Bani Haykal's New Album Turns 1950s Malay Film Comedy Into a Study of Colonial Violence

bani haykal spent the last few months alone in his Singapore apartment, splicing dialogue from Malay films shot before the country existed in its current form, while construction crews drilled outside his window. The result, industri kelakar seram, landed on Bandcamp this week: fourteen tracks of Moog synthesizer and recut colonial-era film scripts, bilingual in Malay and English, recorded entirely from his home studio.

The title is the album's thesis. "Kelakar seram" is Malay for a specific kind of behaviour, one that reads as threatening and funny at the exact same moment, the nervous laugh right before something goes wrong. bani haykal builds the whole record around that tension: excerpts and newly written dialogue pulled from Malay cinema across the 1950s to the 1980s, reassembled, according to the release notes, as "scenes of rage in the absurd," a way of acknowledging "the trauma of war, colonialism and occupation disguised oftentimes in comedy."

Rage Dressed as a Punchline

Fourteen tracks move between English and Malay texts, with titles like "cowards in the panic room," "runtuh empire" and "salam kiamat." The instrumentation stays minimal on purpose: mostly a Moog DFAM, a Soma Lyra and an mdsl HXP synth, plus electric bass, a stripped-down palette that leaves room for the dialogue to carry the weight. None of it is built for a dancefloor; haykal works closer to radio drama than club music, a gap he's occupied for well over a decade now.

haykal already has one record this year built on the same instinct. In January, his label Strange Weather Dunia released Rupa Bentuk Rangka Derhaka, a cassette built from retuned bicycle frames with every sale going to Palestine solidarity groups. Loopliner covered it at the time: salvage and protest treated as one gesture, aimed at Gaza's present. industri kelakar seram turns the same instinct on Singapore's own colonial past.

What the Sound Actually Does

haykal has been doing this since at least 2013, when a profile in The Diplomat described him assembling instruments out of "dormant objects." Between records, he's held an artist residency at Nanyang Technological University's Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, researching how language, tools and technology shape identity. industri kelakar seram folds that same habit, reading the politics buried inside old culture, into something you can actually sit with for forty minutes.

Where to Hear It

The album streams and downloads from haykal's own Bandcamp page. No label attached this time: it's self-released under his own name rather than through Strange Weather Dunia.

Cover artwork for "industri kelakar seram," via bani haykal's Bandcamp.