Photos by Francisco Silva, Coşkun Saffet, Gaspard Froment, & Min Su
On a Friday night in Tottenham, DARKCLIP brought Seoul duo ETIC to London for the first edition of Exchange, a new event series built around connecting underground scenes across cities. Made up of Biohazard Girl and Gas Girl, ETIC sit somewhere between hardcore, hardstyle, techno and pop. Their sound is abrasive, melodic and euphoric in equal measure, creating a darker, faster and more unstable alternative to the polished edges typically associated with K-pop culture. Visually, the contrast is just as sharp. Biohazard Girl, also a tattoo artist, leans into a feminine gothic aesthetic, while Gas Girl brings a more glamorous, fashion-led energy. Together, that contrast has become central to ETIC’s identity, with the pair building a visual world that feels inseparable from the music.
Produced by Bardosage, ETIC emerged from Seoul with the intention of making something they felt was missing from the city’s wider musical landscape. In the group’s music, moments of trance-like euphoria cut through heavier production, giving it an emotional and nostalgic quality beneath its more distorted surface.
Their work feels less interested in fitting neatly into one genre than in pulling simultaneously from the harder edges of club music, pop and internet culture. That refusal to stay inside one scene is also central to DARKCLlP’s idea for Exchange. Rather than treating underground cultures as isolated by geography, the series looks at the increasingly blurred relationship between cities, sounds and communities. The aim is to take artists and subcultures that already share a frequency online and bring those connections into the physical world. That same approach shaped the London lineup.
Heisman Cobain, Reid, W1thdrawls, whosmeg?, Def Sera, Thirty7mins and Soma performed across a night that moved between underground rap, hyperpop, electroclash and electronic music, while DJs Xixi, Boy Pillow, Baptist, Poi and Killcaskets and Occult14, connected to communities including CRUSH, Maxxing, Audible Mania, Mind The Gap and Borough, brought different corners of London nightlife into the same space.
DARKCLIP curated a sonic journey built around contrast, allowing each act to maintain its own identity as the similarities between them revealed themselves naturally over the course of the night. Exchange worked because of the overlap.
Music travels instantly, visual references move even faster, and artists separated by thousands of miles increasingly draw from the same digital references, finding each other in the same corners of the internet. The relationship between London and Seoul’s undergrounds already exists online and continues to evolve every day. Discovering another city’s underground has become almost instantaneous. DARKCLlP’s idea is to do the harder part and make those connections physical.
For one night in Tottenham, that meant placing ETIC as the headliner of a London lineup where ETIC felt less like an international booking and more like a natural extension of London’s underground ecosystem.
Exchange 001 is the first step in what DARKCLIP is developing as an ongoing series connecting artists, scenes and communities across cities. The question behind it is what happens when separate underground communities are given a reason to actually meet, and what happens after they do.
