Yeti Out Turned a Hong Kong Party Blog Into Boiler Room's Comeback
Yeti Out started as two brothers and a friend blagging free entry to parties by pretending to write about them. Sixteen years later they run a Hong Kong radio station, a record label, and the crew Boiler Room called when it finally came back to the city.
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In September 2018, a crew of twentysomethings took over a former Victorian prison in the middle of Hong Kong for a party co-branded with Boiler Room. Typhoon Mangkhut had just flattened the city's original date, so they rebuilt it around a Tuesday night instead. Six and a half years later, in May 2025, Boiler Room's cameras came back to Hong Kong for a full broadcast, and the crew running the night was the same one: Yeti Out.
That's the shorthand version of how a party blog turned into one of East Asia's more durable underground institutions. The longer version starts around 2010, when Arthur Bray, his twin brother Tom Bray, and London-born Erisen Ali were students in the UK running a blog called YetiInTheBasement, mostly as a way to blag free entry to shows they wanted to see anyway. "We've just been doing stuff we like with friends in our corner," Arthur told The Beat Asia. "One day, you get a call asking 'how about you come and do what you do, over here?'" They took the call. Arthur moved to Hong Kong, Tom to Shanghai, Erisen stayed in London, and in 2014 the three of them formalized the whole thing as Yeti Out: a DJ collective and party promoter spread across three cities that don't share much except a time zone problem and a lot of frequent flyer miles.
From Free Entry to a Real Broadcast
The 2018 Tai Kwun show, staged inside the restored Victorian Prison compound that reopened as a heritage and arts site just months earlier, wasn't a proper Boiler Room broadcast. It ran under Boiler Room's Pioneer series with no cameras rolling, a co-brand rather than a co-sign. Frankie Lam of the tech-house label PUSH, disco specialist Ivan Sit, both Bray brothers, and Subez Yeti played a set built entirely on vinyl. It was a good night, not a breakthrough.
The breakthrough was the actual thing, the one with real cameras rolling: Boiler Room, at Wan Chai Harbourfront in May 2025, filming Yeti Out alongside N.Y.P.D., Dark Metaz and Triple Happiness Club, with Arthi and Jael flown in as the international names. The resulting set, titled simply “YETI OUT | Boiler Room: Hong Kong,” is the kind of credential a collective spends a decade building toward, and it's still up on Boiler Room's own channel.
A Radio Station Nobody Asked Them to Build
Most party crews stop at parties. Yeti Out kept adding infrastructure. In 2018 they launched Silk Road Sounds, a record label built to give the wider crew somewhere to put out music instead of just playing other people's. In January 2021, in the middle of a pandemic that had shut down almost everything the collective actually does for a living, they opened FM Belowground, a 24-hour internet radio station broadcasting out of Hong Kong. It sits inside a small studio behind a wall of built-in speaker cabinets, the kind of room you'd expect from a crew that treats sound design as seriously as door policy.
That's the pattern with Yeti Out: build the party, then build whatever the party needs to survive between parties. A record label so the music doesn't disappear after one night. A radio station so the crew has a signal on air even when there's no room booked. An in-house creative studio so the flyers, merch and video don't have to be outsourced to somebody who doesn't understand the joke.
Taking Over a Museum
On March 1, 2024, Yeti Out got handed something bigger than a club: three floors of Hong Kong's M+ Museum, the West Kowloon institution better known for Ai Weiwei installations than dance battles. For one night, called “M+ 夜不同” (Museum, After Dark), the crew filled the building with a hybrid electronic set from post-punk act 南洋派對 N.Y.P.D., a live performance from rapper N.O.L.Y., a four-way dance battle between B-Boy ET, BOMS and two local crews, an interactive playground installation from street artist LOUSY, and a curator-led talk on street culture with tattoo artist Karl Hung and skate shop founder Arthur Leung. Tickets were HK$180, free for M+ members. A museum handing its own floors over to a party crew for a night says something about how far “stuff we like with friends in our corner” had traveled in a decade.
It kept traveling into 2026. In March, Yeti Out played the Pigeons & Planes stage at ComplexCon Hong Kong, sharing a bill with Korean R&B act Peakboy and rapper REDDY, the kind of lineup that treats a house and techno collective as a peer to pop acts rather than a niche booking. Nobody in Hong Kong's underground gets that call by accident.
What This Says About the Region
Hong Kong doesn't get the column inches Bangkok or Bali do on this beat, and its scene is smaller and more expensive to run a night in than almost anywhere else covered here. Yeti Out's answer to that wasn't to wait for a bigger city to notice them. It was to build a label, a radio station and a creative agency around the parties, until the parties were the least interesting thing they did. Taipei's Pawnshop took a similar route by simply refusing to close. Yeti Out took it by refusing to stop building. Both are still standing, which in this business counts as a genuine achievement.
Cover photo: Yeti Out crowd shot via Mixmag Asia's coverage of the M+ Museum takeover.
