How Dipha Barus's Pon Your Tone Became Underblok Festival

In 2014, Dipha Barus and a handful of friends were bored stiff of Jakarta nightlife. Every room played the same EDM festival-pop, the same drops, the same build-ups. So they started digging through SoundCloud instead, pulling R&B edits and baile funk remixes no local club would touch, and throwing their own parties around what they found. They called the thing Pon Your Tone.

Twelve years on, that party has a building. On the last weekend of July, Pon Your Tone took over four floors and six stages of Row9 in Jakarta's Blok M district for Underblok Festival, running reggae and soundsystem culture on one level, Italo disco and house on the next, hyperpop and hardbass throwbacks above that. More than 40 DJs, collectives and music communities from across Indonesia played across the weekend of July 31 to August 2, as the dance-music finale of the city-wide myBCA JSD Blok M Festival.

From SoundCloud Rips to a Real House

Pon Your Tone didn't start as a business. Before the label, the artist management arm, the creative house and the production boutique it is today, it was a YouTube channel of curated tracks and a single night at Parc 19, run by people who wanted to hear something else. It stayed a party, mostly, for years.

What changed it, according to Dipha's own account in an interview with Mixmag Asia, was the pandemic. "That period forced us to grow up as a collective," he told the magazine. "We learned to run things more sustainably, to think long-term, and to adapt without losing our roots or the fun." That is a very tidy way of describing what usually kills a party crew: the moment where staying fun and staying solvent stop being the same problem, and most collectives pick one.

Underblok, Built in a Month

Underblok itself, by Dipha's telling, started as a spontaneous conversation between business partners and was put together in under a month, which is either an impressive turnaround or a warning sign depending on how the weekend actually sounded. On the evidence of the lineup and the floor plan, it leaned toward the former. Row9's four levels were split by genre rather than by stage size or ticket tier: reggae, soul, R&B and hip-hop downstairs, Italo disco and house one floor up, EDM throwbacks and hyperpop experiments above that. It's the kind of programming that only makes sense if you already trust the crowd to move between rooms instead of camping out in front of one headliner, which is more or less the whole Pon Your Tone pitch.

Indonesia's house scene has been having a moment for a while now, from Jakarta's basement parties to the booths of Bali, as this site covered in August. What Underblok adds to that story isn't a new sound so much as a new format: a homegrown crew renting a building instead of a club, and filling it with more than forty acts pulled from scenes around the country rather than flying in a marquee international headliner to sell the tickets.

What a Pon Your Tone Artist Sounds Like

Ask Dipha what ties the roster together and genre isn't the answer. "A Pon Your Tone artist is someone who has their own voice and isn't afraid to take a risk with it," he told Mixmag Asia, describing a house that gravitates toward musicians who show curiosity, honesty and some commitment to the community around them, whether they make hip-hop, pop or straight electronic music. It's a similar logic to the one behind Yogyakarta's RAMPAK G, another Indonesian label that treats genre as a starting point rather than a fence. In both cases, the pitch to a listener is the same: trust the curator, not the tag.

The Harder Part Is Doing It Twice

Dipha's stated goal is to turn Underblok into an annual series, taking over a different warehouse or building each time, until it becomes, in his words, a trusted platform where new collectives can grow and a real fixture on the Asian festival calendar. That's a big claim off one edition, however good it looked on paper. Plenty of one-off takeovers have read brilliantly as a single weekend and then quietly not happened again once the novelty wore off and the actual costs of renting a building, four sound systems and forty acts' worth of logistics came due.

What Pon Your Tone has that most first-time festival organizers don't is twelve years of running parties as an actual business already, with a label and artist roster behind it rather than a single promoter hoping a good night pays for the next one. Whether that's enough to make Underblok a fixture rather than a one-off will depend on whether it can pull off a second edition without the month-long adrenaline of the first, and on whether Jakarta's scene, which has no shortage of parties competing for the same Friday night, keeps showing up once it stops being new.

Cover artwork: Pon Your Tone, via their official Facebook page.