What Is Anak Borneo Really About
For a long time, I thought Anak Borneo was mainly a music project. That was where it began.
I was making songs, experimenting with traditional Bornean instruments, playing live, and trying to understand how the things I grew up around could exist naturally alongside the music I was listening to and making in the present. Over time, however, Anak Borneo became something larger.
Music led to performance. Performance led to storytelling. Stories began creating characters, places and histories of their own.Eventually, all of these things started connecting.
That is probably the best way I can describe Anak Borneo today: not simply as a genre, an artist name or a fictional universe, but as an evolving way of looking at the world from where I come from.
Growing Into the Name
Before Anak Borneo became my own project, I was the vocalist of Kitai Anak Borneo. When I began developing Anak Borneo independently around 2017, I was already thinking a lot about indigenous identity, environmental change, disappearing traditions and what happens when the world around us changes faster than we know how to respond to it.
At first, much of that naturally pointed back toward the landscapes and cultures of Borneo.
But as the project developed, I slowly realised that being Anak Borneo could not only mean looking backwards.
Borneo is not frozen in the past. It moves with the people who live here, through changing cities, jobs, relationships and ways of living. We sit in traffic. We work in offices. We travel. We stare at our phones. Some of us leave home and return years later, carrying new experiences with us, while the landscapes we remember continue to change. We watch forests disappear while still dealing with bills, careers, family and whatever else everyday life brings. All of that is Borneo too.
So Anak Borneo gradually became less about representing an image of Borneo and more about seeing the present through a Bornean perspective.
I cannot speak for everyone from Borneo, and I don't intend to.
Anak Borneo is simply where my own experience begins.
Music Is Still the Centre
Everything still starts with music.
I sing, write, produce, and work with instruments such as sape, bungkau, guitar and looping equipment alongside electric instruments and contemporary production. Depending on the song, that can move through alternative rock, reggae, progressive music, ambient textures or something that doesn't fit neatly into any of those descriptions.
I have never been very interested in adding a traditional instrument to a song simply so the music can be labeled “Bornean.” The sape might be the main instrument in one arrangement, or its playing style, phrasing, and cultural character might inspire how I approach modern instruments in another. Elsewhere, a distorted guitar, a repeated loop, an unusual rhythm, or even silence may say more.
What matters more to me is that all of these sounds are allowed to exist naturally beside one another.
The Street Became My Laboratory
A large part of the way I perform today came from busking.
The street is a very different teacher from a concert hall. People walking past did not buy a ticket to see me. Most of them were going somewhere else. If something caught their attention, they stopped. If it didn't, they kept walking.
That environment forced me to experiment. I learned to work with limited equipment, build arrangements in real time, improvise when something went wrong and respond to whatever was happening around me. Sape, guitar, voice, loops, rhythm and electronics gradually became things I could assemble and rearrange on the spot.
In many ways, busking became my laboratory. A lot of the live language I use now grew from those experiments. Even when I perform on a proper stage, some part of that mentality remains: the performance should feel alive, and I should still be listening to the room rather than simply reproducing a recording.
Eventually, I also began asking whether a performance could communicate something beyond the individual songs. Could lighting, visuals, transitions and atmosphere become part of the story?
Projects such as Pulau, Fire Ritual and later Fire Ritual on Pulau Concert pushed me further in that direction. The songs were no longer necessarily isolated pieces.
They could become part of a journey.
When Songs Began Building a World
At some point, that same idea started extending beyond the stage.
A song suggested a character. A character needed somewhere to live. That place needed a history. Then came transport systems, advertisements, bars, technologies, companies, habits and all the small things that make an imaginary place feel ordinary to the people living inside it. That eventually became the Anak Borneo Universe — ABU.
ABU is fictional, but it is not an escape from the real world. Much of it comes from looking at things that already surround us and pushing them slightly further.
Technology is becoming routine. Development is changing landscapes and communities. People are giving more parts of their lives to systems they barely think about. Social media is influencing identity. The tension between comfort and control. The ways people still find friendship, humor, music, alcohol, love, and small freedoms within those systems.
Sometimes fiction gives me enough distance to explore these ideas without turning a song into an essay. By shifting familiar experiences into imagined places, people and histories, I can look at the world around us from a slightly different angle. It creates space for recognition without having to explain everything directly, and sometimes that distance makes the connection to real life even clearer.
From the Forest to the City
Looking back, I don't think Anak Borneo's core appeared all at once. I discovered pieces of it through different projects.
Pulau brought environmental loss, land and displacement much closer to the centre of my work.
Fire Ritual explored transformation, loss and renewal from another direction.
By the time I was developing Fire Ritual on Pulau — music, visuals, atmosphere and performance had started feeling less like separate disciplines and more like different parts of the same language. But another important realisation came later.
I realised Anak Borneo did not always need to take place in the forest. That opened a different door. The current LOOP chapter moves into the city: commuting, work, drinking, consumption, algorithms, social media and routines that repeat until comfort can quietly become confinement. A song about drinking with friends can exist beside a story about technology and social control. A man can worry about a disappearing landscape and still miss a meeting because he was stuck in traffic. Those contradictions are interesting to me because that is how real life usually works. And somewhere along that path I found what I think is the core of Anak Borneo:
It is not about recreating an old Borneo. It is about carrying Borneo into whatever comes next.
More Than Releasing Songs
That also changes how I think about releasing work.
Traditionally, a musician finishes a song, releases it, promotes it for a while and eventually moves on to the next one. I still release music that way, of course. But ABU allows a song to keep developing after the recording ends.
Someone might hear a song first. Later they encounter the character connected to it. Then they see the bar where that character drinks, an advertisement from the city they live in, or a piece of fictional history that changes how the original song feels.
Social media becomes more than a notice board. It can carry pieces of the world itself — an in-universe advertisement, a glimpse of daily life in Mud City, or a small detail that changes how a character is understood. Music videos can open another part of the story, the website gives people space to explore it at their own pace, and live performances can bring fragments of that imagined world into a real physical space.
That does not mean everyone needs to understand all of it. Someone may only want the songs. Someone else may follow the characters. Another person might become obsessed with the fictional history or technologies.
There does not need to be one correct entrance.
Where Anak Borneo Is Going？
I don't know exactly where all of this will eventually lead. That uncertainty is part of why I continue doing it.
I want the music to keep evolving, the performances to stay open to experimentation, and the Anak Borneo Universe to grow at a pace that leaves room for discovery — even for me.
Most importantly, I don't want the worldbuilding to become more important than the human experiences underneath it. The technology, fictional histories and strange characters only matter if they eventually bring us back to something recognisable: home, memory, identity, loss, friendship, survival, change.
Perhaps that's also where I hope the work leads the audience. Not to a single conclusion, but to a place where they can view something familiar from a slightly different perspective.
Anak Borneo began with music. For now, music is still the door. I just don't know how large the world behind that door will eventually become.
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