Our first edition of The Nightlife Review launched late last year with Elsewhere. In case you missed it, we still have three zines left in stock. 

Now, we’re excited to partner with Zora on a completely different format: soundscape. We’re bringing you audio postcards from five different cities around the world—Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Saigon, Aba, and New York City.

As Paz Azcárate writes in her dispatch from Buenos Aires, “The nightlife of a city is intricately intertwined with the lives of its inhabitants, forging vital connections that define its essence.” There’s something about being able to hear the dried squid street vendor, the football game replaying in an open pub, the line down the block to get into a hotel club on the Sunset Strip, that completely transports you. So close your eyes, press play, and travel around the world with us in one night. 

The Nightlife Review (Edition 002) is executive produced and hosted by Harrison Malkin. Our contributors are Dan Q. Dao, Chidinma Iwu, Paz Azcárate, Jocelyn Silver, and Harrison Malkin. Artwork is by Carlos Sanchez and music by Michna. 

All audio postcards, photos, and the final mixtape will be mintable on Zora, a decentralized protocol where anyone can permissionlessly buy, sell, and create.

For our first episode, we bring you to Buenos Aires. — Daisy Alioto

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

The nightlife of a city is intricately intertwined with the lives of its inhabitants, forging vital connections that define its essence. Nowhere is this truth laid more bare than in the midst of an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, as witnessed in the heart of a nation grappling with the most acute financial turmoil of the past quarter-century. The highest inflation rate in the world, constantly rising unemployment, the kind of political tensions that turn people against each other, a sharp decline in the purchasing power of the completely collapsed middle class. And yet, when Friday comes, no one wants to call it a night before 10 PM. 

Could it be driven by a need for distraction? Undoubtedly, enduring a perpetual state of mental agitation and worry around the clock can inflict profound harm on one's psyche. At night, without schedules, obligations, or inhibitions, finding a moment to give bigger prominence to the body is much easier. 

The last time I went out partying before the COVID-19 quarantine in Argentina (considered one of the longest in the world) was to celebrate my 29th birthday. After almost a year of silence on the dance floors of Buenos Aires to prevent the spread of the virus, parties returned.

The mainstream scene pretended as if nothing had happened, as if returning to the "old normality" had been a real possibility, just as the media proposed. But a party born in 2021, right after the quarantine, understood the rupture that Buenos Aires’ nightlife had experienced and chose a more honest path. This party was called Fractura, and offered a synthesis between the need to reconnect with others and the fragility of things as we knew them—creating a mix of artists of different genres who share a willingness to explore new sounds ranging from neoperreo and dark reggaeton to hard techno. Recently, Fractura celebrated three years reshaping the underground scene of Buenos Aires. 

I believe there is a greater need that acts as a driving force in times of crisis. It's the need to trust that something better is coming, that you can trust people you don't know. Sometimes, this can only be produced by dancing for hours with strangers. — Paz Azcárate

All photos by Paz Azcárate.