Xhin Is One of the Only Asian Artists to Have Played Berghain, and Singapore Still Barely Knows His Name

Ask a techno fan in Berlin, Paris or Tbilisi about Xhin, and a fair number will know the name: the Singaporean producer who makes dark, cinematic techno has played Berghain and Tresor, released on Lucy's Stroboscopic Artefacts and on CLR, and had a track reworked by Surgeon. Ask someone in Singapore, and the odds drop sharply. That gap between how far his music travels and how little recognition it gets at home is the actual story.

Two decades, three names

Xhin has been making tracks since 1997, which puts him among the longest-running producers working in Southeast Asian techno. He self-released his first EP, Xycle, in 2003, followed by the debut album Supersonicstate in 2004, years before Singapore had anything resembling a techno infrastructure to support that kind of output. He's talked about Myspace, of all things, as the platform that got his music in front of European ears before European labels had any reason to look toward Singapore.

That early reach paid off in 2009, when Lucy invited him onto Stroboscopic Artefacts, the Berlin label that was becoming one of the most respected addresses in European techno. Xhin has since described SA as "the perfect output" for a stretch of his career, while being candid about why he didn't stay put creatively: "I'm very unpredictable and I get bored easily." That restlessness is the throughline of his whole catalogue. Releases also landed on CLR and on the German label Meerestief, and Surgeon, no small name in techno circles himself, remixed Xhin's track "Teeth."

In 2017 he opened a second channel for the music that didn't fit the main project: NIHX, a techno-only alter ego built for straighter, club-oriented tracks. NIHX debuted that January with a four-track EP called 001, followed roughly six months later by 002. The timing wasn't an accident. Two weeks after 002 landed, Xhin's main project put out Shift Ltd 001 on Midnight Shift, the first installment of a planned three-way techno trilogy alongside Kirk Degiorgio and Prequel Tapes. The lead track, "Transitory," runs six and a half minutes and does exactly what the title says: it doesn't resolve, it just keeps shifting.

Berghain, and then the opposite of techno

The detail that actually separates Xhin from most of the region's producers: he's one of only a handful of Asian artists ever booked by Berghain, and one of a short list from the whole continent to have also played Tresor and Paris's Concrete. By his own account, the math behind that is simple and a little uncomfortable: "I guess I have more fans in Europe than in Asia. I don't know really." He's named Taipei as the one other city in the region he sees building something comparable, while describing Singapore's own scene as still growing, "and I've kind of become a little bit more recognised" at home, in his words, which is a modest way to describe being one of the only Southeast Asian artists ever booked by three of Europe's most selective rooms.

Then, in 2022, he did the thing restless artists do: he walked away from the sound that built his reputation. The Images Within, released that April on his own independent label, The Document, is eight tracks of ambient, cinematic soundscape, a hard turn from the techno that got him into Berghain in the first place. He's described the record as music that plays like "a soundtrack in search of a film," citing directors like Denis Villeneuve and David Lynch as closer reference points than any DJ. It came out on vinyl in a run of just 200 copies. Whatever Xhin is chasing at this point in his career, it isn't a bigger room.

His own account of what keeps the work honest hasn't really changed across two decades of interviews: "Why pigeonhole yourself in one genre?" And on what he'd tell the next Southeast Asian producer trying to get a European label's attention: "you have to be the real deal and very unique without trying so hard to be someone that you aren't." It is not a glamorous formula, but going by his own catalogue, it is the only one he has used.

Cover photo and portrait: Mixmag Asia.