of floating from place to place, iN settled in a new secluded location that ticked all the boxes: a massive abandoned printing house tucked away between a construction site, high rise apartment buildings and derelict body repair shops in Baku’s nondescript 3rd district. With help from friends and volunteers, the iN team worked around the clock on a very tight budget to turn the ground floor of one of the factory buildings into a space with all the trappings of an industrial techno club. Old pipes and ventilation shafts were taken apart and welded back together to form the club’s labyrinth-like chill zone where people can take a breather in little nooks made out of scrap metal found onsite. Lacking the money to purchase a high-end sound system from abroad, the club enlisted the help of Dede (“uncle”) Namik—a mustachioed retired Soviet sound technician in his sixties—to install a custom-built sound system. Dede Namik is extremely proud and protective of his creation, keeping watch at every iN event, eager to share stories about how he built Azerbaijan’s first analog delay unit for an electric guitarist friend back in the 1980s.