When Arthur Yeti talks, his eyes often flutter back and forth as he recalls the journey that brought him to whatever point he’s making, which usually involves multiple countries and reconnecting with people from months or years earlier. He’s got an endless curiosity that stretches across borders, scenes, and mediums that he brings to his label Yeti Out, which he co-founded alongside twin brother Tom. Through that brand, they purposefully create bridges across all these interests, taking the form of a community radio located in a luxury mall, a genre-agnostic record label, non-stop parties, art shows, clothing design, and more. “It’s downtown culture worldwide,” he explains breathlessly from Hong Kong in between Bangkok gigs at Wonderfruit last month and the Blaq Lyte Block Party later this month. “A lot of people just hug their corners and look at the differences between each other, whether that’s politically, nationally, or socially—but really we’re all more similar than we are different. It’s just about choosing which way to look at it.”

Arthur, whose real name is Arthur Bray, was born and raised in Hong Kong. He got his start in nightlife during the early 2000s promoting for hip hop clubs on their street teams at 16 when he was still too young to legally go to the parties. When he turned 18 he gravitated towards the tail end of the rave scene there, turning up at parties in old airports and closed shopping malls where people were dressed in UFO jeans and Mickey Mouse gloves. “It’s the curiosity of nightlife, the energy of discovery finding whatever happens at night,” he recalls. “There’s an element of resistance to whatever you pick up in these scenes.” All these different musical subcultures and the elements of dress and design that came along with them would provide the beginning of an education that informs Yeti Out to this day.

When the twins went to university in the UK, they immersed themselves in the music scenes there, launching the Yeti In The Basement blog alongside Erisen Ali as a way to get free passes to parties. It didn’t take them long to start throwing their own parties under the same name. “I only got into DJing because in 2010 when we started doing shows in London, I’d play that first 10PM slot instead of paying another DJ to do it. It was more cost-efficient,” Arthur says. “We’re party promoters and community organizers first and DJs second.” Tom left for Vancouver and started throwing his own parties under the Yeti name there. Eventually, Arthur had to return to Hong Kong, where he got a job on the editorial team at Hypebeast and started throwing parties on the side. But he realized that he would need to keep DJing himself in order to build their brand and engage with the community there, which was much smaller than in the UK. “DJing is a form of communicating and connecting with people, but we never wanted to be front-facing.” The blog had allowed them to play the background, but Instagram and its personality-driven culture would change that and their faces would eventually become part of the brand itself.

To get international DJs to play their parties in Hong Kong, they started working with other like-minded people from around the region as a way to bring down booking costs, creating the foundation for their international network. They would share gigs with promoters in Korea and Japan and Tom was in Shanghai. “We were making our careers up as we went along,” Arthur laughs. “It wasn’t later until we realized that was actually the role of an agent or manager.” This was when they trimmed the name to Yeti Out and started running tours for artists, touring themselves, organizing events, and creating merch in collaboration with brands like Nike.

In 2017 Arthur threw himself into Yeti Out full time, bringing along all the knowledge and connections he’d built over the years. “We always wanted to be a hybrid label; something 360 that didn’t just focus on one particular corner of the culture,” he says. Part of this is because that’s just their personality and it’s how they live their lives, but also because they wanted to attract people from everywhere. “This way someone who comes into the room and doesn’t like house music or whatever, then they can gravitate towards something else that we do.”

The Silk Road Sounds compilation in 2018 was not just the launch of their label but also a distillation of their outlook on life. It features artists from all over Asia and other parts of the world, bringing together friends they made in all their travels. “We were meeting all these artists on the road, so we brought them all together in one place,” Arthur says. “We’re East meets West, where everyone takes part in multiple identities and we’re from all these different areas. It’s about sharing with a passion and hoping that passion translates.” He hopes to keep building on this theme, helping to bring Asia together so artists can tour in a different city in the region every weekend like they do in Europe. “We don’t need the validation of Berlin. We can create our own institutions.” Yeti Out’s headquarters is now at the FM Below Ground radio station in Hong Kong. They launched it in 2020 during COIVD when promoters couldn’t throw parties, and they still broadcast every Wednesday and Saturday while labbing there the rest of the week. Their highlight of 2023 was throwing a party at an actual Yeti museum in the capital of Tibet, Lhasa, which is also the most elevated city in the world.

As he reflects on ten years of Yeti Out and twenty years in night life, Arthur says they’re trying to be more formulaic in their approach, zeroing in on what’s really meaningful to them personally and what works best for them. They also hope to create something more sustainable that can grow on its own. “We want to set a foundation where we don’t always have to be so hands on,” he explains. “We want to turn scenes into industries. An industry is when everyone in the scene can eat, it creates jobs. We’re still working on that.”