A Unique Fusion of Sounds at Tomorrowland
At one of the world’s most renowned electronic dance music festivals in Belgium, a crowd of entranced revellers recently found themselves dancing to sounds more commonly heard on a Singapore commute than on a Tomorrowland stage. Among these unique sounds were the MRT warning, “Sila berhati-hati di ruang platform” (“Please mind the platform gap” in Malay), which is familiar to millions who use Singapore’s metro system. Also featured were the piercing and repetitive calls of the Asian koel, a bird whose cry is instantly recognizable in many neighborhoods across the city-state.
Threaded through the set was the sound of the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese instrument that local DJ Likie Low has played since childhood. For her 30-minute performance on July 25 at Tomorrowland, she aimed to transform everyday Singapore sounds into dance music for a global audience.
As one of the few Singaporeans to have performed at the annual music festival, she wanted to bring a piece of herself to one of the world’s largest electronic dance festivals. “Since I got to play Tomorrowland, and it might be the first and the last chance in my life I get to do that, I wanted to incorporate every single part myself and all my own music is very Chinese. So it’s like showing myself as a Singaporean Chinese, even though people there won’t understand what an Ang Mo Kio Avenue is,” she said, referring to a residential district in Singapore.
Her music seems to have resonated. Clips that Low uploaded on Instagram from her set, filled with those quintessentially Singaporean sounds, have since gone viral.
Other parts of her set included bus announcements for various destinations in Singapore, and recordings of children playing at playgrounds in public housing neighborhoods, blended with Chinese instruments such as the pipa and suona and the Indian hand drums, tabla.
“Everywhere I go, I’m always collecting sounds and wondering how they will end up in my tracks,” Low said from her recording studio.
A Passion Born from Curiosity
Low has been playing the erhu since she was eight years old and attended the School of the Arts, Singapore, before studying at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, where she learned music production. Her passion for electronic dance music began in 2013 when she was in secondary school, largely prompted by Dutch DJ and producer Martin Garrix’s hit song “Animals.”
She and her schoolmate downloaded the digital audio workstation Logic Pro and taught themselves how to produce music by researching and watching YouTube clips.
“At the time, I was playing in the Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra and whenever I attended the rehearsals, I was always wondering how these little melodies and instruments would blend and sound together with EDM [electronic dance music],” Low said.
She admitted that the first few tracks were “very bad” and there were people who thought it was not respectful of traditional Chinese music. “I understand because my first productions were quite bad and maybe it didn’t sound correct.”
A Turning Point and Continued Growth
A milestone came in 2021 when her lecturer, Christel Hon, now head of music at Esplanade, asked her to take the stage at the performing arts centre. “I’ve always performed but that was the turning point for me to have a stage to test the DJing and erhu [sounds] out … Honestly the first show was quite bad. I had never DJed in public before then and I didn’t know how to hype up the crowd. But it was fun,” Low said.
Since graduating in 2022, Low has been supported by grants from the National Arts Council that allow her to put on more shows. Things came full circle last year when she got into a JBL Music Academy, an exclusive mentorship programme created by the sound equipment company alongside Garrix and American singer-songwriter Benson Boone.
“I had watched tutorials he shot in that room and then I was in that room. We took pictures there too. It was very surreal and quite insane,” Low said.
Eight musicians were chosen from the programme to play at Tomorrowland, with Low finding out in March that she would be one of them. Despite her recent success, the level-headed Low believes she will still have to scramble to sell tickets to her shows. She has one lined up for next January.
“It’s always been difficult to sell tickets to my shows because the theme is something that people don’t really understand,” she said. “It’s not like people will just suddenly come to my concerts now that one video went viral. There’s a huge possibility that this attention will just go away after a while.”
