“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”
– Plato
WELCOME to another Saturday of Digital Zen.
Most weeks, we talk about screens, systems, the technology that shapes how we work, connect, and think – the platforms that promise liberation and deliver dependency. The questions beneath the questions nobody’s asking.
Today is different.
Today, Digital Zen goes somewhere it’s never gone before. Not into code or algorithms or broken institutions. But into frequency. Into basslines.
Into the precise, deliberate architecture of sound that science now confirms does something extraordinary to the human brain and body.
Today, we talk about Techno.
Not the stereotype. Not the fengtau image of flailing arms and glazed eyes. Not the association with excess that most Malaysians default to when this word comes up.
The real thing. The philosophy beneath the beat. The medicine inside the music.
I produce electronic music. Have for years. And what I’ve learnt – what science is only beginning to confirm – is that this isn’t entertainment.
It’s engineering. It’s neuroscience. It’s Zen.
A Complete Mistake That Changed Everything
Detroit, 1981. A city hollowing out. Ford and GM shedding jobs by the thousands. Unemployment at 30%. Entire neighbourhoods abandoned.
Three teenagers in Belleville – 30 miles out – sat in basements with synthesisers and drum machines. Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May. The Belleville Three. They blended funk, electro, and electronic music into something nobody had heard before.
Derrick May described it: “A complete mistake. Like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator, with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
That mistake became Techno.
But here’s what the history books miss: They didn’t make dance music. They made philosophy. May was explicit: “We never took it as just entertainment. We took it as a serious philosophy.”
From Detroit’s ruins, they built a sonic language that now pulses through clubs in Berlin, Tokyo, São Paulo, and yes – Kuching.
They didn’t just create a genre. They created frequency architecture. A precise engineering of sound that four decades later, scientists are studying for its effects on the human brain and body.
The Transmission
Terry Duncan said something to me once that I couldn’t unhear. Mid-session – monitors on, lights low, bassline at 128 BPM.
He leaned back: “You feel that kick before you hear it. If it hits the ear first, the mix isn’t done.”
Offshore safety officer by profession. Bedroom producer by calling. Most of what I know about electronic music – its architecture, its soul – didn’t come from tutorials.
It came from him. From rooms with monitors glowing and waveforms loading. The lessons weren’t lessons. They were transmissions.
This column is for Terry. And for every kindred spirit in Sarawak who produces, who mixes, who lives inside sound and has never seen themselves represented in print.
The Science Nobody Talks About
Forget the stereotype – flailing arms, glazed eyes, the association with excess. That’s surface noise. Beneath it, something extraordinary is happening neurologically.
Research confirms that regularly listening to house music within the 120-130 BPM range can slow biological ageing by as much as six years.
The mechanism: music in this frequency range lowers cortisol levels significantly – elevated cortisol being a primary driver of accelerated ageing. Six years. Not from a pharmaceutical. From a bassline.
Separately, research from over 10,800 older adults found consistent music listeners had a 39 per cent reduced risk of developing dementia compared to those who rarely listened.
The mechanism? Music engages brain regions simultaneously – sensory-motor processing, cognitive function, memory, emotional processing – restructuring the brain over time.
Every frequency decision has a physiological consequence. The kick at 60Hz creates resonance in the chest cavity – felt before heard.
The bassline at 128 BPM synchronises with elevated heart rate to produce active relaxation – focused but fluid, present but unbounded.
This is wu wei in sonic form. The music moves through you. You don’t listen to it. You dissolve into it.
When the Transmission Breaks
Native Instruments – founded in Berlin in 1996 – has entered preliminary insolvency proceedings in 2026. Traktor. Maschine. Kontakt. Massive. The tools that carried Detroit’s philosophy forward, that democratised the transmission from bedroom to bedroom, Sarawak to São Paulo.
Now in an administrator’s hands.
The company shifted from engineering-led innovation to financial extraction. Private equity bought in, consolidated, extracted. £250 million in debt against £25 million in revenue.
This is what happens when the philosophy becomes commodity. When the transmission line gets interrupted by balance sheets. When the thing that was built to liberate sound gets hollowed out by the same logic that hollowed out Detroit in the first place.
The Belleville Three made something in basements because the system had abandoned them. Native Instruments gave that basement sound to the world. Now the system is abandoning the tools too.
But here’s what they can’t kill: the knowledge. Terry still knows how a kick drum should hit the chest. Someone in Berlin still understands frequency architecture. Someone in Kuching is loading waveforms right now, learning the transmission the way it was always meant to be learned.
Person to person. Room to room. Sound to sound.
The tools might change hands. The transmission doesn’t stop.
The Practice
Listen differently.
Find a track at 120-128 BPM. Turn off the lights. Put on the best headphones you own. No scrolling. No multitasking.
Let the kick drum find your chest before it finds your ears.
Let the bassline regulate your breathing. Let the hi-hat pull your nervous system into its rhythm.
That’s not fengtau. That’s neuroscience.
That’s what three teenagers from a dying city understood forty years ago when they sat in the dark, treating sound as serious philosophy.
Because it was. Because it still is.
And somewhere in Kuching, in a bedroom with monitors glowing and waveforms loading, someone else knows exactly what this means.
This one’s for them.
This one’s for Terry.
For those who want to feel exactly what this column is about – start here: Terry Duncan’s progressive house mix, curated and live: STRUUM 02 | imlive Progressive House Mix – curated by T3D
Turn off the lights. Put on your best headphones. Press play.
The rest will make sense.
● Sufian Mohidin produces electronic music as Maqluk (YouTube) and writes on the intersection of technology, philosophy, and human experience.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at sufiansarawak@gmail.com.
