During the mid-1900s, many Orang Asli, the indigenous people of Malaysia, migrated from their rainforest villages to work at Hospital Orang Asli Gombak in Selangor. As a result, their children grew up detached from traditional musical practices and instead absorbed the urban soundscape influenced by radio and popular music. This led to the formation of Orang Asli bands that improvised and adapted the popular music they encountered. This study explores how Orang Asli musicians from Gombak learned and composed popular music, analyzing their musical style, lyrics, and the emotions conveyed in their songs. Using a case study approach, including an interview with the lead vocalist and composer of the band Jelmol and a musical analysis of his work, the research highlights the Orang Asli’s adaptability in music-making. Their compositions were heavily influenced by Malaysia’s 1980s–1990s rock movement, blending Anglo-American rock with elements of Hindustani pop and traditional Orang Asli musical features like melismatic singing, tone bending, and modal harmonies. The study argues that themes of love, rindu (longing), and melancholy, once conveyed through instrumental music in their rainforest homes, were transferred into lyrical expression in their songs. Despite the shift from instrumental to verbal communication, the jati diri (essence) of Orang Asli identity persists through their slow rock musical style. This research underscores how Orang Asli musicians creatively integrate tradition with modern influences, maintaining cultural continuity while adapting to contemporary musical landscapes.

“How do Indigenous youth use music and dance to express cultural memory, labor, and creativity in a Taiwanese Indigenous village? This paper explores that question through a case study of the annual mugamut celebration in the Puyuma village of Nanwang, Taitung.
Puyuma is one of ten Pinuyumayan Indigenous villages in southeastern Taiwan, where millet farming once shaped ceremonial and seasonal life. Due to colonial projects in the 1930s, the influx of settlers, and land loss, millet cultivation declined sharply, and misaur—the communal women’s weeding group—gradually faded from practice. Yet mugamut (the millet-weeding completion ceremony), in which women gather to sing traditional songs, continued to be held annually for decades. In the early 1990s, Puyuma women initiated a cultural revival, reintroducing community millet farming and misaur. As part of this revival, they also added talent-show-like performances and intergenerational games during the mugamut celebration, which now spans three days.
This paper focuses on the young adult women’s performance during the second day of mugamut 2025, featuring a choreographed medley blending Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” (U.S.), “Khong Sao Ca” by DJ YuanBryan (Vietnam), and “Samingda’s” by T-HO Brothers, a duo of Indigenous Taiwanese musicians. Wearing Puyuma regalia, the women danced in a line-dance-inspired formation, performing millet-weeding gestures—pulling weeds, tossing them behind, and miming the act of drinking Paolyta-B, a herbal tonic associated with manual laborers. This paper argues that hybrid performances such as this reflect what Bissett Perea (2021) describes as a dense form of Indigeneity—an expressive layering of Puyuma musical practice and global cultural influence.”

“Going back home” or pag-uwi in the Philippine context has been understood as pagbalik or returning to rural provinces away from the bustling Metropolitan Manila. This phenomenon echoes a rural sentimentality that is resounded in songs from previous generations like “Sa Kabukiran” (Eng: In the Countryside) and “Buhay sa Nayon” (Eng: Life in the Village). However, recent song hits since 2020 like Zild’s “Kyusi” (Eng: Quezon City) and Lola Amour’s “Raining in Manila” hint at a growing sentiment and even affection toward the urban center despite worsening living conditions; thereby raising questions as to whether these songs still echo pag-uwi as affection towards the province or as means to reconcile images of home with a dystopian urbanity as there is no other provincial home to return to. Prominent discussions on placemaking and pop music revolve around memory and nostalgia (Yano 2002; Lie 2014; Khiun 2016; Mangaoang 2019; Boym 2002); however, these frameworks cannot accurately describe the evolving relations of pag-uwi/pagbalik to Philippine songs since 2020. This paper argues that a concept of urban sentimentality more accurately describes the relational trend of song production and placemaking in Manila as a phenomenon of misrepresenting urban life in its current state to purposely reveal redeeming qualities in an otherwise cruel city landscape.
I conceptualize urban sentimentality by (1) interweaving various frameworks of sentimentality from Anglophone and Tagalog scholarship which include discussions on rurality and romanticism, (2) examining Tagalog slang such as senti (from sentimental) and hugot (Eng: draw out), and (3) by articulating views from and investigating the works of Philippine pop music artists and bands like Zild’s “Kyusi”, Lola Amour’s “Raining in Manila”, and flu’s “Manila Bay”.