Famous for bringing together the world's best-looking audience in the most stunning festival location, Malaysia's Rainforest World Music Festival offers three days of gravelly throat-singing, cheerful panpipe tunes and Sicilian tambourine beats mingled with the chirps and shrieks of the rainforest on the South-East Asian island of Borneo.

The festival began 10 years ago, when Canadian musician Randy Raine-Reusch teamed up with the Sarawak Tourism Board. Randy was driven by the desire to preserve, showcase and celebrate the myriad musical forms that thrive on the island. Today, the festival is one of the main events on Malaysia's cultural calendar, drawing around 8000 people on its busiest days. Featuring little-known local groups alongside bands from the global world music circuit, the festival programme is clever, but can hardly be described as cool. Celtic music from Poland, Peruvian cliches from Sydney and Cuban melodies sung with British accents wouldn't draw people to a weekender in most places. Yet in Malaysia, the trendiest youngsters from across the country save up all year for their weekend passes and the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Kuching, the principal city of Sarawak.

"This is the best party of the year", grins a student, whose neck is being adorned with a temporary tattoo, "we come here to hang out and have fun. The music is just the bonus, but a great one! I loved Hun Huur Tu (Tuvan throat singing), they had me head-banging all night!"

Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur brims with chic bars and glittering nightclubs, but it doesn't have an outdoor party to rival the relaxed mood of the Rainforest World Music Festival. "You couldn't hold an event like this on the Malaysian peninsula", explains a local journalist, 'it would never get a license, as Islam is the predominant religion. The punters are too sexy here and it's sponsored by a beer company." And so the country's trendsetters converge on the edge of the rainforest, drinking rice wine in the traditional longhouses of the Sarawak Cultural Village while listening to bamboo bands and jumping to the sounds of the sape, one of the island's proudest indigenous instruments.

It's rare that the aspirations of traditionalists and hip youth converge so magnificently. One group feels warm and glowy for having contributed to the preservation of another slice of traditional culture, another for having discovered new music from home and away during one rocking party.

- Katharina Kane