May The Fourth Be With You!

Event Details

This planned event was scheduled to take place at Piu Piu, 97 Hai Bà Trưng, Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Ho Chi Minh City, from 9 PM on 4 May 2019 until 3 AM on 5 May 2019, but it was cancelled and did not take place. The venue has since closed, but the original location and planned event details have been retained for archive accuracy.

The cancellation coincided with Vietnam’s two-day National Mourning on 3 and 4 May 2019 following the death of former President General Lê Đức Anh. Public entertainment, artistic performances, sporting events and recreational activities were ordered to stop during the mourning period, meaning the planned Star Wars celebration could not proceed.

May The Fourth Be With You! had been conceived as a Star Wars-themed night built around costumes, galactic humour and underground electronic music. Guests were encouraged to choose between Resistance energy and Dark Force behaviour, dress for the occasion and get suitably wookiee on the Piu Piu dancefloor.

The familiar “May the Fourth” celebration gave the organisers an excuse to push the theme well beyond an ordinary club night. Star Wars characters, deliberately questionable space references and renamed DJs were intended to turn the venue into a temporary corner of the galaxy while the music moved through several underground styles.

The planned international guest was Jona Jefferies, a Barcelona-born DJ, producer and record collector who had grown up between Spain and the United Kingdom before becoming based in Berlin. His musical background stretched across Jazz Funk, Soul, Hip Hop, Disco, Balearic music, House, Reggae, Dub, Broken Beat, Bass and Drum and Bass.

Jefferies’ route into DJ culture included the DIY free-party and rave scene of 1990s Britain before taking in the hedonistic musical environment of Ibiza. He later absorbed further influences through Bristol’s sound-system culture and urban music community, helping create the unusually broad selection style he was due to bring to Ho Chi Minh City.

That breadth made him particularly suitable for a party where the musical identity was not intended to remain in one genre all night. Reggae and Dub could sit beside Disco, House and Broken Beat before the selections moved towards heavier bass music or Drum and Bass.

One of Jefferies’ notable production projects was Nocturnal, made as Sapience with mastering engineer Lewis Hopkin for Tom Middleton’s Sound Of The Cosmos label. The release received support from Gilles Peterson as well as DJs including Mala and Laurent Garnier, with further support coming from Modeselektor, Renaat Vandepapeliere, Scrimshire and Toddla T.

The project demonstrated the same cross-genre thinking present in Jefferies’ DJ sets rather than positioning him inside a narrowly defined club category. His recorded work and selections could draw from soulful and Balearic material before moving towards more rhythmically demanding areas of electronic music.

At the time of the planned Saigon appearance, Jefferies was also involved with two party projects in Berlin. Many Hands was developed around soulful and eclectic dance music, while Buena Onda operated as a Balearic-focused session alongside Marco “peeDoo” Gallerani of Hell Yeah Recordings.

Jefferies had additionally appeared on stations including Ibiza Sonica, Cashmere Radio, Pure Ibiza Radio and Berlin Community Radio. That combination of clubs, radio and independent party activity reflected an approach based more on musical selection than allegiance to a single scene.

Scientific Sound Asia later maintained a connection with Jefferies through Many Hands and its Basement Soul radio programme. The station’s archive documents his work with Kava and repeats the history of Nocturnal and the support it received from Gilles Peterson, Mala and Laurent Garnier.

Supporting Jona Jefferies was DJ Psycho-UK, who received the temporary Star Wars identity The Last Jedi for the planned event. His background stretches from Hip Hop and Acid House through Hardcore, Jungle, Drum and Bass, House and the underground rave culture he became involved with while growing up in East London.

DJ Psycho-UK had played on London pirate radio stations including AXE FM and Fantasy FM and was connected with underground party networks around Outcry Syndicate, OTT and London Overground. His later work in Vietnam included DJing, event promotion and the development of Scientific Sound Asia as a radio, events and artist platform.

For May The Fourth Be With You!, the musical plan allowed him to draw from several sides of that background rather than being restricted to a single genre. The Last Jedi persona was intended to bring some suitably rebellious energy to the decks while maintaining the deliberately ridiculous Star Wars concept.

DJ Manny Saigon was transformed into Mannybacca for the night, adding another local selector to the proposed line-up. His philosophy was summed up in the original event material with the observation that making a crowd shake its head was satisfying, but making it shake its booty was considerably better.

Vynnibal became Princess Levynla, carrying the local underground scene towards the darker side of the planned programme. Her role was specifically associated with bringing Techno to the Dark Forces, giving the event a stronger late-night electronic direction.

Scarry Potter completed the published support line-up under the suitably space-age identity Laser Beams. His planned selections were expected to move from Hip Hop towards UK Garage, adding basslines and another British club influence to an already deliberately mixed musical programme.

The changing genres suited the Star Wars theme because the party had never been presented as a strict single-style club event. Jona Jefferies’ eclectic background alongside DJ Psycho-UK, Manny Saigon, Vynnibal and Scarry Potter would have allowed the music to move between Hip Hop, House, Techno, UK Garage, bass music and Drum and Bass.

Piu Piu was due to host the event at 97 Hai Bà Trưng in central District 1, a location that had supported numerous independent music events in Ho Chi Minh City. The venue has since closed, making preservation of the original address useful for documenting another former space associated with the city’s underground nightlife.

Admission had been announced at 90,000 VND and included one “Star Shot”, continuing the Star Wars wordplay into the ticket offer. Guests prepared to arrive in full Star Wars costume were due to receive free entry, making dressing up an active part of the event rather than simply promotional decoration.

None of those plans ultimately went ahead because the National Mourning took precedence on Saturday, 4 May 2019. The party therefore should not be treated as a Jona Jefferies performance in Vietnam or counted among events that actually took place at Piu Piu.

Preserving cancelled events is still important within the Scientific Sound Asia events archive because they document bookings, artists, venues and programmes that formed part of the organisation’s history. The wider platform now connects that archive with its radio station, DJ agency and music news coverage.

May The Fourth Be With You! therefore survives as the record of an ambitious Star Wars-themed event that was planned but never staged. Jona Jefferies, The Last Jedi, Mannybacca, Princess Levynla and Laser Beams were all supposed to enter the Piu Piu galaxy on 4 May 2019, but the National Mourning meant the Resistance and the Dark Side both had to remain at home.

Event status: Cancelled due to Vietnam’s National Mourning on 4 May 2019. No performance took place, and the original date, venue, line-up, ticket information and event concept have been retained solely for historical and archive accuracy.