Muttiah Ashnim Built Underground Techno Scenes in Six Southeast Asian Countries, Then Left for Germany

Before Myanmar's 2021 coup, Yangon had exactly one nightclub built for techno. It was called Level 2, and the five friends who would go on to found Groove Culture, the collective now teaching the city to love house music under curfew, first met each other on its dancefloor. For a stretch of that room's life, its signature residency wasn't run by a local promoter at all. It belonged to a collective based in Singapore.

Behind that residency was Muttiah Ashnim, and Level 2 was just one stop on a map that also ran through Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. For years, she built and ran Into The Deep, a collective that, in her own words, helped "nurture dancefloors and communities" across all six countries. Its event series Uncaged was the vehicle: the Level 2 residency, she has said, was "one of the biggest defining moments" of that whole run, a foreign promoter earning a regular slot inside the only techno room in a country that had almost none.

Building It Without Backup

None of this came with an obvious support system. "I don't think I ever doubted my career in music, but coming from a conservative background where women are often expected not to be seen or heard, this path wasn't widely understood or supported," Ashnim has said. She built Into The Deep anyway, across borders, currencies and, in Myanmar's case, a market where foreign patrons had historically dominated the little electronic music that existed. Getting a Singaporean collective a residency inside the country's one dedicated techno club is not a small thing to have pulled off.

Closing the Book, Opening Another

In 2024, Ashnim closed Into The Deep. She has described it as a turning point rather than an ending: she relocated to Germany to focus on DJing and production full time, trading a regional network she'd spent years assembling for a solo run in a scene where nobody owed her anything. It is the harder path, and also the more honest test of whether the music holds up on its own.

So far it has. In 2025 alone she released 11 original tracks, and closed the year with an EP on the Austrian label Vision Serpent: Pain, out November 21, four tracks deep with remixes from TiM TASTE and Verschallt. Her sound leans dark and minimal, built on percussion and groove rather than melody, which is a deliberate choice in a genre that rewards patience over hooks. "It's about reading the crowd, engaging them, evoking curiosity, and taking everyone on a journey together," she has said of her approach behind the decks.

Amsterdam, and What Comes Next

The clearest sign the gamble is paying off came at Amsterdam Dance Event 2025, where she played a B2B set with TiM TASTE. "It was a defining moment for me. I genuinely didn't expect it to happen this year, so it came as a really good surprise," she has said, crediting both her B2B partner and Divergent Label for making the booking happen. It's a long way from a single club night in Yangon, and it puts her among a small number of Singaporean women building a career in dark electronic music outside the region entirely, rather than importing it back home.

Her own targets for the year ahead are modest and specific in the way real goals usually are: better German, a return to Muay Thai training, and a first festival booking, or at minimum her music getting played at one. "Personally, I'd love to speak better German and probably get back into Muay Thai. Professionally, I hope to play at my first festival, and then some, or at least have my music played at festivals," she has said. Pain is out now via Vision Serpent; whether 2026 gets her onto a festival lineup is still an open question, by her own account.

For more on the Yangon scene Into The Deep helped seed, see Loopliner's own coverage of Groove Culture, the collective still running house nights there under curfew.

Cover photo: via Bandwagon Asia.