RAMPAK G Gave Five Producers the Same Sample Pack. Here's What Yogyakarta's Gqom Label Got Back.

Sanjonas doesn't touch the sample pack himself. He builds it in Yogyakarta, a folder of unlabeled drum hits and vocal chops, and mails the exact same folder to five producers scattered between Indonesia and Mexico. Then he waits to see what comes back. What came back on August 17 is Symbiotic III, RAMPAK G's third compilation and its strangest one yet: five tracks built from identical raw material that sound almost nothing alike.

The Same Folder, Five Different Records

RAMPAK G calls it a sequel to an earlier release, Rampak Sampler vol. 1, and describes the exercise plainly on Bandcamp: give a diverse set of producers the same sampler pack, and see how far personal instinct can pull it apart. It's a controlled experiment dressed up as an EP. Mischief opens the record with "Shâkhib," which the label's own notes describe as folding in a hint of gamelan and twisting it with trap and bass. NOISYNOISE follows with "KQōM," then Funtime, lalo and NikoNikoNii take their own runs at the same source audio, pulling in Latin percussion on one end and two-step and breaks on the other. Nobody involved lives in the same city, and it shows. That's the point.

From Durban to Yogyakarta

RAMPAK G takes its name from rampak gendang, Indonesian for drums played in unison, and that's the whole mission statement. Sanjonas started the label with sujaatse and wazabii after the three of them got hooked on Tokyo's TYO GQOM collective and started asking what South African gqom, all distorted log drums and lurching rhythm, would sound like filtered through Indonesian percussion instead of British bass music. Loopliner covered the label's first two Symbiotic compilations back in August: the debut in June 2025, then Symbiotic II in April, which pulled in newcomers MAHAMBORO and Alkahfa alongside the core roster. Symbiotic III doesn't touch gqom directly so much as prove the label was never really about one genre. Look at the cover art across all three releases and you'd struggle to guess they came from the same imprint, dried flowers on Symbiotic II, liquid chrome on Symbiotic III. That's deliberate too.

Yogyakarta Doesn't Wait for Jakarta or Bali

Sanjonas has been producing and DJing out of Yogyakarta since 2012, long before RAMPAK G existed. He's a graphic designer by day, runs the local platform Post Party Syndroma, co-founded the Bast Cultura collective and started his own imprint, RAR Editions, on top of all this. He also turns up occasionally behind the decks at KLYMAX in Bali, which says something about how small and well connected Indonesia's underground actually is once you leave Jakarta. Loopliner has written before about how that underground built itself from Jakarta's basements outward, and RAMPAK G is a decent argument that the next chapter isn't happening in either Jakarta or Bali. It's happening in a mid-sized university city in Central Java, and the label still lists a Gmail address at the bottom of its Bandcamp page for anyone who wants to send in a demo. No A&R department, no gatekeeping, just an inbox.

Whether Symbiotic III travels beyond the handful of people already tracking RAMPAK G is another question. Five producers interpreting one sample pack is a clever premise for a label to build a reputation on, less certain as something a casual listener puts on twice. But as a snapshot of what a self-taught Yogyakarta collective can pull off with a shared folder of drum hits and zero shared studio time, it's hard to argue with the results.

Cover art: RAMPAK G, Symbiotic III.