Vancouver moombahton ambassador Ziad from 110BPM here. One of the pioneers of moombahton, Munchi, recently played a show in Vancouver and wanted to share the experience (along with exclusive excerpts from my interview with him) with Cal and the rest of Salacious Sound. 

If you’re not familiar with Munchi (shame on you!), here are a two of my favourite tracks to get you acquainted:

The first thing I immediately noticed when I got to Republic was that a lot of the people there definitely weren’t from the moombahton or even EDM scene. With $12 cover the night before a long weekend there must have been a lot of door traffic. I know what you’re thinking and yes, I know that $12 cover for a normal Canadian club is ridiculous. This is Vancouver.

...and this is Republic's light-up bar

To my disappointment the opening DJ didn’t play a single moombahton track, but the performance that followed more than made up for that. Arriving straight from the plane, Munchi got behind two shiny CDJ 2000s right away and put his CDs in. Singing and dancing along to every track, Munchi’s energy immediately transferred over to the 400 shuffling club-goers and got them moving right away.

If you’ve never seen a Dutch man with a giant ‘fro and an ever bigger grin on his face jump up and down, shouting “Mother-fucker!” along with lyrics… it puts a smile on your face. What I loved at this show was that instead of the typical ‘build and drop/melt your face’ off’ style that I’m accustomed to hearing at most shows he pulled off one hell of a rhythmic, high-energy set.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of shows in my 22 years of life and this was the first time I’d ever seen 6’3″ Persians with silver chains and girls in little leather jackets all dancing alongside each other and enjoying the music equally as much. In fact, instead of the usual situation where the line is dead by 12am-12:30am, it was constantly busy whether it was 1am, 1:30am, 2am, and even later people were still flocking to the club… I guess that’s what word of mouth can do for a show.

Hands down favourite point of the night? An unreleased remix of The Final Countdown. I don’t use this expression often, but people seriously went ham. Two days later, I sat down with Munchi to talk about the experience:

First off, I was at the show and I don’t think there’s any question that people loved it.

Munchi (M): “You were there? Why didn’t you come say hi. After the gig I was talking to everybody at the show.”

Ziad (Z): “Haha, well I tried talking to you, but Jason said you just got off the plane so I wanted to give you some time.”

M: “Aw, naw man, that’s not that big of a deal. I just like talking to everybody. I could tell that there were a lot of people coming that weren’t in the moombahton scene or weren’t used to going to Republic and everyone came together and had a good time it looked like. That’s why I went out into the crowd after to thank everybody for coming out because I could tell that a lot of them came out of there element and had a good time regardless.”

That’s actually something Republic is trying to get past, this perception that it’s a Top 40 club or a club for a select group of people.

M: “For real?!”

Z: “Yeah, recently there’s been a big push to expand their audience. They’ve got a successful reggae night on Sundays, and Tuesdays they do drum n bass/jungle, and now they’re really pushing new artists to come do Thursday shows.”

M: “That’s good shit, it’s always good to bring different crowds together.”

And what do you think of the layout of republic?

M: “It was weird, it’s in the middle of the air. Downstairs was crazy, upstairs everybody was judging and I felt really peer pressured, you know?”

What was Fortune like? I know that you weren’t on the bill until the last minute, was it strange playing for people that don’t know your music?

M: “Aw, no, it’s all good, dude. I actually prefer to play in front of people who don’t know my shit and then I try to convince them… but sadly, it didn’t work this time…

Z: “Really?!”

M: “I mean, it worked up until a certain extent, but when I started playing moombahcore they were like ‘nah, fuck that shit,’ haha. I don’t mind though, I was like ‘fuck it,’ you know?”

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I hope you all enjoyed my expose of Munchi’s debut show in Canada. If you want to read the rest of the interview it’s all on Moomba+ for your viewing pleasure, and if you live in or around Vancouver and want to talk moombahton (shows, tracks, whatever) don’t hesitate to send me a message through my Facebook page.

The Republic show was made possible by the great guys at the Donnelly Group, as well as 110BPM, Winnie Cooper, and Vancouver’s Very Own. To see more photos from the event, head over here.

Lastly, Moombah+ has a swell Facebook group that you can keep up with us on:

– Ziad