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In-depth articles
Gqom went from Durban's townships to Beyoncé's The Lion King album in less than a decade. A decade later, a small Yogyakarta label is running the same log drum through Indonesian gendang, and nowhere else in Southeast Asia has really picked it up.
DJ Mag's 2026 Top 100 found three clubs worth ranking in Bangkok and one in Jakarta, whose biggest night out spent December fending off a bribery investigation. The two capitals built very different scenes, and neither one tells the whole story by itself.
Fono built an eight-year weekly night around vintage hi-fi gear inside Kuala Lumpur's Zhongshan Building. In February 2026, its founders closed the series at full strength, on their own terms, rather than let it run down.
Every country in the region regulates when a club can serve its last drink. Almost none of them enforce it the same way twice. A country-by-country look at Southeast Asia's real closing times, law versus practice.
Manila's House of Mizrahi turns ten this year, ten years after Xyza Mizrahi brought international ballroom culture to the Philippines.
The producer who built Indonesian Bounce for beach stages and water guns spent 2026 signing to Steve Aoki's Dim Mak and returning to Tomorrowland in Belgium.
KSHMR headlined Borderland Music Festival's 2026 edition at Sarawak's Cultural Village.
Djakarta Warehouse Project draws the headlines and, in 2024, saw 18 of its own police officers investigated for extorting attendees. Bali's Savaya cracked DJ Mag's Top Five. Jakarta's underground signs to European labels. None of it is the same scene.
Studio Lam closed its Sukhumvit 51 shophouse in February after twelve years. Salon Kiku, the wine bar built one floor up by four friends including DJ Pam Anantr, never stopped.
Bangkok's door is simple, no fuss. Singapore's isn't. A city-by-city look at what it takes to get into Southeast Asia's best house and techno rooms, from Mustache to Marquee to a club that keeps its door policy to itself.
Budapest-born, Brooklyn-based singer Hien built her debut album Trăng Qua from a decade of demos, bolero and chèo samples, and a guitar line she dug out of her grandfather's old cải lương tapes.
Hardstyle is a 150 BPM Dutch genre built around distorted kick drums. Its biggest stage just closed, and the region's clearest entry point is a Jakarta producer who once played an all-Indonesian set at Tomorrowland.