Jakarta's Ecilo and Bali's Gibs Take Southeast Asia's Underground to Amsterdam Dance Event

On Thursday, October 22, a venue in Amsterdam will spend twelve hours doing something it has never done before: hosting a full day of Southeast and East Asian club culture during Amsterdam Dance Event, the self-described world's largest electronic music conference and club festival, marking its 30th anniversary this year with five nights of parties across the city.

The venue is Wanakam. The day is Pavilion East, a takeover organized by Mixmag Asia with Clockenflap, Nowness Asia, SOOOP, Kaboom Animation Festival and EMC, running from noon to 2AM as part of Amsterdam Dance Event. And the two names doing the heaviest lifting on the lineup aren't DJs booked to play a set. They're Jakarta's Ecilo and Bali's Gibs, booked to talk.

At 9PM, the pair take a panel called "Ground-Level Architecture & Peripheries of Sound," built around a problem anyone who has tried to book a Southeast Asian artist onto a European lineup already knows: visas that take months, promoters who won't front a flight without a guaranteed draw, and a booking circuit that still treats the region as an afterthought. Loopliner profiled Ecilo on September 28, after Jeff Mills signed him to Axis Records. He co-founded Underradar Records in Jakarta in 2021, a label, clothing line and booking agency built as one venture, and his catalogue outside Indonesia also runs through ARTS in Berlin, Planet Rhythm in the Netherlands and We Are The Brave in the UK. Gibs, born Gibran Wirjawan, runs the Bali-based platform Dunia, which spans music, events and film and has spent years trying to build exchange that runs both directions instead of just importing European headliners to Canggu.

The rest of the day makes the point without a microphone. At 8PM, Pavilion East screens Bussy Temple's ALTÆR, a documentary about the Singapore collective that started in 2022 as invite-only raves in an abandoned tunnel, built for trans, non-binary and femme dancers who didn't feel safe at mainstream parties, queer or not. The same slot carries Spring Will Come, a narrative short following a Saigon DJ. Earlier, at 3PM, a screening block pairs an Indonesian noise-scene documentary, Bising, with films on Hong Kong's Fire Dragon Dance and an Australian K-rap crew. At 1PM, David Zhou of London label Eastern Margins opens the day with a talk on platforming East and Southeast Asian subcultural music in Europe, the same argument Ecilo and Gibs will make from the other side eight hours later.

None of it is a club night exactly, though there are DJ sets from Gibs, Dunia collaborators and Ling:Chi scattered through the day, and an invite-only mixer from 5PM to 7PM pouring a cocktail built on espresso, cardamom, yuzu and elderflower. Mixmag Asia's listing gives no public ticket link; the instruction for the mixer is simply to "get in touch to RSVP." Most of ADE's venues this October won't have a single Southeast Asian name on the bill. This one does, and it put two of them behind a microphone instead of a booth.

Pavilion East runs October 22, noon to 2AM, at Wanakam in Amsterdam.

Cover photo: Ecilo, press photo via Synthetik Sounds.