At Boiler Room’s first post-pandemic event in Seoul, in 2022, one set stood out among the rest. Wearing a colorful umbrella hat and wielding thick iron scissors, Seoul-based DJ and producer Seesea spun high-octane K-pop edits and a bouncy, backbeat-heavy genre known as “trot” or “ppong-tchak” to a throng of sweaty bodies. A cross between Japanese enka and Western dance music that emerged during the Japanese colonial period, trot has evolved over the years and is sometimes thought to contain a uniquely Korean spirit; earlier in 2022, NewJeans producer 250 released PPONG, a culmination of close to a decade of “finding ppong” in used electronics stores around Dongmyo and daytime dancing studios called cola-teks. While the online response to Seesea’s set was mixed, the gurgly analog synths and gravelly singing of ppong-tchak went over well among the crowd, largely aware of the cultural context of ppong and its revival among local DJs searching for an indigenous Korean sound.
In the past decade, underground electronic and experimental scenes in Seoul, Manila, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh, Shanghai, Taipei, Bangkok—the list goes on—began developing their own vernacular and forming a network within Asia. It’s healthy to exercise caution whenever “Asia” is invoked; from economic unions like ASEAN to violent imperialist projects like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, pan-Asianism has historically been a top-down, homogenizing endeavor. This new pan-Asianism, however, is more of a bottom-up, inter-Asian phenomenon. These are brash, maximalist sounds, an alternative to the tasteful techno of European clubs.
A key moment was in 2020, when artist collective and record label Eternal Dragonz dropped Embers, a fundraising compilation supporting L.A. and Australian community organizations that brought together scenes in Seoul, Ha Noi, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo in a reverb-soaked haze of introspection and protest. A year later, UK club collective Eastern Margins released Redline Legends, a supercharged homage to ppong-tchak’s analogs in other Asian countries: Indonesian funkot, Vietnamese vinahouse, Singapore/Malaysian manyao, and Filipino budots. And, in 2022, London electronic music label CHINABOT celebrated its fifth year anniversary with a compilation album merging electroacoustic detritus with traditional timbres from Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
These efforts, in tandem with the work of Asian artists, have borne fruit. In 2023, Manila Community Radio (MCR) headed Boiler Room’s coveted Broadcast Lab, attaining a global platform for Filipino club maximalism. Budots pioneer DJ Love (Sherwin Tuna) played a set controversial among buttoned-up techno lurkers, yet hipping Western listeners to the street music genre omnipresent in the Philippines since the 2000s.
In South Korea, one key figure in cultivating an inter-Asian cultural sphere between underground artists and cultural institutions is Park Daham. Park wears many hats—noise artist, promoter, DJ, and label head—and is the founder of Asian Music Party, which he’s been throwing since its inaugural 2015 iteration with Japanese DJ crew Soi48. Two years later, he also started A Melting Pot, a curatorial project aiming to “create a sound network of experimental / improvised / independent music in Asia.” The inaugural gathering in 2017, at alternative art space Post Territory Ujeongguk, hosted talks, film screenings, and performances by Yan Jun, Martinus Indra Hermawan, and Dawang Huang. And his efforts have increased in the post-pandemic years, expanding to the club scene: In 2022, Park brought Vietnamese collective Nhạc Gãy to perform at the Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Seesea and experimental club musician bela. After the pandemic, Park’s also been joined by C Bong Sae and Palpaljeong, a DJ duo who run the underground space ACS. Their raucous parties, including the flagship Future Kwankwang Medley, frequently feature budots, funkot, ppong-tchak, and other hard dance hybrids that comprise what they call “GOiiBBER,” a pun on a Korean phrase meaning “weird mushroom” (괴상한 버섯) and the Dutch hard dance genre.
Japan, in particular, has had a lingering fascination with regionalism after World War II: Fukuoka’s Asian Art Museum, opened in 1999, claims to be “the only museum in the world that systematically collects and exhibits Asian modern and contemporary art.” And many of the Japanese selectors unearthing sounds from Asia might be considered modern-day ethnomusicologists: Shibuya party DUGEM RISING has been spinning funkot since 2010; Tokyo DJ collective Soi48 spread their love for mor lam throughout the region; Murakami Kyoju and Kishino Yuichi make regular pilgrimages to Myanmar to dig for the country’s percussive court music hsaing waing; and Hasegawa Yohei, who played in seminal Korean indie bands like Kiha and the Faces, flexes his encyclopedic knowledge of Korean and Sinophone rare groove in his mixes. In the realm of noise music, Otomo Yoshihide’s Asian Meeting Festival and Far East Network have linked Ryu Hankil (Korea), Yan Jun (China), Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) and dj sniff (Hong Kong) with improvisers across the region.
The history of pan-Asianism in Japan, however, is not innocent. Since Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzō’s 1903 declaration that “Asia is one,” the imagined unity of this region has served as a rallying cry against Western imperialism, although the idea would become a pretext for Japanese conquest of large swaths of the region during World War II. So it’s important to ask: Is this so-called new inter-Asianism any different from what we’ve seen in past artistic and political movements? Yes and no. It’s a common critique that pan-Asianism is mainly invoked by East Asian countries or individuals, leaving out their Southeast Asian counterparts. Indeed, the first attempt at a modern pan-Asian movement in music might’ve been the Asian Composer’s League, founded in 1973. Its founding members were from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, all composing in the Western classical tradition and hailing from countries on this side of the Iron Curtain. But the new inter-Asian underground, led increasingly by Southeast Asian artists, rearticulates that history on a bottom-up, scene-to-scene level, acknowledging these irreconcilable differences while imagining new ways to think about mutual recognition and connection.
DIY organizations are leveraging institutional funding to help local Asian scenes gain broader recognition. From 2018 to 2022, Manila’s experimental arts festival WSK participated in Nusasonic, a project in collaboration with Indonesia’s Yes No Klub, Singapore’s PlayFreely, and Berlin’s CTM Festival that aimed to research “experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, enabling dialogue within the region, with Europe, and beyond.” Featuring English-language articles on budots, dangdut, protest music, and noise, Nusasonic’s research, along with their events and 2022 compilation album Common Tonalities, make a case for a new inter-Asianism in the underground.
The upshot is that Asian underground artists are looking less at the West and more to their neighbors as sources of inspiration. Berlin is no longer the center of the universe for club heads, though these DJs sometimes pay them a visit. At CTM this year, Thai producer Pisitakun curated a series titled The Three Sound of Revolution, calling up Korea’s C Bong Sae (one of the owners of Seoul DIY venue ACS), Teya Logos, and Malaysian DJ Wanton Witch to draw together the common threads of protest and sound in their respective contexts. Coupled with the diaspora’s shared experience of being marginalized, this inter-Asian solidarity has the potential to link together a widely disparate group of people.
Of course, these differences often make collaboration difficult: In a 2016 interview with WKCR, Otomo Yoshihide said that Korea, Japan, China and Singapore “have never talked like this before. We have no chance to meet. Even no common language together.… Because there’s just no chances, and of course historically, it’s not really good, the last 100 years, especially between Korea, Japan and China.”
Sometimes the geopolitical hierarchies within Asia become insurmountable. Earlier this year, ACS tapped Pinoy DJ Teya Logos to play in Seoul, but, at the last minute, she had to cancel because the Korean embassy denied her visa. While Western artists seem to have no problem entering Korea, it’s much harder for artists from Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and the Philippines to get visas because of South Korea’s strict immigration policies. And efforts at political solidarity between East and West Asia have sometimes fallen on deaf ears: Pisitakun’s The Three Sound of Revolution still went on at Berghain, despite Ravers for Palestine’s call for a boycott of the club due to its silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.
Will all of this lead to a truly global sensation like the Asian underground in the 1990s? I don’t think so, and, in some ways, I hope not. What’s exciting here are the increasing interactions on a scene-to-scene level: Seoul club crew the Internatiiional linking with Taichung venue and party DAO; Ho Chi Minh City tricksters Rắn Cạp Đuôi collaborating with Korean deconstructed club producer NET GALA; Tokyo-based Soi48 throwing parties at Bangkok’s Xuxu Party. With music scenes in Asia looking to each other for inspiration, it’s us in the West who will need to catch up.
