A Beginner's Guide to the Anak Borneo Universe (ABU)
When songs grow into a world.
ABU began with stories that kept unfolding as I made music, and the questions that followed. Who lives inside these songs? Where do their stories happen? What kind of world would make their struggles seem so ordinary?
The Anak Borneo Universe is a fictional world that mirrors our own. Its people, places and stories connect with one another. My experiences, city life, technology and the cost of development all leave their traces here.
If you have noticed the animal masks in my recent music videos and wondered how they connect, this is a place to begin.
New to ABU? Start Here
Start with Happy Life (籠裡), then listen to Drunkard’s Song (她說是酒鬼的歌). Both are available on the Music page.
You can enjoy the songs and discover the world’s history gradually. If someone catches your interest, visit the Characters page. If you wonder what it feels like to live through a mask, step into Routines.
Everyday Life in Mud City
Most of the story currently takes place in Mud City, a fictional city modelled on Kuala Lumpur. People commute, reply to messages, build careers, compete for attention and meet for a drink after work. Life here should feel familiar.
The masks make that familiarity a little strange. The mask system brings together identification, access permissions and everyday services.
Different levels offer different functions, from basic recognition to reality filters and advanced analysis. The mask you can afford affects how you experience the same street, the same person, even the same conversation.
People have reasons to want these masks. They serve functions similar to an IC—an identity card—or a passport, while also helping with work, making life more convenient and becoming part of someone’s personal style. That usefulness interests me: even when a system restricts people, they still have reasons to participate in it.
The film The Matrix and George Orwell’s 1984 are both inspirations for ABU. Filtered reality and controlled information give me ways to explore how power enters everyday life. In LOOP, these questions appear through consumerism, the mask hierarchy and routines that become increasingly difficult to leave.
The People Living Inside the Songs
Lau Eng Gang works at HopeBill Finance and wears a rhinoceros hornbill mask. Happy Life follows his commute and working day, entering a routine in which someone can be surrounded by people and still feel alone.
Maya is a content creator and influencer whose custom pink python mask has become her signature. She knows how to attract attention and how to use the algorithm to build her brand.
Evan Tesat is a musician known as “the Drunkard.” In a city where people are identified through animal masks, he wears a red blindfold. Drunkard’s Song brings us closer to his unease, his escapes and his moments of connection with others.
Tiger Boss owns Happy Life Bar, where these different characters cross paths. His Level 3 tiger mask includes emotion analysis. Combined with years of dealing with people, it helps him judge his customers’ moods and steer a conversation towards the outcome he wants.
There are traces of me in these characters, too. Some carry versions of the person I once imagined becoming. Others have grown out of my observations of people around me and everyday life.
Their circumstances give them different reasons to accept, use or question the world around them. You can meet them here.
Finding the Connection Between the Three Chapters
While creating and promoting Happy Life, I began imagining a fictional bar where the song’s story could unfold. That became Happy Life Bar. As Eng Gang met Evan, Maya, Tiger Boss and others there, their lives began taking the story beyond the bar. Mud City gradually took shape, and the details of its world became clearer.
As this world expanded, a series of songs I had originally planned to release as one album developed into three chapters: LOOP, PAST and SEED. Only later did I find a way to describe their connection and begin to understand the journey they shared.
While thinking about that connection, I remembered a Chan (Zen) saying:
First, a mountain is a mountain.
Then it is not a mountain.
Finally, it is a mountain again.
— Adapted from a saying attributed to Chan master Qingyuan Weixin
We begin with something familiar, start to question it, then encounter it again with a different understanding. This helped me see a thread running through the three chapters.
Later, while looking for an English expression that carried a similar feeling, I came across these lines:
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
I recognised something of the three chapters in these lines. You can return to a familiar place and only then realise how little you understood it before. This also echoes my own experience: from wanting so much to leave home to beginning to look back at the places that shaped me.
Chapter I: LOOP
LOOP begins in everyday life. In Mud City, we work, consume and pursue happiness, until the things we have grown used to begin raising questions.
Happy Life enters through repetitive routines and quiet loneliness. Drunkard’s Song moves from drinking and gathering together towards the uncertainty of tomorrow. The happiness is real. So are the limits surrounding it.
Beneath these routines lies a question: how much of this life have we chosen for ourselves?
Chapter II: PAST
PAST turns towards memory, childhood and the places that shaped us. A river in Niah, an Iban lullaby, the sounds of childhood—these change how we see the present and lead us to ask: what exactly have its comforts cost us?
Looking back also means examining our own memories. Affection and distance can change what we remember. We may notice details we once overlooked, including contradictions within our idea of “home” that we had never recognised.
Chapter III: SEED
SEED returns to land and belonging with a different understanding. A river has been dammed. Villagers have been forced to leave. Longing for home meets the reality of what home has become.
Bird Song (鳥歌) carries particular weight here. It tells of a dam and the destruction and displacement brought by development. It is also the seed of Anak Borneo’s music: the song through which I gradually found my direction as Anak Borneo.
A seed carries a beginning, but it also needs somewhere to grow. When the past cannot be restored, this chapter asks what we can still protect, what we can nurture and what we will leave for those who come after us. We spread a woven mat, gather and make music.
PAST and SEED are still developing. Together with LOOP, they form the current three-chapter journey, while ABU continues to leave room for other stories.
Choose Your Way In
Explore at your own pace:
Music: Follow the unfolding story through songs and music videos.
Characters: Meet the people whose lives cross in Mud City.
Routines: Explore mask levels, filtered experiences and everyday moments to see how people live with the system.
History: Discover the events, emergency measures and reforms that shaped this fictional society.
ABU: Get an overview of the world and its growing parts.
For more about the creative journey behind the project, read my earlier post, What Is Anak Borneo Really About.
One question runs through these three chapters: when our understanding of the world changes, how do we live from there?
What we carry from our beginnings.
What we choose to let grow.
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