Senyawa – Alkisah

Phantom Limb / Dekorder / and forty-two others worldwide

Senyawa apparently move in circles that include your Stephen O’Malleys and your Damo Suzukis and your Oren Ambarchis. But let’s not hold that against them. They’re an Indonesian duo that use… well, it’s not clear what of these sounds is orthodoxly “instrument” and what’s sound / processed noise / loops. Synths, junk percussion and vocals seem to be the core flavours. But there’s quite a lot in the mix.

There’s a couple of ways you could listen to Alkisah. I can see the connection to what you might call alt-metal, or doom-y strides — lugubrious, looming basslines over incomprehensible (to me) vocals is perhaps not too far away from a more excitable SunnO))) (the bits with Malefic on vocals) — but that’s not what’s doing it for me. The junk percussion points me somewhere in the direction of Neubauten as well, but neither of those comparisons fit well. Except maybe as a way in for folk outside of South-East Asian traditions.

See, what they seem to do a lot of is have a few elements — let’s call them the bedrock — and those will loop or otherwise be repetitious. And then there’s all this other stuff that appears – so the structures are often something like: establish loop -> establish vocal phrase -> repeat -> have a back and forth between vocal phrase and noisier elements. So that’s relatively simple — except a bunch of those noisier elements are changeable; some end up being repetitious, forming parallel (ie, different tempo and signature) rhythms, some stay as kind of junk-y noise.

There’s not a great deal of what might be considered melody here, but that’s not to say it’s lacking, just that it exists somewhere closer to bass registers. There’s a really interesting thing happens with intensity where the pieces don’t quite crescendo — in the sense of getting louder — but become more tightly wound, adding more unstable rhythmic elements until the vocals are done.

And those vocals are great. Apparently tri-lingual(!) and veering chaotically from chanting to shouting, but always, so far as I can tell, well within a kind of rhythmic phrase. What I mean is that this could sound like a bunch of random noise having a back-and-forth with the vocals, but there’s a kind of lateral rhythmic density that’s putting it well into a territory that’s more engaging than the kind of alt-metal stuff I mentioned above (not to be too disparaging, but a lot of that material is compositionally limited and relatively minimal). You could say Senyawa were minimal, but I’d probably recommend you put your ear-glasses on if you did.

There’s two themes that remind me of Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth here — and that is definitely due to my exposure to that record more than anything else. One, there’s a bunch of sounds produce by metallic strings being hit with objects, and secondly there’s a bunch of dramatic pitch variation done from slack to taut. It’s not a familiar sound to Western stringed instruments but (and I’m stretching what little knowledge I have here) it’s possibly better known to folk familiar with suangs or guzhengs. That is, instruments which use dramatic pitch bends using slack or distended strings — typically a “bend” in Western music doesn’t go that far, but a lot of East and South-East Asian strings are a lot less fussy about that stuff.

I should say that if it looks like I’m trying to paint this as very “Eastern” music — it’s not, in a lot of ways. But it is in others. It’s not forty minutes of traditional Indonesian music. But neither is it a facsimile of Western stylings. Alkisah is definitely something out on its own, being odd and shouty and rhythmically taut, but not excessively regimented. It’s good. You should listen to it.

-Kev Nickells-