Haunted by the imagery of Dutch colonisation, Indonesian musician Kasimyn’s latest album takes listeners on a sonic journey into death, desire, ecstasy and… ‘Javafuturism’?
In the history of difficult concept albums, Indonesian musician Kasimyn’s latest release – the freaky, baffling and totally engrossing Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (2023) – must surely be given an honourable mention. Amid its sleeve notes, ‘the mixed and inexplicable emotions aroused from browsing the Indonesian war archives from various sources for years’ is cited as one of the major influences on the production.
‘Indonesian war archives’ is a vague term – it could include anything from the history of violence against native populations during the 125-year period of Dutch colonisation that ended in 1942 with the Japanese occupation, to the mass killings of civilians accused of being Communists during the mid-1960s under Suharto’s regime, or the genocide in East Timor that spanned 1975–99. Kasimyn, who has also received mainstream attention for collaborating with Björk on her trippy, mushroom-inspired album Fossora (2022), to which he contributed beats on three tracks and appeared in the music video for the lead single Atopos, doesn’t want to dwell on the topic of any direct historical inspiration – citing reasons of privacy – although he did say (via a telephone conversation) that the album was composed while looking at images of Indonesia under Dutch rule.
Since the album’s release in June, the few scattered reviews from the (mostly white) international music press have interpreted it in broad strokes as a form of trauma response to the history of violence in Indonesia. The Quietus says, ‘Though [the album] is a reaction to the legacy of Indonesia’s turbulent relationship with war, there is little concrete reference to that history… In many respects, the album is a sorrowful tribute to the unnamed victims of the war, creating spaces for them that expresses the rage of those who will never get to speak for themselves.’ Meanwhile, online electronic-music magazine Resident Advisor writes: ‘Kasimyn uses gabber, techno and experimental club music as tools to channel, relive and represent the violence of the past. The ultra-fast rhythms overlap, leaving no space for a reprieve, while the brutal snares evoke physical blows and the darkest hours of war.’
You can (sort of) see where these reviewers are coming from. The emotional tenor of the 14-track Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is generally dark, operating in a horror-movie-soundtrack mode, with sampled human vocals of cries, growls and moans, layered over dread-inducing soundscapes with dark, industrial textures. Programmatically, it could be read as a moody and cathartic response to the sorrows and horrors of war. For example, the track titled Bucur consists of low, ominous, stomach-churning synths that almost sound like the moans of a large beast, which are layered over eerie scampering drumbeats. In Tungkai a discordant melody is repeated like a broken siren amid drums that crash in a chaotic rhythm. And Budakkawan comprises three minutes of lyrics screamed out by Indonesian poet and vocalist SaintMary, sampled and built up over booming kicks. In Bahasa Indonesia, she shrieks: “Whose name is in history? Who is to blame?”
But the album is too strange and slippery to be reduced to the narrative of war alone. For one, it simply generates conflicting impulses that go beyond the expected territory of anger, dread, trauma, etc. There are points where the anxiety in the music is laid on so thick you could scream, but there are also moments in which you just want to dance, whether it is expressed by the helter-skelter percussion in Kemuat or the hypnotic trance rhythms of Hitam. Sometimes the sonic atmosphere falls into some unparsable zone between horror and ecstasy. Ultimately, Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal, to my ear, is unmistakably club music. Whether or not it drinks from a well of historical injustices, it also transcends those material determinants to be jubilantly generative, opening up other-worldly vistas of defiance and speed.
In his influential 1998 book, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, British writer and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun disparages familiar modes of theorising and historising Black music as a tradition that’s rooted in material conditions of struggle and deprivation, and instead aligns Black music with the tropes of science fiction, relating it to the cyborg and the alien. He explores how jazz, dub, techno, funk and hip-hop musicians used the culture and experiences of the African diaspora to create a sound of the future that is powered by a longing for change.
One could argue that Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal occupies an analogous plane, with Kasimyn’s use of local musical elements – such as the seven-note pelog scale used in gamelan music, and traditional instruments – that are processed to such an extent that they seem alien and even futuristic. For example, instead of playing original traditional instruments such as the two-headed gendang drum, he recreates the sound on a synthesiser. The result is a slightly off-kilter, purposefully hollow and mechanistic version that he speeds up, slows down or distorts. The unusual meeting place between analogue and digital, human and machine, is best encapsulated in the track Gendang Ria, which references the serunai, a wind instrument with a reedy, buzzy wail, used in Indonesian rituals including death rites. The track starts off sounding like a chiptune soundtrack to a computer game and gradually picks up in speed and volume. Meanwhile, the artificially created serunai drags out long, foreboding synths that alternately rise and fall in Shepard tones, generating a windswept, cosmic soundscape – and leaving listeners to imagine a kind of joyful-horrific ritual taking place in outer space.
Musicologists Sanne Krogh Groth and Nils Bubandt might call this a form of ‘Javafuturism’. In their ongoing research project on experimental music in Indonesia, they have picked up on Eshun’s Afrofuturist line of thinking. On their website, they write: ‘“Java-Futurism” is a term coined by Lintang Raditya, an instrument-builder and noise musician from Yogyakarta. The term plays on the political and temporal aesthetics of the concept “Afro-futurism” and refers to the contemporary practices of sound art and sound activism employed by experimental musicians in Indonesia who seek to investigate a past that might have been, in order to imagine and define a future that could be. The “Java” of Java-Futurism is not so much a place as an imaginary that is at once political, aesthetic, and cosmological.’
Their argument is especially amicable to a subset of Indonesian bands that blend folk traditions with noise, metal, drone and improvisation, and whose methods for music-making, performance and living offer nonexploitative alternatives to the music industry. These bands make their own instruments, blend precolonial sounds – such as music from local trance or ecstatic traditions that have eluded colonial discipline – with electro-industrial styles. The trailblazerin this field is Yogyakarta-based Senyawa, comprising singer Rully Shabara and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi. The band’s unique doom-folk sound is formed by a wide array of vocal gymnastics, heavy metal, drone and self-built instruments. Their epic musical stylings and lyrics (always in native Indonesian Sulawesi languages, as well as Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia) are ambitious feats of world-building, providing doomsday visions of a civilisation built on greed and power. Sample lyric from Istana, a track from their fourth album Alkisah (2021): ‘black pond / saturated with the remains of war and conflict / scattered bloodstains / the blood of nameless humans’.
Collaboration and decentralisation are also key to their distribution method: Alkisah was coreleased by 44 record labels over four continents, to which the band provided graphics and audio files, inviting them to create their own cover art, packaging and format. The labels can also commission remixes and interpretations of the source material, to which Senyawa will have no rights. Meanwhile, another Yogyakarta-based duo, Raja Kirik, comprising Yennu Ariendra and J. ‘Mo’ong’ Santoso Pribadi, updates the hypnotic sounds from Javanese trance dance performances, which feature repetitive phrases of gamelan playing layered with inter-locking drumbeats. Such performances have different names in different locations, such as jaranan, jathilan, kuda kepang or kuda lumping, and are performed for ceremonial purposes to mark events like birth, marriage and death, as well as for entertainment. Flat wooden horses made from bamboo and decorated with colourful fabric and paint are the props for the dance. Performers enter into a trancestate during which spirits are believed to enter them, making them eat, drink and dance, but also perform various feats like walking over hot coals and eating glass. The dance’s history is unclear, but some scholars say it developed from the Java War (fought between Javanese rebels and the colonial Dutch empire from 1825 to 1830) to celebrate the local horsemen. Raja Kirik’s three albums, Raja Kirik (2018), Rampokan (2020) and Phantasmagoria of Jathilan (2023), draw from Indonesian musical traditions and combine them with experimental electronica, rave music and homemade instruments.
While Senyawa and Raja Kirit lean towards avant-garde and noise music, Kasimyn’s DNA is rooted in dance music with a more commercial bent. Kasimyn – his real name is Aditya Surya Taruna – is one half of the electronic dance-music duo Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO), whose Indonesian-flavoured club music has gained a cult following in the global dance-music circuit. Unlike Senyawa and gang, GMO are not based in the arty university town of Yogyakarta but in touristy Bali, where they used to work as DJs. (Kasimyn says that a good part of Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal was actually composed by 2017, while he was working “a very boring job”: “I was a DJ in a fancy lounge”.)
According to the record label Drowned By Locals, the official translation of Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is ‘Synthetic feeling for anonymous sacrifice’. Literally, Bunyi bunyi means ‘sound’ in Indonesian, but tumbal means sacrifice. In our interview, Kasimyn says: “In the past, tumbal could mean the virgin that villagers threw into a volcano. Now in Indonesia, when we build a mall and a construction worker dies, we say, ‘Oh the spirits of the land needed a tumbal’. The feeling is, this is totally OK, because it’s for the greater good.”
Again, one could, like the foreign music press, read the work as a protest against Omelasian systems, like colonialism, racialised capitalism and other ideological power structures that justify the suffering of a specific group for the benefit of others. But Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal is less clearcut than that, with varied and nuanced textures and moods that are not so easily surmisable or even legible within a single intellectual framework, or for that matter, any framework at all, because to position it within such parameters would be to flatten the album’s complexity and the unique paralogical patterns of feeling it captures.
For one, there’s eros and dark humour in it. For example, in Sayat, every first beat is accented with an earsplitting laser sound. Yet amid this abrasive landscape, the sampled human vocals that repeat ‘Ohhh!’ and ‘Ahhh!’ evoke lasciviousness rather than pain. Then there’s how the songs in the album make us dance. Hitam begins with a jaunty swinging rhythm that escalates to urgent industrial percussion (hammers? Some sort of piling machine?) that operates at a propulsive, ecstatic tempo. Kemuat is filled with the intricate and skittering rhythm of drums that possess the power to drive us all into spasmodic, jerking footwork.
Eshun might call this power the ‘Rhythmachine’, his slippery term that describes the sonic capture of our senses and through which bodies can be collectively mobilised. Or we may call it a form of ‘trance’: not only the clubby kind, but also those of folk traditions involving altered states of consciousness aided by song, dance and movement.
Ultimately, the album offers its listeners a powerful and defamiliarising experience by opening up an unruly matrix of resistance, death, desire, freedom and vitality that invites linguistic analysis and decoding as much as it resists it. If music has the potential to be transportive, Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal takes you to an underworld, dimly lit and filled with the faraway, metabolised strains of sounds you think you know, with the driving, insistent rhythms of ecstatic dance that seem to exist outside of time; it is a place one can only understand with the body, not the mind.
