Abstracting traditional Indonesian music with a strung-up bamboo spear and unique, tremor-inducing vocals, Senyawa strike a thunderbolt between their avant-garde influences and a strong connection to their cultural heritage. Playing live at OTO on a Monday night, their humid intensity made techno heads and metal fans alike weep for their mamas. Will bend your week right out of shape.
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Rully Shabara / vocals
Wukir Suryadi / bamboowukir
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Tracklisting:
(1hr 15 min)
Recorded by Shaun Crook on Monday 7th September 2015. Mixed by James Dunn. Mastered by James Dunn. Original photograph by Dawid Laskowski.
Available as a 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC download.
Senyawa's sound is comprised of Rully Shabara’s deft extended vocal techniques punctuating the frenetic sounds of instrument builder, Wukir Suryadi’s modern-primitive instrumentation. Inventions like his handcrafted ‘Bamboo Spear’; a thick stem of bamboo strung up with percussive strips of the animal skin along side steel strings. Amplified it fuses elements of traditional Indonesian instrumentation with garage guitar distortion. Sonically dynamic, the instrument can be rhythmically percussive on one side whilst being melodically bowed and plucked on the other.
As a duo they have been performing and playing together extensively over 5 years and have toured Indonesia several times over. In 2011 they were invited to perform internationally for the first time at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival sharing the stage with many great musicians such as Faust, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine.
Since then they have gone on to perform at MONA FOMA Festival in Tasmania, the Adelaide Festival with Korean singer Bae Il Dong, toured as special guests of Australian supergroup Regurgitator, performed at theGlatt und Verkert Festival in Austria along side Japanese guitar master Kazuhisa Uchihashi, as well as the Malmo Sommarscen Festival in Sweden, Salihara Literature Festival in Jakarta, CTM Festival in Berlin, SuperDeluxe Tokyo, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Clandestino Festival in Norway and Oct Loft Jazz Festival in China.
