A Denpasar Producer Named His Debut EP After a Bali Club That Spent Seven Years Shut for Drug Trafficking

Five tracks, five nightclubs, and one of them closed for the better part of a decade over a drug bust. That's the concept behind Velfarre 2002, the debut EP from Denpasar producer Funtime*, and it's a stranger, better idea than most "tribute to the golden age" records manage.

Funtime, real name Cahya Nugraha, discovered Eurobeat as an eight-year-old trawling YouTube compilations, long before he ever touched a mixer. By the time he started DJing in Bali in 2021, he was playing it exclusively, full sets of the fast, maximalist Italo-descended sound that soundtracked Tokyo's biggest clubs through the 90s and early 2000s. Velfarre 2002 is what happens when that teenage obsession collides with the genre he actually works in now: BKB, Indonesian breakbeat, the hard, chest-thumping style you'll hear blasting out of local bars from Kuta to Jakarta on any given Saturday.

"[BKB] is already a thing that happened in lots of local commercial bars around Indonesia for the last two to three years," Funtime said in an interview with Swine Daily. "I've reached the point where I've gotten sick of it because everyone does the same, and I just want another color to appear in the scene." His fix: lean into Eurobeat and breakbeat's shared ground. Both genres sit around 140 to 160 BPM, both love a wall of layered synths, and both, in his hands, want to go as loud and as bright as possible.

A tracklist that doubles as a history lesson

Every song title pairs a club name with a year: Velfarre 2002, Xenon 1996, Twin Star 1999, 9LoveJ 2001 (featuring Gestalt Intelligence), a run through the venues that hosted Eurobeat and trance during the genre's Japanese peak. Velfarre itself is real and well documented, a 1,500-capacity Roppongi megaclub that Avex ran from 1994 until 2007 and that doubled as the year of Funtime's birth, which is where the EP's title comes from.

Then the bonus track flips the geography entirely. Akasaka 2012 is named for Akasaka Bali, Denpasar's biggest nightclub, and Funtime picked a genuinely loaded reference. Bali police shut Akasaka down on June 6, 2017 over a drug trafficking case on the premises. It sat closed for seven years before reopening in July 2024 as a rebuilt karaoke-and-music-club complex. Sticking that name on a record that otherwise mythologizes a vanished Tokyo scene is a pointed move: it says the local, messier history belongs in the same sentence as the imported nostalgia, not a footnote to it.

That's more ambition than most self-released debut EPs bother with, and it's why Velfarre 2002 is worth a listen even if Eurobeat isn't usually your genre. You don't need to know who ran Xenon in the 90s to feel the record's argument: Bali's underground has its own club mythology, and it's just as worth naming a track after as Roppongi's.

Velfarre 2002 has been out since May 29 on Bandcamp for name-your-price starting at $7, alongside a full stream on SoundCloud. It's Funtime's first formal release after building a small catalogue of remixes and edits, most recently gathered on a self-released 2022-2024 Archives compilation. If this EP is the sound of him finding his own lane, it's a fast, bright, slightly chaotic one, and Bali's underground could use more producers willing to name their influences this specifically.

For more on what Bali's DJs are building beyond the beach clubs, see Loopliner's coverage of DITA, the Bandung-trained selector who went from Klymax Discotheque to Panorama Bar, and Munir's decade-long project reviving Indonesia's lost disco records.

Cover artwork: Funtime, official Bandcamp release art for Velfarre 2002.