Miko Naiko Learned to DJ From YouTube Tutorials in Ipoh. ALIGN.ONLINE Got Her to Pestapora Jakarta.

Sharifah Syauqina's hands were shaking so hard behind the decks that she still remembers the grip on the pitch fader. She was 19, playing her first gig ever, a hip-hop underground show in her hometown of Ipoh, Malaysia, in 2018. She wore a hijab, as she always does when she DJs. Some of the crowd had never seen that combination before and stared. She kept mixing anyway.

Seven years later, DJing as Miko Naiko, she was one of only two Malaysian acts booked for Pestapora, Indonesia's biggest annual music festival, held September 5 to 7, 2025 at JIExpo Kemayoran in Jakarta. The other was Dato' Sri Siti Nurhaliza, the country's biggest pop star. Naiko builds sets out of acid house and hard-edged techno, usually for crowds who showed up expecting hip-hop or hardcore, at afterparties where a DJ slot gets squeezed between two bands rather than headlining. Getting from an Ipoh basement to a 230-plus-act festival bill took her the better part of a decade, a stack of YouTube tutorials, a deck her parents eventually paid for, and, right at the end, a recommendation from a woman she barely knew.

A City of Music, Short on DJs

Ipoh calls itself Malaysia's "City of Music," but the scene Naiko describes is thin on the ground for what she actually does. "The DJ scene in Ipoh is still quite small," she told the Kuala Lumpur culture site Noisy Headspace in July 2025. "It's more focused on hardcore and indie right now." She started teaching herself to mix at 15, watching Tomorrowland livestreams on YouTube and picking apart other DJs' sets. Three years later, fresh out of school, she bought her first deck. Her parents, who come from an arts background (her mother once curated exhibitions), ended up covering the cost once they saw how long she had stuck with it.

Because there was barely a DJ-only circuit to plug into, she found one at the shows that already existed: hip-hop and hardcore afterparties, run by friends who doubled as promoters. That is still mostly where she plays. In 2020, on a short experimental tour through Ipoh, Penang and Singapore with the Indonesian producer Rio Nurkholis, she released her first production, a noise and ambient track called "Nepacirna Ijaw," on the Pancawala split EP. It pulled her toward producing alongside DJing, something she has kept chasing since, working toward original material instead of leaning only on other people's records.

The Network That Moved Her

Naiko's route to Jakarta ran through ALIGN.ONLINE, a platform co-founded by two artists Loopliner has profiled separately: Victoria Yam, who produces as rEmPiT g0dDe$, and Lynn Nandar Htoo, who DJs as LnHD. ALIGN.ONLINE archives and connects femme and queer electronic artists across Southeast Asia, and its radio series put Naiko in front of an international audience for the first time in December 2024. Months later, when Pestapora's Yes No Klub-curated stage, run by the Indonesian artist Wok The Rock, asked ALIGN.ONLINE to recommend a Malaysian act, Yam made the call.

"She's actually the one who reached out to me on behalf of the organiser," Naiko said of Yam, who had played Pestapora the year before. "She's been super supportive and has helped connect me to opportunities." It's the kind of pipeline that rarely gets written up: not a label, not an agent, just one touring DJ vouching for another across a border, because a radio session months earlier had already made the introduction.

What Landed on the Bill

Pestapora 2025 was not a quiet festival to debut on. More than 230 acts played across three days to a crowd that topped 100,000, and the run-up was dominated by a sponsorship controversy that saw more than 20 acts pull out days before the gates opened. Naiko kept her slot on the Yes No Klub stage regardless, going in with a target she had set herself: to debut at least three original tracks by September. Whether she hit that number isn't confirmed. What is confirmed is that landing the booking put her name on a poster next to Siti Nurhaliza's, distributed across the region, at a scale no Ipoh afterparty was ever going to offer.

Why It Matters Past One Booking

Malaysia's underground has no shortage of hijabi women producing or organizing, but very few stand behind a mixer in a scene that, as Naiko put it, still assumes "the DJ label comes with outdated, loaded stereotypes." She has said plainly that she doesn't drink or take anything before she plays; the adrenaline is the whole point for her. What she does have is nearly ten years of unpaid practice, an EP made with collaborators across the Java Sea, and a network of women, Yam and Htoo among them, who keep handing each other stages instead of waiting for someone else to build one. Naiko is the newest name to move through it. She almost certainly won't be the last.

Cover photo: Miko Naiko at Atas Angin Festival, March 2024. Photo by ICHI for Atas Angin Festival, via Noisy Headspace.