← Back to Countries

Indonesia

A bamboo spear, wired for sound

Senyawa

Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi had never played together before a Yogyakarta promoter put them on the same impromptu bill in 2010. They recorded their first release four days later and have worked as a duo ever since. Shabara sings in a self-taught extended technique that runs from guttural growl to falsetto scream, often in no recognizable language. Suryadi builds his own instruments from bamboo and farm tools. The best known is the bambu wukir, a spear-shaped hybrid of string and percussion instrument fitted with guitar pickups. The duo deliberately turned away from Indonesia's more genteel gamelan-palace tradition toward rawer, trance-adjacent village forms, and the result sits as comfortably at festivals like Primavera Sound as at a metal show. For 2021's Alkisah they applied the same outsider instinct to distribution, releasing it simultaneously through forty-four independent labels worldwide instead of picking one.

Two songs on a cassette from Sumatra

Haba Haba Group

Haba Haba Group exists on record only as two tracks, both in the regional Haroan Boru style, found on cassette tapes collected across Sumatra around 1989. The tapes were traded, given away or bought by crate-diggers who were piecing together a picture of the island's folk and pop cassette culture from the outside. They eventually became Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra Vol. 1, released in 2003 by the Seattle archival label Sublime Frequencies as part of a wider project documenting village and street music across Southeast Asia that commercial labels had never bothered to record. Beyond the two songs and the regional style they represent, nothing else about the group survives. There are no names and no other releases, only a cassette that outlasted whoever made it.

The Collection