Eastern Margins announces debut London festival celebrating ESEA music and culture

Eastern Margins is hosting its first-ever festival, Margins United, at London’s EartH Hackney this September. 

The day-into-night festival, set for Saturday, 28th September, will centre alternative East and South-East Asian culture for a one-of-a-kind event with DJs, art installations and exhibitions, workshops, panels and plenty of food, including a supper club, across the east London venue’s three rooms.

The DJ line-up is led by Budots pioneer DJ Love, for his first gig outside the Philippines. He’ll be joined by the likes of yeule, Soo Joo, Onra, gyrofield, Shelhiel and No Rome, among others, as well as LVRA and Soda Plains’ new Fortress project. (LVRA previously co-headlined Eastern Margins’ late 2023 Road 2 Redline tour through East Asia.)

Elsewhere on the programme is a design workshop by Baesianz, installation by multimedia artist Lawrence Lek and a talk by industry group ESEA Music. More details are still to come, with additional event information and tickets available here.

Eastern Margins launched in 2018 as an event series, with the label arm following in 2020, to celebrate artists from East and South-East Asia and its diaspora. Learn more about the collective and its evolution in James Gui’s The Sound Of feature from 2023, featuring a mix by Jex Wang. 

Revisit Manila Community Radio’s 2023 entry in the Selections series, co-curated by DJ Love. Earlier this year, another Eastern Margins affiliate, Dirty K, charted a history of ‘90s and early ‘00s East Asian rave music in ten tracks for the Selections series. Read that here.

See the Margins United line-up in full via Instagram.