I first met Anton Wirjono in 2014. He was hosting a British Council event at Goods Diner, one of his restaurants in Jakarta. We talked about music for a long time that night. I wasn’t surprised when I found out later that this was more or less his default setting.
Anton has been throwing parties since the early ’90s — starting with the rave scene in San Francisco, including at least one illegal event in an abandoned hangar in the Bay Area. He eventually brought that same energy back to Southeast Asia. In Jakarta, he converted a dead shopping mall into an event space that drew 130,000 people.
We crossed paths again at The Great Escape in Brighton a few years later. He was there for the music.
This interview covers how he got started — the boarding school years in Singapore, the move to San Francisco, the long road from going to raves to being the person who builds them.
Leave a Reply