Inside the UK’s first festival dedicated to East and Southeast Asian alternative culture and music

It’s midnight in the expansive basement of Hackney’s EartH and rapper Jianbo stands at the tip of the stage. He’s backed by a crowd as dense as the dancefloor that he overlooks, flanked by friends, singers and rappers including BABii, Namani, Nix Northwest and SHAYK. As the DJ runs a weighty half-grime, half-dubstep riddim, he raises the microphone to his lips, shouting: “Sambal / Sambal / Sambal, sambal, sambal, sambal!”

‘Sambal’ is an unreleased track from the southeast London hailing rapper, who wrote it when he visited an Indonesian restaurant in Malaysia’s capital city of Kuala Lumpur, and the spice level of the sambal – a chili paste found across Southeast Asia with endless regional variations – caught him off guard. “Indonesian sambal is really spicy compared to Malaysian sambal, I felt like I was on drugs,” he recalls. “Doing that one on stage at Margins United was a different level of pop off. Everyone was loving it, the crowd was going crazy, people onstage going crazy – the energy was just right. And it’s just a silly song, it’s just about fucking sambal.”

Throughout the 45 minutes of Jianbo and Friends at Margins United – a 12-hour, day-and-night event organised by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) collective Eastern Margins – the rapper’s signature velvety smooth flow tops a cycle of tracks that encompass 2-step, drill, dubstep, hip hop and more. It’s a showcase of UK rap executed impeccably with eastern flair, by an artist born to Vietnamese-Chinese parents.

“Growing up, my musical inspiration wasn’t really Asians,” Jianbo says. “I grew up around Black people, South Asians, Arab people in southeast London – unity vibes, everyone’s always been from everywhere. But no one talks about being East or Southeast Asian as a part of UK culture – my main prerogative is to leave a mark on the culture.”

It’s a mission that’s been at the forefront of the minds of the Eastern Margins crew, which has grown to become a loose, broad collective since forming in 2018, when founders David Zhou (aka Lumi) and Anthony Ko threw a Lunar New Year party featuring an all-ESEA line-up of Organ Tapes, Eri from Yeti Out, BBC AZN Network resident 2Shin and Singaporean singer-producer yeule, who closed out Margins United – the UK’s festival first dedicated to ESEA alternative culture – in something of a full circle moment. The party instantly attracted a heavily Asian crowd, which at the time was unheard of in UK nightlife and live music spaces, save for karaoke bars or K-pop megastar concerts.

“Eastern Margins is David’s baby, and it’s a space to service the under-serviced with the ESEA community in London, who are especially under-serviced in the electronic music world,” says the collective’s senior consultant Jay Eau. “To create a space where people can come to connect with people from their community, and really explore the boundaries of music and creativity.”

Nowadays, Eastern Margins encompasses a series of regular club nights across cities around the UK, as well as a record label and booking agency, platforming music from the ESEA diaspora all across the world. In August, they released Budots World (Reloaded), a 15-track album and label debut from Filipino budots pioneer DJ Love (real name Sherwin Calumpang Tuna). As the lore goes, the genre – which features ravey, 90s euro house synth leads and off beat basslines over fast paced four-to-the-floor rhythms – was invented by Tuna while he was working as an internet café manager in Davao City. It’s since grown to become a global, online sensation, with its own knees-bent, street dance style that’s hard to miss in certain corners of TikTok.

Taking to the stage just after 1am, following Jianbo and then Malaysian hyperpop leader Shelhiel’s debut UK set, DJ Love throws down a raucous set of budots and donks, dipping his knees from side to side as he performed the now-viral dance moves in his first ever international gig. Backed by rainbow strip lights, with sections of the crowd rocking flags that marked their heritage – Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, The Philippines, etc. – the moment, and indeed the whole festival, feels like a coming together celebration and a showcase for London’s ESEA diaspora.

“To have DJ Love come down for his first international show, that was a very special moment, and he did the dances as well,” says Jay. “It reminds me of [South African dance music genre] gqom coming out back in the day. Gqom came out of a taxi rank and budots started in internet cafés – it’s this different, but parallel journey to get to people’s ears internationally. Because we released DJ Love’s album on Eastern Margins, we feel very honoured to be given this stewardship.”

The remainder of the night sees a breakbeat workout from drum & bass futurist and new XL Recordings signee gyrofield before yeule’s closing set. But while experimental dancefloor sonics form Eastern Margins’ bread and butter, the festival format of Margins United provides them with licence to expand their vision beyond the confines of the club. The festival is broken up into three phases, with the first two taking place in the afternoon and evening in EartH’s Theatre and Kitchen spaces.

It opens with a series of film screenings, including a premiere of New Wave Documentary, which dives into the underground Vietnamese New Wave scene of the 80s in all of its gelled-hair glory, as well as panel talks and workshops. In the kitchen area, food is provided by the East and South East Asian Community Centre (fka Hackney Chinese Community Services), alongside arts and crafts stalls and a bookshop. It resembles a small community market, and provides a whistle stop tour into the diversity of ESEA arts, culture and food.

Phase 2’s programming mostly takes place in EartH’s grandiose-yet-rustic Theatre room, where steep steps descend towards its stage. Instead of dance music, the line-up leans towards live acts, including the ambient and shoegaze of LVRA & Soda Plains and ONRA’s experimental hip-hop productions. A particular highlight, though, comes from punk rocker LIA LIA. The Berlin-based vocalist stands in the middle of her bandmates, all of them donning school-uniform reminiscent white shirts and black ties, and the group launch into a set of distorted guitars and noisy grunge-punk.

“It was my debut show with the band – for the first time, I really felt how my music should be played live,” she reflects. “Playing ‘Shut Up!’ for the first time [was a real highlight]. It’s one of the new singles I released recently, and we totally raw-dogged it – no backing track, no click. It was just us. It felt gritty and real as fuck, and the crowd gave us the best energy!”

LIA is half-Chinese and half-German, growing up between both a small village in Germany and the Sichuanese capital Chengdu – a megacity in the southwest of China. It made her feel like something of an outsider in both growing up. “I felt isolated growing up in both Germany and China because both places have pretty homogeneous populations. I always stood out in some ‘alien’ type of way, never fully fitting in,” she says. “[Playing Margins United] meant the world to me. Sharing that moment with the community was beautiful. A lot of Asian households push traditional careers on their kids, so seeing so many free-spirited Asian artists pursuing their dreams was super inspiring. It made me happy.”

Her story is testament to the power of building communities, and physical spaces where people can express who they are. Margins United is ultimately that. For most of the ESEA people in attendance, they have never seen a UK rapper, a genre-inventing DJ or a post-punk rocker who looks like them perform live, let alone all under a single roof.

“I mean damn, this is super unique right?” says Jianbo. “This is the biggest ESEA music event in London ever, so it’s meaningful – it’s all new, first times. I get the feeling that they are letting us into the club, we’re building our own ecosystem of party culture.”

At around 10pm, as Phase 2 turns into Phase 3, there’s a surprise waiting in the Kitchen area for those filtering out from the Theatre room. With sleazy house grooves moving the dancefloor, manning the headphones and CDJs is none other than British Chinese actor Benedict Wong performing as DJ Obi Wong and The Temple of Bangers. His set ends on an edit of The Black Eyed Peas 00s classic ‘My Humps’, which is underscored by a wiggy, minimal tech house beat that goes on and on. “Benedict Wong was a surprise to everyone,” Jay explains. “He messaged David saying: ‘I’m going to come to Margins United,’ and next thing we find out is that he’s a little bit of a DJ and wanted to get on – we had to make it happen.”

It’s a shock, but perhaps there is no more fitting a special guest for an event that stamps a marker for the UK’s ESEA community into the ground. “On a deeper level, It was really cool because this is someone that a lot of East and Southeast Asians grew up watching on TV and in films, when we really didn’t have much representation on the big screen, aside from a [token] Asian character,” he continues. “Benedict Wong was always Benedict Wong – he was there because he was a fully fleshed actor, the best person for the job, so it was really cool to see someone who symbolised representation for kids like myself in the flesh at Margins United. People like Benedict made people like us realise that this is actually possible, and that’s what we want to do with Eastern Margins.”

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