Magazine

One of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Thai literature, Duanwad Pimwana tells the story of Manop, an ageing man haunted by a love he never confessed. When a vivid dream brings back memories of Chaiyapon, the childhood friend he secretly loved, decades of silence begin to resurface. Moving between adolescence and old age, the story follows a life shaped by desire and compromise, tracing the quiet negotiations through which a kathoey identity was concealed and ultimately reclaimed. At the centre of this journey is the “chong kraben”, a genderless garment that becomes both a memory of first love and a late gesture of self-recognition.

A Manila office worker arrives in Masbate expecting a provincial rodeo. Instead, he enters a world where cattle still organise the rhythms of life, where spectacle and labour blur under the island sun. In this literary fiction, Glenn Diaz moves through cowboy rituals, uneasy conversations and nocturnal pastures to explore what modern urban life has lost contact with, and what still survives at the edge of disappearance.

In this work of speculative fiction, the character 377O73-QÂF—hypostasis of this musical and ambient interregnum—recounts the Ambient Rave eXperience as an hallucinatory sonic ecosystem populated by a promiscuity of dancing bodies. Moving through T.A.Z. and altered states of perception, 377O73-QÂF invokes how sound ceases to be mere communication and becomes a force that slowly reshapes bodies, communities, and imaginaries. Blending rave culture, psychoacoustics, collective ritual, and speculative philosophy, 377O73-QÂF reflects on ambient music as a threshold between memory and anticipation, and between presence and transcendence; as a practice of drift, metamorphosis, and collective becoming.

A speculative fiction by artist Riar Rizaldi, rooted in Bandung’s underground music history, imagines a city where gangs of preman (freeman, gangsters), devoted to punk, metal, emo, and hardcore, rule the neighborhoods on motorcycles.