In Production

Introduce yourself!
I’m Kenneth, I’m a music producer, and I run a music label called under.net for alternative and hard dance music. We’ve been taking off recently, and I’m super grateful for that, because it’s all I worked on during my gap year. I’m in university now, but I plan to go back into music full time after I graduate.

We hear you’re also part of the band LONGKANG GINAS (LKG)!
Yes, I produce most of the songs for the band. Most of the songs that we play live, or that I play on my own at DJ gigs are my own material, which I’m proud of because not many musicians get to say that their entire set is all theirs. And I’m very proud to say that people like my music, and want to come and see me play live, to hear my music!

How would you describe your music to those who are unfamiliar with it?
A combination of uplifting euphoric trance, shoegaze, and nightcore. People like it somehow, and I’m really grateful for it because it’s a bit weird. Some of it has even hit major clubs in Europe—I’ve seen videos of my friends’ songs (and even some of mine as well!) being played in a few DJ sets in places like Germany, Norway, and Zurich. I’m like “Wow, it’s not just a joke anymore!”.

That’s cool! And you mentioned that you hope to pursue this full-time eventually, right?
Well, I know music is really hard to go into full-time unless I’m being boosted by pop labels, but that’s just not me, so I’m not going to go down that route. But I do feel like I’m ready to do this part-time while actually have a paying day job because I’ve already given so much to the community, and it’s given just as much back to me. So yes, I’d say I’ll still be making music for the foreseeable future, but maybe I’ll slowly change genres and evolve. Music is always changing anyway, so who knows?

How long have you been in the music scene?
I’ve been producing music for about four years, but I only started taking it seriously in the past two years. For the first two, I was still in polytechnic and was just picking up a new hobby out of boredom—I would only work on music about once a week or something. But in the past two years, I’ve been learning and trying to make stuff every single day.

At one point in my gap year, I was doing it non-stop—18-hour sessions! So I would wake up and get my headphones on and have them on till I go to bed. And I repeated that again and again, but it’s really paid off and I’m super grateful and excited for what’s to come!

How would you say your music has changed in these four years?
I started off making hip-hop beats because that was what everyone was doing in the peak SoundCloud era, then as the music I listed to changed, I moved on to hardstyle, hardcore, trance, techno, and now, alternative.

I don’t think I’d ever want to confine myself to a single type of music because I always want to approach music in a fresh, new way as I learn different techniques, and this is exactly what my band LKG has proven.

But I would say this whole experimentation that I’ve been doing with music is just for fun. I even created my own fictional genre, trancegaze, which is a combination of trance and shoegaze. I always tell people “This is a fictional genre, you wanna use it, please, go crazy! If not, then this is just for fun.”. If you love it, thank you, and if you don’t, it’s fine too. But I what I will take credit for is my music label, because I’m very, very proud of the community that I’ve built and the artists that have come to support me and be nurtured under my label. These people were my mentors and my early inspirations, and now we’re working together, which is mind-blowing!