EVERY GENRE PACKAGES: Indonesian Music (6 January 2025)
Indonesia: wkwkwk*
🇮🇩 Today features our second country-specific genre recap, after Brazil. These middle powers may occupy large swathes of the tropics on different hemispheres, but in a way, their musical breadth, diversity, and distinctiveness
A precursor to this column was my discovery of the Spotify Charts that tally up the streams for every country the platform hosts a few years back. I’d precise different countries’ situations, noting the level of international penetration, the unfamiliar times, and the overall mood. As I’d check Indonesia, I’d notice a peculiar penchant towards sentimental and sadder songs, dominating both domestic, Indonesian-language and international hits. For example, The 1975’s melancholy “About You” sits at #66 on today’s chart in Indonesia where it’s not ranked globally at all. I’ve never been able to corroborate why this is. But since then, Indonesia has always been one area of musical intrigue, and last year’s exploration helped open me to so many other ways in which the archipelago’s music stands apart.
That connection feels fated at times—the first time a random genre of the day was Indonesian, gamelan beleganjur, I walked into my lecture hall to find a presentation group finishing up a gamelan demonstration. We met four distinctive gamelan forms in last year’s column, each a different permutation of the long history of the rarefied classical ensemble, developed over centuries through lineages of formal apprenticeships across the nation’s western, higher population islands.
Each gamelan ensemble’s history and output constitutes its own unmistakable experience—gamelan beleganjur as a “musical defibrillator”, gamelan semar pegulingan’s softness once lulled royals to sleep where us modern peasants now use pre-recorded rain sounds. Gamelan jegog’s intimidatingly large (and potentially deafening) bamboo keys are a feat of timbral contrast, as are the tonal drums of gondang. Gamelan gong gede is perhaps the most fascinating insight of these into the intersection of colonialism and musical history—the gongs, they were a’changin.
On the pop side, one of the crown jewel discoveries of this column for me was funkot, Indonesian techno that subconsciously channels Indonesia’s long history of spiritual communication via intense polyrhythmic music, often in certain gamelan forms. Funkot brings that spirit to the club world, and I’m really not sure if I’ve heard a better dance album that Barakatak’s Bandung Bergoyang. Its syncretic vision follows in a line of different popular genres through time, like dangdut’s Bollywood, psychedelic, and rock influences. Keroncong represents both the ephemeral nature of ‘contemporary’ music and ingenuity in blending Javanese musical theory with instruments borrowed from pieces of colonial history.
Today, I listened to Zaman, Zaman, a gorgeous shoegaze set by The Trees and The Wild for a more recent slice of avant-garde Indonesian musicians’ vision. Is it a stretch to say gamelan ensembles were doing shoegaze before shoegaze? Very much so. But these classical forms have developed multitextural, complicated blurs of rhythms and melodies centuries prior to those downward-looking guitarists. Even if the similarities end there, Zaman, Zaman shows a penchant for long-form glory among Indonesian musicians of vastly different forms, like the title track’s tender arpeggio base continuing to scintillate as the track becomes awash in drama and brash breaches into its core.
Classical
Pop
* wkwkwk is the Indonesian texting way to say hahaha.