For as long as I can remember, everyone told me it was impossible to throw a rave in Singapore. The island country was too small, said the local DJs and promoters I’d talk to during my annual trips back home from the States. The cops would inevitably bust you, and—because there is little precedent for this sort of law-breaking—you’d probably end up in jail. Or even sentenced to death for trafficking drugs. Not knowing any better, I accepted this rationale as fact. After all, Singapore is known as one of the most orderly countries in the world, with strict laws governing everything from flushing toilets to chewing gum. While its DIY music scene has long thrived in smaller clubs and bars, perhaps an all-night rave in some dirty warehouse was, like my friends said, impossible.

Last month, I was back in Singapore for a family visit, and was poking around Resident Advisor’s event listings looking for something to do when I came across a mysterious party called Horizon99. Its event page read more like a cross between an academic text and political manifesto than typical party promo: “Attn: The scheduled precarious race has been disrupted by alien tempos,” declared its opening salvo. “The future is here and it can be redistributed.” I immediately marked it in my calendar. I had never heard of the DJs, who had names like GOTHHOBBIT and A(;D—but there was no way I was missing out.

That night, I found myself lost in Singapore’s red-light district, trying to find my way around a seemingly deserted industrial building. Following the stink of cigarettes up a stairwell, I walked straight into a room stacked with shelves of blinking machines that turned out to be a bitcoin mining farm. Turns out the rave was next door. Stepping over a crew of self-declared skinheads squatting in the corridor, I pushed open a heavy door and found myself in a dark windowless room vibrating with metallic clangs and the brutal 4/4 punches of techno. Red strobes briefly illuminated a pair of DJs leaning over a table strewn with tangled cables, mics, grooveboxes, and other live gear. A circle of anonymous bodies were silently writhing to the bleepy stutters of Errorsmith's abstract techno track, "Lightspeed.” I was alone in a strange place, but it felt like coming home.

The sets for the rest of the night screeched between industrial techno, stomach-churning gabber, and jungle-tinged 90s hardcore. Sometimes, an errant K-pop melody, reggaeton rhythm, or classic Baltimore club “ha!” would get thrown into the mix, but the music remained a sludge of abrasive sounds culled from labels like Shanghai’s Genome 6.66 Mbp, Mexico City’s NAAFI, and Paris’ Casual Gabberz. These kinds of cyber-rave sounds are most at home on SoundCloud, and you’d probably never hear it in an established Singaporean club—which is why hearing it out of precariously stacked speakers in a dingy hole-in-the-wall venue was so exciting: a new rave scene was fermenting out of the simple desire to thrash around to music you could usually only hear on the internet.