Mia Mao, the new electronic superclub, sets up shop at the Halle aux Cuirs de la Villette

With its 2,300 seats, its concrete look and a demanding program, Mia Mao, which opens this January 17 with Laurent Garnier, positions itself as a new reference place in the North-East of Paris, coupled with a platform around the club culture.

Ttransforming a former industrial site made entirely of concrete in a marginalized area of ​​the city into a techno club: Mia Mao, which opens this Friday, January 17 in the former Leather Hall of La Villette, realizes an old party fantasy. The 3,000 square meter building, located between the ring road and the Ourcq canal, houses a huge room on two levels, dotted with pillars under a 7 meter ceiling. Any resemblance to the reference of the genre, Berghain, a legendary Berlin techno club installed in a former power station, is obviously fortuitous, but the comparisons are assumed by Mia Mao’s team. “For me, it’s the first club/rave in Paris, says Antoine Husson, the artistic director of the place. There are two minds in it. Of course, in terms of geometry – the ceiling height, the different levels – we can draw a parallel with Berghain, but with all humility. » “But we don’t have any backrooms! » explains Arnaud Perrine, the boss, who has been working on this project for almost ten years.

At the beginning of 2015, while he was managing Glazart, the alternative club at Porte de la Villette which was all the rage in the summer with its equipped beach, he was looking for a new place to prepare for the aftermath. He first visited the Cinaxe, a dynamic cinema hall closed in 2011. But Didier Fusillier, then president of the public establishment of La Villette, took him to visit the Halle aux Cuirs, where the skins from the La Villette slaughterhouses in the 1960s before serving as a storage location for the decorations of the exhibitions at the Grande Halle or the Cité des Sciences.

Time to win the call for tenders and convince a few banks, the project came to fruition at the end of 2019, and, in February 2020, Arnaud Perrine went on vacation to New Zealand with peace of mind, convinced that this new place “will break everything”. When he returns, everyone is looking for masks and the banks no longer respond. It will take two more years to restart the machine, and today, Mia Mao comes to crown her little night empire made up of Glazart, Kilomètre25 and Jardin21, literally next door, in this corner of the North-East became “the electronic district of Paris” according to Antoine Husson.

Modeled on Berghain, Tresor in Berlin or Fabric in London, Arnaud Perrine has created an ecosystem around his clubs. Mia Mao is in fact a platform dedicated to the local electronic scene, with a web radio, a YouTube channel which broadcasts filmed DJ sets and a label. Enough to feed the programming of this new place (open Friday and Saturday) which will require “big names” to fill its two thousand three hundred places, explains co-programmer Sylvain Lemerle. But it will make room for emerging artists, in all styles of “underground” electronic music, that is to say without falling into Las Vegas-style EDM.

Evenings without photos

“The idea is to have the most eclectic club possible, he said. There will be techno, hard techno, house, trance, drum’n’bass, probably also a little disco. This is the beauty of electronic music, very broad and very rich at the same time. » Thus, on January 17, Laurent Garnier will place the first record on the turntables (at eye level) at Mia Mao, which will welcome DJs like Manu le Malin, I Hate Models and Rebeka Warrior. And like more and more nightclubs around the world, Mia Mao applies a “no photos” policy, while smartphones are accused by artists of killing the atmosphere in the evening.

At the entrance, we stick a sticker on the lens of your smartphone, and you will be scolded if you are caught removing it. That didn’t stop some people from filming the laser scenography on concrete imagined by Minuit Une during the inauguration, Wednesday January 15, but it’s a habit to get into, believes the Mia Mao team. “The whole society is frozen on its screenconcludes Antoine Husson. Coming to a club is a moment of escape, a space to decompress, so you might as well escape from all these screens. »

Mia Mao, 12/A rue Ella-Fitzgerald, Paris 19ᵉ (entrance via the Ourcq canal). Every Friday and Saturday, midnight-7 a.m. €25-30.