About Universe Factory

Universe Factory is a publication about music, art, and the places they come from.

I write from somewhere between the stage and the audience. I help run shows, work with bands, make connections, occasionally get involved with media and PR, and spend a lot of time in the rooms where music actually happens. But I’m also an outsider. I don’t belong entirely to any one scene, city, or musical world.

That position – one foot in, one foot out – is where Universe Factory begins.

I’m interested in music beyond the music itself: in the people who make it, the spaces that allow it to exist, and the social worlds that form around it. A song can tell you something about the person who made it, but the circumstances around that song can tell you something about a city, a generation, a community, or a particular moment in time.

So I look at scenes as much as I look at artists. I want to understand how music travels between places, how ideas are borrowed and transformed, how artists respond to the spaces around them, and how those spaces – basements, bars, galleries, clubs, back rooms, warehouses, festivals and whatever other cracks people find to make something happen – shape the art that emerges from them.

The focus is largely Southeast Asia and Australasia, but borders are rarely as useful as they appear on a map. Music moves. People move. Ideas move. Sometimes they move through formal networks; more often they travel through friendships, tours, record collections, conversations, cheap flights and somebody knowing somebody who knows somebody.

Universe Factory follows some of those movements.

It is part music writing, part cultural observation, part travelogue, and part attempt to understand the strange little worlds that form around music. Sometimes that means writing about a band. Sometimes it means writing about a venue, a promoter, a festival, a city, or a night that seemed to contain something larger than itself.

Welcome to Universe Factory.