After an interview in Cinunuk, just outside the city of Bandung, Indonesia, with Kinoy, singer of brutal death metal band Undergod, he asks me if I want to follow him to a nearby holy source of water. I ask if there's really one nearby and he replies affirmatively, as if everybody knew besides me. I agree. We walk to the holy source through narrow alleys, passing by mounds of construction materials mixing with scattered human trash, asbestos rooftops, hanging clothes, vagabond cats, indigenous, infesting weeds and rests of houses and construction work. There is a strong smell of burning plastic that is taking over the night's air, generating a feeble, white haze blurring the contours of the dim lit post-agrarian urban territory. The source is a small puddle of murky water in a desolate space at the feet of a forsaken palm tree grove.
By Luigi Monteanni
There is an unusual silence; a silence that one only hears seldomly in Indonesia. A reassuring calm permeates the polluted air and the chitchat. Our voices lower. It's time for Kinoy to execute his ritual washing in the source. He asks us to take a distance and leave him in the dark. As we distance ourselves, Kinoy crouches down facing the source. He washes his hands, arms, and face, subsequently whispering what is likely to be an Islamic prayer. His eyes are closed and arms open, hands up facing the sky. When Kinoy is done, he comes to me and says, 'your turn'. Feeling completely out of place, but knowing that declining is not a possibility, I do the same, ridiculously emulating what I think he was doing. After it's done I ask him how it feels and he just says 'tranquil'. We hug each other. The entire atmosphere is surreal, but it discloses a certain tenderness. It's like experiencing the black metal imagination of nature rituals, of pilgrimages to land origins and ancient ancestors, and seeing it projected onto the archetype of an equatorial land of dilapidated urbanity and remains of ecosystems. Only, it is all very real.
"When we tap into the extreme metal imagery we are mainly drawn to a world of cold frost-bitten forests, lonesome mountains, and Norse mythology. Thanks to more than fifty years of ear-piercing guitars and rumbling thunderstorm-like drumming based in the West, we seldom realize that metal has become a global subculture that fits amidst a background of banana trees, holy white tigers and agrarian farmers from the equatorial highlands."
Looking at the development and expansion of the transglobal extreme metal movement might tell us that metal's emotional overdrive is rather suited to the tropic type of ambience. Since its birth in the UK with Black Sabbath's first homonymous album, metal has traveled the world reaching its furthermost corners, building communities that are both based on local connections, and on a global network of musicians and fans devoted to pushing the boundaries of fast-paced, loud, dangerous music. They are bound in fighting the common experience of living in the disenfranchised peripheries of a land traumatized by the mechanisms of global capital.
Although metal's golden age of slapstick and hairspray celebrity - with bands like Whitesnake and Mötley Crüe - is long gone, metal has never disappeared. It has instead retracted to the background of the music industry. It's now a movement of committed supporters, and, due to this, is often considered 'cult'. This does not imply that metal has become less popular. On the contrary, according to Spotify data, as well as research done by scholars of metal studies, metal is nowadays the most listened and diffused genre on the planet, reaching a canonization that has surpassed even classical composition. The most surprising aspect of all is that, even though metal was formally born in the UK and US, its popularity is now higher in the global south, where the cavernous, high-energy sounds of the genre are vibrating the air more and more.
The genre that, during its early onset developed in Scandinavia, has shown its head through scenes and bands in unlikely places such as Brazil, Botswana, Nepal and even Easter Island, is divided by different languages and social histories, but united under the aural pressure of power chords and double pedal drums.
But whereas Sepultura has put Brasil on the map and the stylish cowboy metalheads of Botswana have made it to the sectorial press and international festivals for their killer look, the Indonesian scene is still largely unknown even for lofty connoisseurs. Strikingly, if we shift our statistical methodology from accounting for demographic density ─ for which Finland and its impressive ratio of metal bands per capita gets the studded cake ─ and base ourselves on sheer numbers, Indonesia might be the biggest metal scene in the world. With bands such as Burgerkill, Jasad and Voice of Baceprot, the 'land between the waters' has been straying away from the cliché of gamelan aristocratic delicacy and nostalgia ever since the nineties.
Since the 1970s, the archipelago has had a musical avant garde that combined international experimental music trends with indigenous musical traditions, for which rock provided new means to reflect on what might constitute a 'distinctive' national and regional sensibility. Extreme metal in particular has been extremely relevant since its reception. In West Java Bandung metal and loud rock have been a vehicle of protest voicing discontent and rebellion, fueling the riots toppling second President Suharto and offering a language to discuss issues such as romanticization of indigenous culture, and tourism. This language was a tool that allowed musicians to oppose the orientalist image of an exoticized, backward country that is not 'metal' enough - or cannot play a standard, cosmopolitan type of metal such as, for instance, Metallica would.
Although Indonesia is full of interconnected metal circuits, if you'd ask around, you'd probably hear that everything has started in Bandung. Home of Indonesia's second largest ethnic group, the Sundanese, Bandung has been off the maps of regular tourism due to its lack of formal attractions and gimmicks of nature. Despite the sparse image given by travel guides, the city had a fundamental role for post-cold-war history. The 1955 Bandung conference, an alliance of non-aligned countries from Africa and Asia, counted, among others, nations like Mboto, Sudan, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Cambodia helped forging diplomatic ties between national bodies claiming independence from the western block's imperialism. Spawning the dawn of post-colonialism, the Bandung conference produced a certain spirit of refusal that survived in the oppositional stance of student organizations; a subcultural history that leads to both the riots against the regime of Suharto, and the thirst for extreme new music.
In this humus of youth grassroots movements and rebellious attitude, metal has found its center. Nowadays, it is difficult to go around without spotting people with metal outfits, a trend to which clothing brands such as Maternal Disaster and Heretics have contributed. In Bandung, every week one can attend metal concerts and festivals. They take place in universities, karaoke bars, cultural venues led by the state, as well as DIY locations and even military grounds. Most of the bands play groovy, slamming brutal death metal dense with blast beats and slow-churning growls, developing a style inspired by bands such as Sepultura, Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Bulldozer and Putridity, although on the fringe one can listen also to thrash, black and doom metal. The staggering stylistic homogeneity is attributed to the importance of participating musically in the community more than distancing themselves from the other with a distinctive approach. Musical choices are not mere whims, but enact the community's social values.
And yet, talking about Bandung as a center would be somewhat far from the truth, since everything has started in Ujungberung. This peripheral district in the east of Bandung only recently became a part of the administrative center. According to Kimung ─ a Sundanese intellectual, formerly part of rock-bamboo music ensemble Karinding Attack and the first wave of metal pioneers - in his reconstruction of the scene's history through his cult book Ujungberung Rebels, the Ujungberung community formed in 1995. It originated as a forum and frontline to account for the dynamics, turmoils and passion deriving from metal music and youth instability in what was the industrial center for garment production and export of Java.
As Man, vocalist of brutal death metal icons Jasad (corpse) and Karinding Attack, commented: 'We were called Homeless Crew because we never went home, we just stayed in the streets and at the studios.' Starting to get acquainted with metal music through the local Radio Generasi Mudah (radio young generation), the legendary Palapa music studio, Ujungberung became an important spot for local metalheads. Participating in this scene meant circulating information and resources. The possibility of metalheads coming from higher classes and backgrounds to share their access to foreign releases and music instruments gave birth to nationally and internationally renowned projects such as Sacrilegius, Burgerkill, Beside and Forgotten. From its inception, the scene started making itself heard and visible through a series of events named Bandung Berisik (Bandung noise); a partial aim of this initiative being to show that Bandung had a large basin of interest for metal music, which at the time was predictably seen as a genre appreciated by gangsters, drunkards, and antisocial people in general.
After the Homeless Crew generation, a second one led by death metal bands such as Undergod, started taking center stage. In 2009 BDMS organized the Bandung Death Fest, where active bands of the Ujungberung scene were invited to perform alongside regional arts such as réak, debus, karinding and pencak silat. This historical event was part of Ujungberung Rebels' and BDMS' commitment to spur the youth to appreciate and practice the values and traditions embedded in Sundanese art, inspired by the global metal tendency to relate each community to local specificities and folklore, which in the case of Bandung were perceived by the metalheads as slowly disappearing. After the locally famous AACC tragedy occurred in 2008, during which eleven people died in a stampede generated by the venue overbooking, metal music events were forbidden. As a response, in the following years metal musicians started gathering in the city playing traditional instruments to counteract the new stigma generated by the happening. Indeed, today's revival of traditional arts, and especially of the karinding mouth harp in West Java, is attributed unanimously to the Ujungberung metal scene.
Whereas its past participates in the narratives of class, marginality, masculinity and modernity that connected factory workers of deindustrializing areas all over the world, linking the post-bellic Birmingham populated by PTSD junkies of Black Sabbath with the capitalist annihilation of agricultural lands populated by male-dominated alcoholic gatherings in Ujungberung, few elements make this overlooked temple of shreds quite unique. If metal in Europe often preaches on solipsism and misanthropy, creating an environment sometimes dangerously playing with edginess, egotism and fascist imagery in which ethnic identity, family and religion are eschewed or, on the contrary, excessively celebrated, Ujungberung's musicians prevalently sing in Indonesian, when not in Sundanese, one of the 700 regional languages of the archipelago, using their indigenous languages to celebrate, in the lyrics, their ancestral customs and mythical figures, reading the contemporary world through indigenous language and ethnic tropes. On the one hand, there is the figure of the mythical king of Pajajaran kingdom Prabu Siliwangi, who transformed into a white tiger and escaped in the forest. On the other, there are the everyday lives of gangsters at the traditional markets at the Bandung peripheries: both sing of an unbound world of ethnic social experiences constructing the shape of Sundanese metalheads' identity one riff at a time.
In their first album 'Saguru Saelmu Tong Ngaganggu' ('One guru, one knowledge, they don't interfere with each other'), dated 2010, Undergod started to write in Sundanese to make the cosmopolitan listener uncomfortable. As Kinoy has told me: 'We were reading Metallica's lyrics and not understanding a word. So we decided that we should do the same. If they listen to Sundanese vocals they'll have to learn our language to understand. It will be them that will be forced to learn something of our culture.' Jasad's Man has added to this conversation from a different angle. The singer of the iconic 2012 album 'Rebirth of Jatisunda' stated: 'I do this because for me metal is war. I come to conquer with my music. If I sing in English I will not be a leader but a follower. That for me is backwardness.' Feeding into the narrative of conquery and rebellion, he adds 'that is why I wear Tor's hammer as a necklace. Is just like the Scandinavian bands that felt Christianity had conquered them.,'
One may note that this is exactly what Scandinavian black metal musicians have done, in projects such as Agalloch, Ensiferum and Wardruna. On the other hand, they illustrate ideas of masculinity that are seldom adopted in the global scene, figuring as fathers and husbands with responsibilities more than the classic nihilist, womanizers bachelors from hip hop, reggaeton and R&B. Similarly unexpected, Islam is a big theme in the Indonesian metal scene, sometimes promoted as a positive outlook on life, and bringing female metal fans and musicians to proudly wear the hijab. This is because, although bands share with the global metal scene the idea of an opposition to the status quo and of an uprising from below, priorities change dramatically.
'Instead of changing them, Metal adapted to Sundanese community values frowning on individualism and cynical outlooks on life, privileging instead the sense of belonging and community support that the genre promotes.'
In fact, if you'd ask Undergod's Kinoy, he'd tell you that he's not interested in international metal bands, feeling close only to the work of neighboring projects: 'I could have played anything else outside of metal, I'm just interested in the work of my community.' This brings us to the hardline brutal death bands talking about sadistic cruelty and sexual barbarism. Glenn Bloodgusher is the vocalist of Warkvlt, one of Indonesia's first bands carrying the flag of war metal: an aggressive, cacophonous, rabid and chaotic subgenre of blackened death metal, originated in the work of bands such as Angelcorpse, Revenge and Blasphemy and defined by endless blast beats, unnecessary blitzkrieg soloing and razorsharp tremolo picking. Since their first namesake 2012 album, Warkvlt has gathered members of the first and second generation of metal musicians like Opick of Sacrilegius and Papap of Jasad, also owner of the Pieces studio, the foremost hangout spot for past and present metalheads.
Interestingly, black metal was, at its dawning, more popular than brutal death metal. However, the previous slowly became less suitable due to conflicts with the media for its affiliation with satanic imagery and its pretense of exclusivity and elitism. About their work, Glenn remarks: 'differently from death metal, black metal is still completely underground although it was more popular at the beginning of the movement. This is due to the fact that there is even less money in this fringe: there is no entrance to the mainstream whatsoever and, whereas in central and east Java the supernatural lore is strong, providing themes adapted to rural projects, Bandung relies more on urban topics.' Glenn is also the organizer of the third generation of Bandung's metal festivals with his Flower City Death Fest, with which he's trying to provide a new infrastructure for less known metal bands to shine: 'now there is less interest in forming a metal band for the youth. So we need to push for auditions and free spaces of aggregation and practice, to go back to the origin of the scene, to the hangouts.'
Following this path, one finally encounters the most unique spawn of Bandung's metal underground: the choir of metal vocalists Ensemble Tikoro ('ensemble throat'). Robi Rusdiana is a teacher of classical counterpoint at Unpas university and leader of the ensemble. After playing in outfits such as Divine Blackness, he decided to create a metal vocal choir bringing together various vocalists from the local scene such as Glenn. Metal vocal choirs is a phenomenon that seems to be on the rise, but if we really want to stick to chronology as the yardstick of trueness, Ensemble Tikoro might be the first one. This idea is opposed by the humble Robi, who replied that metal choirs have always existed since ancient times. In his perspective, this type of extreme vocal performances based on bestial screams, monstrous growls and ear-shattering shrieks belonged to warriors, shamans and hunters, being appropriated by metalheads only later on. For my part, I would reply that these types of social aggregations probably did not use precise techniques such as those that metal has codified, and certainly did not perform pieces that are written by the ensemble conductor to a score. In fact, Ensemble Tikoro performs their songs led by Robi as conductor in a fairly classical manner and in all kinds of settings: metal festivals, universities, bus terminals and student collectives.
Their extended vocals rehearsals, which I had the pleasure of attending, are open to all but absolutely disciplined: after trying all the extended techniques of metal from screech to growl to fry, everyone rehearses the pieces from their own piece, which often have ironic overtones and are all in Sundanese. Themes include all the ways Sundanese people have of saying that they have slipped or hit their head, polymetric vocalizations to compose the word clitoris, or a series of sounds that mimic the vocalizations of drivers of angkot, Indonesia's traditional public transport. Robi motivated this by saying that 'of course, Sundanese culture is a lot of different things and not only mythology.' Although they have also performed in Australia with choreographer Lucy Guerin, they have not yet released a proper album, circulating the few tracks they have recorded only on CD-Rs that Robi makes for friends and, recently, on his Bandcamp as free download. This is part of their philosophy that resonates with their often free of charge performances in front of metalheads and average city dwellers, that predates Metallica in a democratizing fashion through their tenet 'and music for all', thinking that it is far more interesting to present their art to a wider audience, than to have it circulate within narrow social groups.
But keeping the focus on Bandung would make any report too insular. Is precisely when we widen the perspective that we can understand more on the uniqueness of the scene and its geography. Particularly, following the trail of black metal, let me account for two projects using agricultural symbolism to articulate metal experience and imagery, intertwining it with critical themes and exceptional unicity.
Pure Wrath is the child of Januaryo Hardy and one of the most popular atmospheric black metal projects in Indonesia. Exploring topics such as nature, death, despair and the dark corners of Indonesian history since 2017, Pure Wrath has released three full lengths, the last of which, Hymn to the Woeful Hearts has dropped on the French Debemur Morti Productions, which has also put out records by bands such as Manes, Archgoat and Blut Aus Nord. Born as a solo project exploring personal matters, Pure Wrath has expanded in 2019 to include many session musicians of the Bandung underground and perform live, experimenting with the much larger flexibility offered by black instead of death metal. Ryo shows an advanced and extremely self-aware conception of what metal and music are and should do: 'For me metal is a genre using shock and aggressivity in order to convert attention to an extreme open-mindedness, getting you to think about important, even sacred matters. Is that type of energy that makes you want to know more about the background and the lyrics.' Pure Wrath uses this primeval terror to explore and convey important matters that are still ignored in much of contemporary Indonesian arts: 'from our second work onwards I tried to talk more about problems that happened in Indonesian history, as my family was also impacted by some of these happenings. You know, history is written by the winners, so I try to present new versions of Indonesian history that you don't get in school. It's the young generations that are the most critical. I just try to work with specific topics to make them interesting and have the youth talk about them openly.' Of course Ryo refers to the heavy bearings of post-independence Indonesia from '65 on, using lyrics as a dog-whistle for the youngsters.
In fact, whereas on most metal t-shirts and merchandise you can spot the usual brutalized body parts and a variety of casual, edgelord imagery, Ryo's artworks always relate to the Indonesian countryside, presenting the backs of anonymous agrarian workers in an ominous natural environment. 'For agrarian countries like Indonesia they [the farmers] are fundamental; the grassroots population. Also when it comes to colonialism, it was all about the farmers and their relationships to the colonizers.' he states. 'But no one wants to be a farmer anymore, everyone wants to live in Jakarta and work in an office. With this, the government destroys the rural areas because no one lives there. For these reasons I think that farmers are a way more important topic than ancient beliefs and the like.' Of course, this type of heterodox approach has its price, especially in a country relying so much on public fundings and institutional support. As Ryo stresses: 'If you show [indigenous] cultural features in your metal, now it's easier to tour, because the government will easily support you, especially after the good examples of bands such as Jasad. But if you don't and you have lyrics like ours it's impossible to think about any help.
But although exceptional, Pure Wrath is not a unique entry in critical farmer-themed black metal (as if this could be a genre), making the pair with somewhat of a 'trickster twin'. Roaring from the hills of Depok, Bvrtan (a union of the terms buruh and tani, i.e. agricultural worker) is a unique project. Looking at the cover art and style, one can discover a Darkthrone parody where instead of being Nordic forest trolls, ours are agrarian workers from the highlands of West Java, employing nicknames like Penjaga Mvsholla (guard of the prayer room) and Kuli Arit (sickle labourer). With titles such as Ritval di Gvbvg Sawah di Bawah Kilatan Petir (Ritual in a paddy hut by the light of a thunder), Koperasi Kegelapan yang Memonopoli Ekonomi Pedesaan (The Dark Cooperative Monopolising the Rural Economy) and Tragedi Kegelapan dalam Serangan Tikvs ke Sawah Kami (The Tragedy of Darkness of the Rat Attack on Our Fields) Bvrtan have no less than seven albums under their belt and a few splits, including an EP with Norwegian Taake. All fun and games, if not for the fact that Bvrtan are somewhat blacklisted by the Indonesian state and use their monikers to keep their identities secret. Posing as nameless peasants means for the members, they are creating a space to make a direct criticism of the archipelago's agrarian policies. A space where to confront unjust historical rulings such as second president Suharto's dispossession of state-community owned land for the allocation of large rural areas to national and international vested interests close to the regime; laws for which the rural population, the 'worshippers of the sugar cane fields' celebrated by the black metal band, suffered the most. Bvrtan is the perfect example of how metal and extreme sounds are sometimes used in Indonesia to ridicule higher powers and highlight obvious problems of everyday life.
'If it's funny and sardonic, it does not mean that it is not dangerous.'
At the beginning of my research I was puzzled on why individuals wearing leather jackets with spikes and showing off their t-shirts with brutally mutilated bodies and unreadable writings would solidarize and even identify with a social group like the farmers. This segment of society is often so distant from them in spatial, temporal, and aesthetic terms. After all, I have never encountered any agrarian worker during my study; if anything, not anyone who liked metal music. Just like the research by scholars such as Jeremy Wallach and Keith Kahn-Harris shows, metal is increasingly a phenomenon of the middle-classes. Thus, in West Java Ancestors and farmers are more a category that emerges as imagined by metalheads. When I interviewed Budi Dalton on this topic ─ a famous Sundanese actor, musician and authority researching the history and customs of the Sundanese people, supporter of the local punk and metal bands ─ he answered that 'rich or intelligent people from the country usually go out, learn, and come back, but they bring types of knowledge which push the culture far from his indigenous people: the farmers, the herders, the fishermen. They enter politics and lose that kind of focus on where we come from. Metal, conversely, employs music as a language that stresses the same points. It points at what is wrong in our world; that society and who rules it are broken.' It is apparently this type of sensory, musical 'language' that inspired the New Order's student uprisings in '98 as a consequence of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. In 1998, a movement of protest and disobedience led by students and inspired by new, aggressive and alternative styles of music from the West, ultimately played a major part in president Suharto's downfall.
Generally, it's always good to be wary of narratives bringing the perils of nostalgia and cultural enclaves, since such a rationale would leave out the possibility of striving for less gendered, parochial and gerontocratic spaces and relationships. After all, a less conservative approach to many issues and a deeper reflection on how scenes have to be articulated after they are born shows how they can be used as a space to empower people and raise the unnegotiable noise of social unruliness instead of falling back into statal and hierarchic cooptation. One may argue that providing an outlet for anger, plays into the cards for the powers that be - and yet, the merits of the West Java and Bandung's metal scenes are obvious and admirable. From a chaotic, geographic musical periphery with scant infrastructural access, they have managed to take part in a global movement of artists demonstrating that shredding and screaming can lift geographical borders even only for a moment, while at the same time not giving up on their peculiar experience of place, past, identity and language.
Of course, these descriptions are somewhat hagiographic. Taking for granted that these communities do not have any weakness would project once again the vicious colonial narrative romanticizing the youth, the lower classes and other ethnicities as virtuous subjects with no stain. Looking from afar instead of dangerously near to this behemoth of sound, divergent opinions emerge. Since its beginnings metal has overtaken the archipelago by force, spreading and establishing new communities everywhere. In the meantime, Bandung has seen metal's rise to fame, which shot it to the forefront of mainstream music, catering to middle and upper classes and reducing its countercultural potential, thus putting in danger the labeling of the genre as something underground, aka opposed to the vulgarities and injustices of the industry. In recent times the scene often benefits from the support of cigarette companies, clothing brands, television and sometimes even the state, generating controversy and competition among the metal music army's soldiers. At the same time, most of the musicians state that they don't care about appearing countercultural.
'Quite the opposite: they often want to show that metal is not a bad thing, and that it can teach powerful lessons and lead to concerned, yet positive walks of life.'
On another note, some of the younger interviewees have remarked that nowadays' scene is damaged by issues of seniority that celebrate the iconic contributors and minimize the participation of new bands, which feel inadequate or never ready to be involved. Some of my interviewees from the scene have noted how the pride in the scene often leads to conservative protectionism, strange musical suprematism and lack of creative and ideological development. According to this rationale, the perceived sacredness of the scene is precisely what spoils the possible heterogeneity of bands' musical endeavor, the possibility of collaboration with other musicians outside the city and the possibility of facing issues of inclusion and gender visible in the scene. On the one hand, the community is currently addressing these problems by trying to put these subjects center stage; a strategy that is attracting more women to cover managerial positions or become band leaders. On the other hand, young bands are definitely still a rarity. While this is deemed by the first and second generations a consequence of social media interrupting the sacred practices of metal hangouts and productive, collective boredom, looking at how sprawling the punk scene is with young people in their early twenties, some suspicion arises.
To conclude, I want to address these frictions from another angle. The global metal movement could learn much from West Java, where communal experience and social unity are more important than anything else; sometimes, alas, even when this erases individual responsibility and heterodox critical stances. Overall, although less popular, extreme metal in Bandung is alive and will not surrender soon. Even from the hegemony of the contemporary mediascape, where, from Resident Advisor to Vice, we are convinced that there is no alternative to the desolation of late-capitalism dance music, bands like Brvtan, Undergod and Ensemble Tikoro continue to offer another paradigm. Through the muscular contraction of false vocal chords' otherworldly shrieks and the blade-like harmonic saturation of vibrating strings, they cover the entirety of the spectrum of human struggles: their stubbornness, discipline and consistency can surface with all their energy, mixing fast urbanization processes with palm trees, ancestral tales, colliding bodies, regional values and sheer, life-affirming power.
When one hears the delicate soundscapes emerging from Mariam Rezaei's turntables, she seems almost ephemeral. Then when she speaks, she goes straight to the core of her subjects, unflinching and with an eye for detail that cuts right through the fluff. Rezaei is at once more hardcore than gabber, and gentler than any feather-in-the-hat singer-songwriter. HATCH sat down with Newcastle's favorite urban myth at Another Sky Festival, Dalston, London.
At Oscillation Festival 2021, Brussels, Rezaei returns her audience in a state of wonder. She is beat juggling, creating distortions by pressing a needle into her turntable's vinyl, as well as the felt underneath. It results in glitches that are at once thoroughly rhythmic, and playfully dissonant. In manipulating her records, she appears with her trademark frown, absorbing time signatures from jazz and footwork into one gently allusive blur. Here is a pure soundscape, one that communicates both her love of her craft, and a passion for the unpredictable.
'The room was so silent, I thought the show was going nowhere,' she says of her gig at Oscillation. 'But then I saw DJ Marcelle nod to the beats, and I figured that, hell yes, I'm on track.'
The importance of chance in Rezaei's work reminds one of the Franco-American tradition of concrete music, as raw and mature as it is playful. 'With the turntable it's all about the pliability of what happens in that moment,' says Rezaei. 'In pressing the needle to vinyl, there is an element of chance you just cannot escape.'
With vinyl spinning around as she presses and contorts its surface, this is the first, obvious layer of chance involved in the process: the fact that the timings of her pointillistic rhythms are erratic and lived, almost opposed to the more-or-less exact ones of a drum machine or a clock.
Throughout her compositional practice, other layers of chance are added as Rezaei goes. During her collaboration with Evicshen and Maria Chavez in Les Halles, January 2024, records are cracked to pieces against the floor, their gentle crevices played with the ulterior tip of the women's fake nails. 'As people, we manipulate and contort all the time,' says Rezaei. 'What should be the matter with applying the same principles in music? Can't we integrate our humanity into it, all the while respecting the building blocks of the creative process?'
When those building blocks are sedimented into cultural codes and habits, at least a part of their potential seems to die. 'Turntablism stems from hip hop culture, where certain ways of doing definitely served their purpose,' Rezaei declares, 'But the craft is now often viewed as a genre, with certain rules that apply.'
And yes, vinyl and the tradition of turntablism - that once spread through the democratization of audio equipment, traveling disk jockeys, and random street parties - now has a certain air of exceptionalism cultivated around it, isolating it within genre bounds and keeping it from merging with different artforms.
'We need to get rid of that fetishist aura,' says Rezaei. 'Turntablism is not a genre, it'a technique.' She mentions how artists like Jlin get backlash from the footwork community for using different time signatures, or working in ballet. 'This is madness, and with the turntable it's the same. It's an instrument that can be absorbed in different ways, rather than imposing its own set of rules.'
In her podcast 'These Are The Breaks,' Rezaei describes the many faces of turntablism, from the polyrhythmic Japanese noise art of DJ Smith, to free jazz in Europe and folk music in the Middle East. 'There is so much that's still possible within this artform,' she exclaims. 'But to find out what that is, some things need to change.'
'There is no such thing as 'experimental' turntablism. All turntablism is experimental.'
If you look at the birth of jazz music, it came from both cultural exchange, and the possibility of notation, implying a potential for a very public sharing of ideas. For this kind of collectivity to properly take place, she reckons,'we need to stop letting ourselves be pinned against each other. It would help if we were no longer entertaining jealousy, or the suffocating expectations of the industry.'
Having led experimental music platforms such as TOPH and TUSK North, and as a lecturer at the university of Newcastle, she takes charge and creates the kind of communal systems she believes in, all the while keeping a focus on the people she is surrounded by. Putting others at the core of her work has contributed, in her sounds, to an openness, a generosity, a precision. 'We need to make music from a place of concern and consideration,' she says.
Iran
At Another Sky the latter travels her face in the form of a frown, while her hands move swiftly as if she were a magician distracting our gaze. On her chopping board are samples of her own voice, merged with vocals from the women's protests in Iran, by which she points out the distance, as well as the proximity between the two, creating an intimate and vulnerable solo piece. 'This piece was conceived as a commission from Another Sky Festival,' says Mariam Rezaei. 'This is exactly the kind of gesture an artist appreciates: the space and trust to create something new.'
In the samples of 'Sing', Iranian women's voices are recorded as they sing standing alone in a mosque. This could be considered a good use of the temple's acoustics. However, since 1978, it's no longer just that. Under Ayatollah Khamenei's current regime, women of all ages have been persecuted for the mere act of loosening their hijab or - in the case of the 16 year old Sarina Esmailzadeh - recording themselves while singing a cheeky pop song.
Hardliner interpretations of the Quran, here, function as a tool for the survival of misogynistic power, naturalizing the detachment of women's bodies from their own basic rights. With 'Sing', Rezaei takes a position in a strand of Iranian women artists that commit implicit subversion.
In Rezaei's suggestive image, she pledges for the re-introduction of woman's voice - one of the first impressions that coördinate our movement when we are born - to the Iranian public and religious sphere. The women standing in the mosque share their unimpeded subjectivity with its walls, in unison with the temple's acoustics. In this way, Rezaei seems to ask for a space where religion and femininity can coexist, a reality where a woman's potential is allowed to travel as widely as her own talents can.
'In Iran, singing is an act that, in and of itself, has become questionable.' She expresses. 'It begs the question, why can't something beautiful exist within another beautiful space?'
'These are not just nice sounds,' says Rezaei. 'You can hear the vocals bouncing off of the walls of the mosques - the samples are filled with the moment they were recorded in, they are charged.' Within the small time frame of Rezaei's samples, there is so much intensity that a multitude of events seem to happen at once, passing you by at the blink of an eye. Rezaei's fragile music language, too, is constantly shapeshifting: emerging from the basic matter of vinyl and needle, it seems to take place not in the eclectic 'beyond', but rather an introspective 'in between'.
In all its heterodoxy, we might consider it a way to live the ambiguous aspects of identity, transforming them into a virtue, rather than a source of misunderstanding. Balancing the dissonant and the harmonic, Rezaei's tones offer a painterly freedom to remain vague, thereby organizing her - and our - search for definition, and celebrating art's never ending failure in finding it.
Thank you Evita Manji, Mariam Rezaei, Luigi Colzato, Wouter Vanhaelemeersch, Nick Baeyens, Emiel Vandekerckhove, Elias Peeters, Ayla Willaert, xox-is-not-alone ♡
DJ TRAVELLA at Brussels Airport
We meet at the lobby of the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Brussels, where DJ TRAVELLA appears imbued in Chanel. His smile is as broad and exciting as his 180BPM - driven beats, and he is more than at ease within the wooden curves of the hotel's swanky art deco interior. For 2 years now, the Nyege Nyege-signed performer has been touring Primavera to the beaches of Italy. There, he jumps up and down his decks like a coil spring, with a frantic crowd tuning in to his every single hi-hat and drum roll.
On the coastline of East-Africa, wedding celebrations would be unimaginable without the Bantu people's Ngoma drums, or the gentle singsong of afro-pop and bongo flava. Perhaps it's this close entwinement between music, and recurrent aspects of daily life - prayer and celebration, but also storytelling and healing - that helped preserve Tanzania's music DNA against years of Arab, German and British occupation. 'Kwaya' choir song, for example, was preserved in church ceremonies during the British mandate, and became a regular component at schools and social events.
Music and movement are not only linked through ritual practice: they are linked in Masai language, affluent with words that conflate the meaning of 'dance' and that of 'sound'. In the word 'isilil', for example, we find 'to sing,' while the word also refers to prayer, and dancing to honor God or the need for rain. Music and dance here, are both reduced to their bare essence: a movement, a pledge for something better.
This interconnection between music and movement runs deep within Tanzanian culture. When the bapagati porters started carrying cloth, guns, wire and liquor through the East-African trade routes in the 1800s, they had every aspect of their day governed by music, from the 4:30 a.m. drum beats to wake the cooks, to the evening dance before bedtime. Porters waiting on the coast would compose songs about being swindled by waungwana, city-dwelling Muslim converts who negotiated the porters' labor contracts.
In the songs conceived during their inland travels, other thoughts would come up, fears of solitude or getting lost. The dwelling bapagati would sing to speed up time: when they neared their destinations, the music would change to reveal their desires, such as "Kesho Samaki, Kesho Ugali" (Tomorrow Fish, Tomorrow Porridge).
Growing in numbers at a high speed, their caravans proved to be an influential means to circulate music, songs, poetry, and language. The first building blocks of singeli music were laid during these exchanges, where taarab developed through contact between Zanzibar, India, the Indian Ocean Islands, North-Africa and the Middle-East.
The sound of Tanzania
With its name signifying 'delight with music' or - the Arabic interpretation - 'enchantment,' taarab consists of tropical textures that merge with delicate, stirring rhythms: speed up the acoustics to 200 BPM, loop them, and you are on the way to create singeli.
The essential building blocks of singeli are fast, frenetic percussion, and chaotic sampling: under pressure from local taarab musicians fed up with having their recordings massacred, singeli has turned across the Atlantic, thereby proving itself a deconstructing force that spares no cliché. This life-affirming energy is visible in the explosive dancing that goes on in Tanzania street parties, that often come about spontaneously and are all too quickly associated with violence, drugs and gangs.
It's for this reason that the parties are, more and more, interrupted by Tanzania's increasingly repressive Magafuli government. Stimulated by a lack of opportunities, many singeli producers are eager to play outside Tanzania. Thanks to Kampala-based African music powerhouse Nyege Nyege Records, some are able to, spreading singeli throughout Europe like wildfire.
'Tabilia'
The story of DJ TRAVELLA, however, is one that started in silence. 'My sisters listened to bongo flava once in a while,' he says, 'but generally, there was not much music going around in the household.' This is because his father is a sheikh, a religious authority and town elder thinking music to be unsacred.
In reality, there was little effect to his conviction: it might even have driven DJ TRAVELLA to his roommate's computer, where he would produce beats in silence. 'Through other friends, I started playing 10 minute time slots at wedding parties,' says DJ TRAVELLA. Since then, his lust to play live music has been relentless, fueled by a bold, unabashed attitude.'I followed artists like Bamba Phana and Machiavelli online,' says DJ TRAVELLA. 'Every time they went abroad, they tagged Nyege Nyege. I kept writing the label, 200 messages a day.'
After weeks of persisting, a reply from one of the CEO's popped up on his screen. 'All he said was, 'nice speed, bro.' Two years later, touring Europe is done with the same energy as when DJ TRAVELLA navigates his drum rolls from behind the decks. 'There will never be a moment where I sit down and say, this is it, I can look back on what I've created, this is enough,' TRAVELLA explains.
'My ideal was to go to Europe and to travel,' says DJ TRAVELLA. 'That's why I chose my name as a prediction, and built my reality through a wish, 'tabilia'. One might say, that his 'Mr Mixondo' (2022) is that prayer: sampling music in Fruti Loops, the producer then processes them in Virtual DJ, bringing about frantic drumrolls clashed with gentle, breezy melodies built from dembow to trap.
'There is no summit, there are no limits to my trajectory. 'It's like how new children are born every day. There is no point of satisfaction here, no 'end' to the world I am building.'
In the meantime, DJ TRAVELLA has turned his quiet household into an IDM powerhouse. 'My father is proud and, since I started to make my own money, gives me the space to play music at home. They didn't even have to invest a 100 shilling, and I'm making a living that I can share with my sisters and parents.'
In submitting himself to Tanzania's deconstructed music culture, DJ TRAVELLA has allowed for it to change his household to the core: it has built the 20-year old a life not unlike that of East-Africa's 19th bapagati messengers, with caravans omitted for business-class flights, and the singsong of travelers, replaced by the frenetic techno emerging from TRAVELLA's USB stick. 'People need to learn that the musicians of Dar Es Salaam are innovators,' says DJ TRAVELLA, 'and that our music is both magnetic, and homegrown.'
Special thanks to Oliver and Derek of Nyege Nyege Tapes & Kathleen Bomani for translating the interview ♡