A Singapore Artist Turned Bicycle Frames Into Instruments. Every Sale Goes to Gaza.

bani haykal's newest instrument used to be someone's daily commute. Bent handlebars, a stripped frame, spokes retuned into strings: on the Singapore artist's latest record, the bicycle furnishes more than 90% of what you hear. Nothing on Rupa Bentuk Rangka Derhaka is built for a dancefloor. It's built to keep your attention on Gaza, where welding a bike frame back together has become, for some people, how you get through the day.

A Cassette With a Cause

Released 9 January 2026 on Strange Weather Dunia, the label arm of haykal's own Singapore experimental collective, SWD 003 comes as a run of 85 cassettes in total (60 standard copies at 12 SGD, plus a numbered edition of 25 in a hand-crafted sleeve at 18 SGD) plus a 10 SGD digital download. Every dollar it makes is going to organisations and mutual aid groups working in and for Palestine. Nobody involved in making the record, haykal included, takes a cut.

That's not incidental to the sound. haykal has spent years building instruments out of things other people threw away: decommissioned drums, dead speakers, and now bicycle frames, cut down and rewired into percussion and string. The credits describe the builds as honouring "communities in Gaza who have adapted bicycle frames into tools of survival," where the metal that used to move people now doubles as a stretcher, a cart, anything that still rolls.

Three Voices, One Record

haykal doesn't carry the record alone. Shivangi Mariam Raj's text is drawn from her essay "Tracing the Coordinates of Absence," about land dispossession under colonial rule. Randa Jarrar, the Palestinian-American writer, contributes material built from her own correspondence with people in Gaza, tracing what infrastructure collapse actually sounds like from the inside. Hanna Hazzan supplies field recordings taken across northern Palestine, framed in the credits as "counter-memory to erasure." None of it is comfortable listening by design: expect voices that arrive like transmissions and textures that fray at the edges, not a beat you can count bars to.

The whole thing was mixed and mastered by Harsya Wahono at Studio Oposisi in Jakarta, a small reminder that Southeast Asia's experimental scene runs on cross-border connections like this one as much as any single city's club scene does.

Not Just a Record

The bicycle-frame instruments weren't confined to tape. A related installation under the same title, built from the same salvaged frames and played collaboratively by haykal and other artists, sat inside Thailand Biennale Phuket's "Eternal [Kalpa]" exhibition from late November 2025 until it closed at the end of April this year. If you missed it, the record is what's left, and on a project built around scarcity and reuse, that might be the more honest way to encounter it anyway: no gallery lighting, just the sound.

Strange Weather has spent this year building a reputation as one anchor of Singapore's experimental underground beyond the label, too, having staged a two-night "Dunia" programme across RASA and Headquarters back in April with artists pulled from across Southeast Asia, East Asia and Europe. It's the same city that gave the region Darker Than Wax and, this October, its first Rainbow Disco Club outside Japan. SWD 003 is where that same instinct, treating a party and a protest record as the same kind of statement, shows up on wax. Or tape, in this case.

Cover photo: bani haykal with one of his bicycle-frame instruments, via Hear65 / Bandwagon Asia.