Club night «Trance Legion: Markus Schulz»

   Some club nights are not built around a run of familiar hits. They are built as one long arc: a slow climb, a breakdown that empties the room of sound, then the bass coming back. That is how trance works, and in central Ho Chi Minh City it will be played by a DJ who has hosted a weekly radio show about it since 2002.

   Markus Schulz was born in Germany and works out of Miami. Listeners call him the "unicorn slayer". In electronic music, "unicorn melodies" are the light, fluttering lines mainstream EDM leans on; Schulz reaches for square waves and pitch bends instead. The nickname came from someone else's tweet, "Markus Schulz: the unicorn slayer of trance" — he retweeted it himself and it stuck.

   The short version
Here is what the man behind the decks is known for:
Nine studio albums between 2005 and 2023, among them Do You Dream?, Scream and Watch the World
The weekly radio show Global DJ Broadcast, which he has hosted since 2002 — more than 1,200 episodes
The label Coldharbour Recordings, which he founded
The Dakota alias, used for separate albums from Thoughts Become Things (2009) to Odyssey to the Netherworld (2022)
Number eight in the DJ Mag Top 100 in 2010, and America's number one DJ in the 2012 DJ Times poll
Stages including Tomorrowland, Ultra Music Festival and EDC Las Vegas

   Who is it for? For anyone who listens to a set as a whole instead of waiting for the drops they already know: trance lives in long transitions, where one track grows out of the last. If Coldharbour means something to you, you know what is coming. If it does not, this is an easy way in — a few hours are enough to hear how trance differs from dance music that lives on one chorus.

   Trance Legion is the night Ciné Saigon gives over to trance, and the club calls this edition a return of Markus Schulz to its stage. The club itself stands on the site of the old Thăng Long cinema and, by its own account, carries on the story of a place with more than sixty years of history.

   Two practical notes: every ticket comes with two beers, and cameras are not allowed inside. The club also runs the evening as a Moët Night, together with Moët & Chandon.

   If you would rather have a set built as a single story than a sequence of familiar tracks, this is a night to arrive early for and stay with to the end.