rEmPiT g0dDe$ Fuses Malay Serunai and Filipino Kulintang Into Industrial Club Music

A Serunai in a Club Track

Victoria Yam produces under the name rEmPiT g0dDe$, and her breakout release treats regional folk instruments as raw material for the dancefloor rather than as texture to sample and forget. PRIME ENERGY EP came out on Yes No Wave Music on April 12, 2024, six tracks built around Malaysia's Serunai (a double-reed horn used in traditional ceremonies), the Rebab (a bowed lute found across the Malay Archipelago), and the Philippines' Kulintang (a set of small horizontal gongs), retuned and processed until they sit somewhere between folk instrument and synthesizer.

The tunings are not guesswork. Yam worked through Nusasonic, a research and exchange network for experimental music across maritime Southeast Asia, to source the correct microtonal intervals for the instruments before building tracks around them. The EP's centerpiece, "BLEED," features her other production alias, Viktoria, layering the two personas into one track rather than keeping them separate. "My love for experimental rave/club music and grassroots EDM in Southeast Asia and the community's relentless force to create over the centuries is my inspiration to create PRIME ENERGY," Yam said.

From Kuala Lumpur to Final and Maho Rasop

The sound has traveled well beyond Malaysia. Yam has played Maho Rasop Festival in Thailand, Speed at Final in Taipei, the Alex Blake Charlie Sessions in Singapore, and Pestapora in Jakarta, a touring path that tracks the same underground room-to-room circuit Loopliner has covered before, most recently with Yangon-to-Berlin techno DJ LnHD.

That overlap is not a coincidence. Yam and Lynn Nandar Htoo, the producer and DJ behind LnHD, co-founded ALIGN.ONLINE, a platform built to archive, connect, and celebrate femme and queer creators across Southeast Asia's electronic music scenes. The two met through the region's small but tightly networked circuit of DIY promoters and artist collectives, and built ALIGN.ONLINE as infrastructure for a scene that otherwise depends on word of mouth and Instagram stories that disappear in 24 hours.

COSMOS and a Network Without Borders

ALIGN.ONLINE's first major public project was COSMOS, a short documentary made with filmmaker Syukri A. Rahim about a DIY event the platform staged at Ritual, an experimental art space and cafe in Penang. The film later premiered at a screening event in Kuala Lumpur. Where a lot of scene documentaries settle for a highlight reel of a party, COSMOS was built around the platform's actual mission: putting the people who book, promote, and produce in a room together and pointing a camera at the parts of the work that don't happen on stage.

ALIGN.ONLINE positions itself inside a small but growing web of sister platforms doing similar work elsewhere: NONNONNON in Bangkok, Asian Core in Paris, and HER in Melbourne. None of these are large organizations. What they share is a refusal to wait for bigger festivals or labels to build the infrastructure themselves, choosing instead to document and connect scenes from the inside.

Why the Instruments Matter

It would be easy to describe PRIME ENERGY EP as "traditional instruments meet techno" and leave it there, but that undersells what the tunings work is actually doing. Most club producers who reach for regional instruments treat them as color, a texture pasted over a beat that would work the same without it. Yam's approach through Nusasonic inverts that: the Serunai, Rebab, and Kulintang tunings shape the harmonic content of the tracks themselves, which means removing the instruments would change the music, not just decorate it less.

That distinction is also what connects the production work to the ALIGN.ONLINE project. Both treat Southeast Asian source material, whether an instrument or a scene's own history, as something to be understood on its own terms rather than flattened into an easy reference for outside audiences.

Cover photo: Victoria Yam (rEmPiT g0dDe$), via Le Guess Who.