By South China Morning Post | Created at 2026-08-15 04:50:47 | Updated at 2026-08-15 07:02:13
4 hours ago
Likie Low’s playlist at Tomorrowland wove Singapore train announcements and bird calls together with electronic dance music
Published: 11:00am, 15 Aug 2026
Updated: 11:07am, 15 Aug 2026
At one of the world’s biggest electronic dance music festivals in Belgium, entranced revellers recently found themselves dancing to sounds more often heard on a
Singapore commute than a Tomorrowland stage.
They included the MRT warning to “Sila berhati-hati di ruang platform” (“Please mind the platform gap” in Malay), familiar to millions who ride the city state’s metro system, and the piercing, repetitive call of the Asian koel, a bird whose cry is instantly recognisable in many Singapore neighbourhoods.
Threaded through the set was the sound of the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese instrument that local DJ Likie Low has played since childhood.
For the 27-year-old, whose stage name is Likki, her 30-minute set on July 25 at Tomorrowland was a chance to turn the everyday Singapore sounds into dance music for a global crowd.
As one of the few Singaporeans who had had the chance to play at the annual music festival, she wanted to bring a piece of herself to one of the world’s largest electronic dance festivals.
“Since I got to play Tomorrowland, and it might be the first and the last chance in my life I get to do that, I wanted to incorporate every single part myself and all my own music is very Chinese. So it’s like showing myself as a Singaporean Chinese, even though people there won’t understand what an Ang Mo Kio Avenue is,” she said, referring to a residential district in Singapore.
