Clique Records, Seoul: A White Room Above Euljiro
Three floors above Euljiro's lighting wholesalers, a white room where dance records are hung like prints, and a listening bar on the other side of the wall.
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Clique Records
Address: 3F, 8 Eulji-ro 12-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Website: cliquerecords.kr
Instagram: @clique_records
Euljiro 3-ga does not perform for anyone. The lighting wholesalers keep their stock spilling into doorways, sheets of acrylic lean against walls waiting to become signs, and the quick-delivery motorbikes thread the lanes without ever quite stopping. For decades this was where Seoul came to have things made. Much of it still is.
Clique Records sits three floors above all that, in a printing building down a back alley that takes a few turns to find. The stairs are steep. Someone has put a plant beside them. It's the first sign that the people at the top have thought about how you arrive.
The room itself is white, and the records are displayed the way a gallery hangs prints: face out, given space, meant to be looked at before they're touched. It's a small decision with a large effect. A sleeve on a white wall asks a question. A sleeve wedged into a crate only asks to be flicked past.
The shop opened in late 2015, after a spell as an online store and pop-up. It was started by two DJs and collectors: Antoine, who plays as Odd J, and Curtis, who plays as 6TS. Their reason was plain. Proper records were hard to find in Seoul, and a small community was forming around the wish to hear more. For a while Clique was the only shop in Korea given over to dance music.
That description undersells the bins. They run from house and techno into ambient and new age, disco, post-punk, new wave, jazz and dub, along with everything that lives in the gaps between them. New releases come from independent labels like Rush Hour, L.I.E.S., Antinote and Dekmantel, which most of the world only meets through a screen. There's a second-hand section, and the shop buys, sells and trades. The selection is made by DJs, and it shows. These are records chosen to be played, not shelved.
The neighbourhood has even found its way into the catalogue. Daehan Electronics, a reissue label from the same circle, takes part of its name from the electronics stores on the industrial streets around the shop. It's a fitting tribute. Clique has always behaved less like a boutique than like another workshop on the street, one that happens to make listeners.
On the other side of a single wall is The Edge, which the same people opened in 2017 as a café, bar and small performance space. It's the listening room the shop always seemed to imply. Its first night was an EP launch for the Seoul musician Mogwaa. The arrangement says a great deal about how Clique thinks: a record is held in one room and heard properly in the next.
This July, eleven years in, the shop marked its anniversary with an all-night run of back-to-back sets at the bar next door. The invitation thanked everyone who had bought records, come to the parties, or simply been around. That last group is the whole business of a good record shop, and almost nobody puts it in writing.
Down the stairs, past the plant, the motorbikes are still going. Euljiro is still making things. Three floors up, so is Clique.
I write about spaces like this for Tracks & Tales. Subscribe to hear about the next one, or read more from the venue guide.
