All-girl, hijab-wearing band Voice of Baceprot (VOB). – Instagram/VOB
JAKARTA: When the all-girl, hijab-wearing band Voice of Baceprot (VOB) played the Glastonbury Music Festival in the United Kingdom in June, it was not the first time for Indonesia to be represented musically on the global stage.
VOB is the latest in a long line of local artists, bands and musicians who have broken the barriers of language, genre and ever-changing trends to make it big in an international forum.
And while VOB has captivated the world mostly by its attitude, stylistic choice and savvy PR campaign, others who have come before them have won critical acclaim for their art and craft.
Take the Yogyakarta-based band Senyawa for example. This duo of Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi has been a fixture on the global festival circuit in the past decade, playing some of the biggest music festivals, like Spain’s Primavera and the biennial Europalia arts festival. Senyawa managed to captivate the global audience with its heady mix of Javanese traditional influence with avant-garde elements of Western music and a punk ethos that made its live performances a sight to behold. And it is not only regular music fans who are smitten by its craft.
In recent years, Senyawa has been invited to join in collaborative efforts initiated by some of the biggest names in rock and metal music, including guitarist from the United States band Sunn O))) Stephen O’ Malley, who joined the band's recording sessions for the album “Bima Sakti” (Milky Way) in 2018.
The biggest seal of approval, however, has come from the Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies, a venerated institution known for releasing some of the most interesting, albeit underappreciated, music from the world’s far-flung territories.
In 2018, Sublime Frequencies released Senyawa’s full-length “Sujud”, a rare occasion considering that the label released mostly old music considered classic from legendary musicians in their home countries like Egypt’s Omar Khorshid, Iran’s Kourosh Yaghmaei and Turkiye’s Erkin Koray.
Being on the roster of Sublime Frequencies is the ultimate recognition for the band’s exuberant talent and the recognition of Senyawa’s place in the pantheon of world music. After all, it was also Sublime Frequencies that brought the spotlight on other major Indonesian musical exports, such as Koes Plus and Dara Puspita, whose early albums from the mid-1960s were all remastered and repackaged for the world market in 2010.
While contemporary acts like VOB, Senyawa, Niki Zefanya and Rich Brian grace festival stages the world over, Indonesian music from the 1960s and 1970s from outfits like Koes Plus, Dara Puspita, AKA and Panbers are on the playlists of serious music fans, while the physical formats from the albums fill the shelves of self-respecting music collectors everywhere.
The second decade of the 2000s saw an explosion of releases made up of Indonesian popular music from the late 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s, compiled for high-quality releases by US and European labels.
Los Angeles label Now-Again in 2012 released a compilation of psychedelic and hard rock tunes from 1970s Indonesia under the title “Those Shocking, Shaking Days” to critical acclaim, successfully reintroducing classic Indonesian music to a new generation of listeners in the West.
In fact, “Those Shocking, Shaking Days” prompted a frenzy in the community of record collectors, especially in major cities in Indonesia, with fans eager to snatch up physical artifacts of music contained in the compilation, pushing the price of second-hand records to a record high.
A similar thing happened last year when London-based boutique label Soundway Records released a new compilation of music unearthed mostly from the catalogue of legendary Jakarta label Irama from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Exquisitely remastered and immaculately packaged, the compilation titled “Padang Moonrise: The Birth of The Modern Indonesian Recording Industry (1955-69)”, was well-received by connoisseurs of left-of-the-dial world music who look for new and unique sounds from regions beyond their musical radar.
In recent years, Indonesian labels have joined the fray in celebrating the rich legacy of homegrown music by repackaging music from specific genres and decades and marketing them for the global audience.
Last year, Jakarta-based independent label Elevation Records published a wax compilation of Arabic-inspired Malay music from the legendary singer M. Mashabi titled “Kafilah Nights” and distributed the release for the European and US market.
The album followed an earlier compilation of hard rock music from the band Panbers, which is also available for the global market. It is about time Indonesian music gets its long-overdue recognition regionally and globally.
This is, after all, a country with a rich tapestry of musical traditions and surely the one that has the most interesting music scene in South-East Asia.
Indonesia has also long been at the centre of cross pollination between East and West, a hot spot for the marriage of influences as disparate as Portuguese Pizzicato style and gamelan orchestra, Hadrami melody and Malay poetry.
Listening to music from Indonesia is hearing the heart beating of a nation on the move. And what a tune it is. – The Jakarta Post/ANN
