Senyawa - Alkisah LP

Label: Phantom Limb

Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa have released the explosive, exploratory trip Alkisah. Instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi performs on homemade instruments, created from bamboo and other natural material, offering a rarely explored link between the ancient, traditional, and mystical musics of South-East Asia and the contemporary avant-garde. Vocalist Rully Shabara mines the human voice for its strangest and most challenging sounds, chanting, yowling and throat-singing like a chorus of demons in one song and an arcane, chattering machine in the next. About them, rhythms skitter and crash around like gamelan, punctuated with trash can drums and bulging plumbing percussion, while the doomier moments (such as "Istana") crush with seething waves of distortion and Shabara's mesmeric growls (a mix of Javanese, Bahasa, and other Indonesian languages). The record lurches from urgency to apocalypsis, twisting and twining fervorous Ramayana chant with animist mythology and hellish atmospherics.