Electronic music, festivals, and nightlife
Diplo filmed himself trading keyboard runs with Habib Gunjat, a wedding-circuit musician from Kendari whose organ tunggal sets had already gone viral across Indonesia, at a charity run afterparty in Bali on October 8.
Hanoi party series HUM's co-founder Yanes joins Croatian techno veteran Petar Dundov on VENT Tokyo's October 17 bill, a small but concrete sign that Vietnam's underground scene is starting to travel.
Argy and Adam Beyer turned Ho Chi Minh City's Independence Palace, the building a tank crashed through to end the Vietnam War, into a 4,000-person dancefloor on October 2, the only Southeast Asian date on Argy's NEWORLD tour.
Manila turntablist Siangyoo has sold out two Singapore shows already. On October 8, he tries for a third at Zouk, with 10% of every ticket funding flood relief in Nepal through a new charity rave format from Beamco Foundation.
bani haykal's new album industri kelakar seram, out this week on Bandcamp, rebuilds dialogue from 1950s-80s Malay cinema over Moog synthesizers, a record built entirely at home around a Malay phrase for behaviour that's funny and threatening at once.
"Radio Hood," out October 16, marks Rekids' 20th anniversary and 300th release, the first-ever team-up between Robert Hood and label boss Radio Slave, who has already played Bangkok's Sing Sing Theater and Singapore's Ritual series.
Sanjonas' second album fuses gqom, marawis and lion dance music into a nine-track meditation on Javanese self-discipline. It lands October 15 on his own Yogyakarta label RAMPAK G.
Manila producer Pamcy scored a fictional Filipino supermarket chain across 11 house tracks named after grocery staples, from quail eggs to mosquito coils, then launched it inside a real Jollibee.
Hong Kong label Klasse Wrecks' 62nd release is a debut EBM duo called Comply, and its opening track lifts ED-209's boardroom warning from RoboCop word for word.
My Own Shadow – Album lands November 13 on !K7, Marcel Dettmann's first full-length since 2022. The Berghain resident spent years skipping Thailand entirely before his first Bangkok set in 2019.
The Bangkok producer built a following by wiring the pin, a three-stringed Isan lute, into festival-scale EDM. In December, Tomorrowland's first Thailand edition puts that sound next to Martin Garrix and Swedish House Mafia.
Twenty years after they started making electronic pop with toy instruments in Bandung, Bottlesmoker's new single Cahaya arrives as the second preview of a seventh album, still stubbornly self-released on Bandcamp.