What is Studio Monkey Shoulder LIVE?
Studio Monkey Shoulder LIVE is a two-month touring series moving through four Southeast Asian markets, cities in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, running August through September 2026. It's presented by British DJ and broadcaster Gilles Peterson together with his Worldwide FM platform, backed by whisky brand Monkey Shoulder, whose sponsorship idea ("The Blend") is built around mixing unlike elements into something new. Rather than parachute one international lineup into each stop, the series hands local curation to a different independent collective in every city.
"DIY music culture is built on exchange," Peterson said of the series. "Working with Monkey Shoulder, we wanted to celebrate each region's diversity by shining a light on the people, communities and grassroots scenes shaping and pushing local music culture forward."
Why is a Jakarta radio collective running the show?
In Jakarta, that means Radio Rumah Oma, an online radio and livestreaming collective founded in 2019 that's been broadcasting since March 2020 out of the A3000 compound in Kemang. Co-founder Farhan "Facil" Ali built the outfit around a format that goes beyond spinning records: "not just playing music but also holding discussions on all sorts of topics with our guests," is how he describes the approach. Handing a Southeast Asia tour's Jakarta leg to a five-year-old streaming crew, rather than a club brand or a promoter, is itself the story: it's a bet that the city's scene actually lives in rooms most outsiders, and plenty of locals, have never set foot in.
What's actually on the Jakarta bill?
The programme runs through three very different rooms before it gets loud. Bartiga, a basement listening bar tucked into The Darmawangsa Square in South Jakarta, seats just 30 (50 standing) and was built around acoustic sound quality; Music Director Reinhold Makasutji, known as Leno Rei, programs nights from his own collection of more than 1,300 records spanning jazz, funk, disco, boogie, Latin and African rhythms. HATS Bar, on Jalan Iskandarsyah Raya, runs as a sorbet shop by day and a cocktail bar by night, founded by mixologist and pastry chef Demitria Dana Paramita and ranked 77th in Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026. "As a pastry chef by day and mixologist by night, we wanted to put the two together in one space," Paramita has said of the concept. And Chris Bunjamin Studio hosts an Audio Nirvana deep-listening session built around a restored 1960s Altec A5 speaker rig, the personal project of photographer and audio devotee Chris Bunjamin, who sums up the studio's ambition simply: "What we want to do here is to be the approachable and viable reference point." No individual DJ lineup or ticket prices have been published for any of the Jakarta dates.
Where does the series land?
The Jakarta run closes at ZOO, the venue that hosted Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills back in May 2026, and the only stop on the bill built for a proper club-scale, high-energy electronic night. Everything before it, Bartiga's soul and boogie, HATS Bar's disco and house, Bunjamin's vintage hi-fi session, sits closer to organic, listening-room territory. The sequencing makes its own argument: Jakarta's grassroots scene isn't one room or one sound, it's a network of very different spaces that only look disconnected from the outside.
