It’s 1.20am on Saturday night and I’m sitting alone on a bench in a giant dark club, three floors beneath the bustling Buenos Aires streets, wishing I had two things: earplugs, and friends.
The club is completely empty except for me, the DJ, a handful of bar staff and two other extremely early revellers, sitting opposite. We steal awkward glances when we think the other isn’t watching. I feel like a right goon.
I was warned this’d happen, that if I went to this club, at this time, it’d be completely dead. I don’t think I actually believed it till now, as I sip on my fernet and diet coke, an alcoholic drink Argentinians drink even more than Malbec. I neck it, stifle a yawn and order a Red Bull from one of the bored bar staff.
It’s not that this club night is unpopular; quite the contrary. But 1.20am, for Argentinians, is early. It’s a time most British fortysomethings like me might consider wrapping it up on a late Saturday night out.
The Argentinian capital is the world’s most nocturnal city. And, while the music most would associate with Argentina is tango, the music currently deafening me is a genre many party-going Argentinians are surprisingly obsessed with: weird, minimal, intense techno.
It’s now 1.35am and the night’s first attendees trickle in. By 3am, the club will be so packed, the next nearest nose will be millimetres from your own. The concept of personal space sits differently in Latin America. The pounding, fast-paced beat goes on here until 7am, when the club closes and about half of its clientele will head across town to one of the two queer clubs hosting the weekly after-parties, called GPS and Zouk. They’ll be equally packed and equally techno and will go on until midday.
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The club night I’m at, Durx, is one of many techno nights in the city. It’s mixed gay and straight. A sweat-sodden, dark brickwork tunnel runs beneath the club, signalled only by a neon sign at each of the two entrances. In those bowels, liberated male and female revellers are welcome to indulge in all and any consensual passions and pleasures.
Most are gay men like me, but there are female and straight male observers and even participants. I’m a bit new to all this.
For each club, the posters state that the night begins at 11.59pm. That’s so nobody gets the actual date confused. But, as I learned, virtually nobody gets there till what is, technically, the early hours of the next day.
The signature techno dance move is to stand opposite one another, or in a daisy chain of single file in threes or fours, hands gripped on to the shoulders or around the waist of the person in front, and sway the head back and forth with a momentum that can build alarmingly. As they do this, it’s common to hear them chanting: Dale! Dale! Dale! It loosely translates, in Argentinian Spanish, as: OK! OK! OK!
Most men – gay and straight – and several women in Durx are topless. It was 38 degrees in Buenos Aires this weekend. Water fountains spray on to a section of the dancefloor to cool down the overheated head swayers. People playfully run in and out of them like children in a town square. The stage is full of people dancing and telling the DJ this un-mellifluous music is life-changing. He high-fives them, then they get back to the head swaying.
The vibe is unpretentious and non-creepy. There’s no reprieve, however, from the sheer volume of the music. None of the wild Argentinians seem to mind. I crave a chillout room. A chillout room, earplugs and friends.
The latter of those cravings is satisfied in the succeeding weeks. Friends, yes, but techno-mad friends who gently mock my need for Madonna.
Still, they show me entire undiscovered underground universes. A huge monthly techno night aimed at gay men called Fagot. A more mixed affair in a disused multi-level grandiose funeral parlour called Demi Monde, featuring a maze of rooms and wires with a glorious disregard for health and safety. Al fresco techno jams in fields with huge screens showing trippy robot-like graphics. A free outdoor New Year’s Eve party in the woods with techno DJs playing beyond sunrise on the first of January.
Gary Nunn is a journalist who lived in Argentina from 2023-2025
