Jakarta's House Cartel Turn Their Decade-Old DJ Crew Into a Record Label
House Cartel spent over a decade as outsiders fighting Jakarta's big room dominance from the DJ booth. Now the collective has quietly turned itself into a label, House Cartel Records, two EPs deep and counting.
Official link
Three guys have been quietly building one of Jakarta's most durable house music institutions for over a decade, and now they've decided to press some of it to wax. House Cartel, the DJ collective that has spent close to fifteen years championing real house music in a city long dominated by big room and commercial dance, has launched its own imprint, House Cartel Records.
The label surfaced quietly this summer with no press release, just two EPs dropped weeks apart on Bandcamp, but the intent behind it lines up with everything the crew has stood for since they started throwing parties as total outsiders to Jakarta's mainstream club circuit.
From Six DJs to a Trio, Now a Label
House Cartel started out around 2012 as a six-person crew: Nandi, Robin, Yorri, Sixteen, David Tjin and Tandunz, united by a shared frustration that the city's dance floors were saturated with EDM and commercial big room sets while house music, the genre's actual foundation, barely got a look in. Three of the original six eventually left Jakarta for other parts of Indonesia, leaving Nandi, Robin Rahardian and Yorri to keep the collective running. Along the way, the trio has opened and closed for John Digweed, Droog, Ben Klock, Bicep, Dubfire, Phono, Chus & Ceballos and Kraak & Smack, building the kind of credibility that usually takes a label, not just a residency, to sustain.
House Cartel Records is that next step, built around a straightforward mission: put out music from Indonesia, the rest of Asia, and the wider underground, without waiting on outside labels to notice the region first.
Two EPs In, Four Weeks Apart
The label's catalogue opens with Halal Sol's Tell Me? EP, released June 20, 2026, a four-track run through Tell Me?, What It Is, Take Note and Fried Peas from the Singapore-based producer, mastered by Ecilo with sleeve art from Randhy Putra Yanas.
Less than a month later, on July 17, catalogue number HCR002 arrived: Waiteasa's Unspoken EP, four tracks deep with remixes from Roshan and Monty Hasan, produced by Faris Primanda Waiteasa and mastered, like the Halal Sol EP, by Ecilo.
Both releases share the same vinyl-label aesthetic, a hand-drawn gunslinger mascot stamped on a splatter-dyed record face, giving the imprint a visual identity as deliberately unpolished as the crew's original party flyers.
Why It Matters
Jakarta's house scene has no shortage of promoters right now, but very few outfits with House Cartel's runway are turning that history into a functioning label rather than just another party brand. Two EPs in under a month is a real cadence, not a one-off vanity release, and a regional-first tracklist, a Singapore producer followed by an Indonesian one, backs up the label's stated mission to build outward from Asia's own scene rather than import hype from elsewhere. For a scene that's produced plenty of great DJs but comparatively few durable labels, that's worth watching.
House Cartel Records' catalogue is streaming now on Bandcamp, and House Cartel itself still holds down regular nights around Jakarta, most easily tracked through the crew's own Instagram. For a fuller map of where to hear the city's house and techno scene live, see our guide to Jakarta's best house and techno clubs.
Cover photo: Nandi, Robin and Yorri of House Cartel behind the decks in Jakarta, via Mixmag Asia.
