Stretching over 5,000km wide, with 6,000 inhabited islands, 270 million people and over 500 languages and dialects, Indonesia is an epic country with multiple musical traditions. Worldwide the gamelan orchestras of Java and Bali are of course widely known, but more contemporary ‘Indonesian’ sounds are still elusive on the global world music scene. Which is a situation that suits the two members of maverick, intense duo Senyawa just fine, as they have no interest in being held up as representative of Indonesian music anyway.

“We don’t want to be labelled either ‘traditional’ or as just an ‘Indonesian group’; we just make our music as ourselves. What you hear is the expression of us two alone,” says vocalist Rully Shabara. Along with instrumentalist (and instrument maker) Wukir Suryadi, Senyawa are a very 21st-century band, creating music of both intensity and beauty, but music that is very hard to categorise or even describe, having elements of avant-garde improvisation, local musical rhythms and even the influence of extreme metal theatricality. 

Senyawa’s music can immediately strike the listener as being otherworldly, but for these deeply creative musicians, their first musical tastes were – like so many teenagers elsewhere in the world –  for classic hard rock, listening to Queen, Zeppelin and Iron Maiden. Unlike most teenagers though, from an early age Suryadi was exploring how to find new sounds by creating his own instruments. Although trained in traditional music styles of his home in Malang City, East Java, he quickly started experimenting. “I started building instruments for local theatre productions when I was 14. For me, building instruments is a medium of expression influenced by many things during the process, responding to the environment, objects or materials. But also starting from inspiration or ideas, depending on the need or what the instrument is for.” 

Now on stage and in the studio Suryadi uses not only an arsenal of guitars but also everyday objects like spatulas, other “industrial mutants” as he calls them like his ‘hurdy-gurdy Java,’ and most notably his custom-made ‘bamboo spear.’ As their Bandcamp page states, this striking instrument is ‘a thick stem of bamboo strung up with percussive strips of animal skin, alongside steel strings. Amplified it fuses elements of traditional Indonesian instrumentation with garage guitar distortion.’ With the aura of a quiet, brilliant scientist, on stage Suryadi moves between a dozen instruments with ease, creating an entire sonic world by himself. 

Weapons of mass improvisation: Suryadi's "industrial mutants"

A native of Sulawesi island, Shabara is a veteran of many projects including the experimental rock group Zoo in Yogyakarta, with a vocal style that defies any rational description, incorporating at times poetic lyrics but also reaches the type of sounds that rival the most extreme free jazz. Shabara explains, “for me singing is no different from any other form of experimentation; it is a continuous search of the inward potential. To be able to keep experimenting with voice, it is important to understand that the voice must be free from all constraints such as specific genre/type of singing, rules, and (to some extent) techniques. In Senyawa, what I aim for vocally is how to counter Wukir’s instruments with the right frequency, therefore the technicality in the singing is all about trying to accomplish that.” 

Shabara’s astonishing range and stamina, alongside his ability to produce seemingly inhuman, often animal-like sounds, makes him an electrifying presence on stage and in the studio, possessing a more extreme version of the non-language singing styles of Chris Combette or Björk. 

The duo first came together onstage to jam at a club night sponsored by the Yes No Wave punk rock label in 2011. The underground scene in Indonesia has grown since the early 2000s, although mostly centred in Java and Bali. Meeting for the first time that night in Yogyakarta, they quickly felt a musical connection and recorded an album in just four days after that initial meeting, before going on to play live at the Melbourne Jazz Festival, then many dates in the experimental live music scene in Japan. They felt a particular kinship with Japanese musicians. Indeed, Shabara’s earlier band Zoo were heavily influenced by Otomo Yoshihide, who Senyawa ultimately performed with, and drummer Tatsuya Yoshida. 

Each particular album since has had a different feel, while maintaining their originality. Their 2016 album Brønshøj (Puncak) slowly explored the sounds and textures of many of Suryadi’s hand-crafted instruments, while 2018 release Sujud, on the Seattle, Washington-based label Sublime Frequencies, pushed the sonic template to the extreme on an intensely powerful folk/metal collection. 

Senyawa’s conceptual vision and sound have been refined through the last ten years and now come into perfect focus on their new album Alkisah (translated as ‘Once Upon a Time’). It’s a lean, 38-minute song cycle that chronicles the building of a new, idealistic civilization that falls prey to greed and destruction. This is thematic territory that has been covered by many progressive rock or metal bands, both East and West, but never in a sound like this which includes junkyard percussion, electronics and Shabara’s at times terrifying vocals, mainly sung in Bahasa Indonesian (though, as the band make clear, this isn’t an Indonesian story, but a universal one that has occurred repeatedly throughout human history). Alkisah is a stunningly original work, in a sense like a mini-opera. It would be easy to imagine it being adapted into a full-scale stage production. 

Senyawa’s uniqueness extends to their decision to release the album internationally using local labels in each market, allowing those imprints to decide on release dates and even sometimes artwork, in collaboration with the band. “We see it as a goal to lead to more decentralisation of the music industry, so that both musicians and smaller labels will not be at the mercy of powerful music companies.” In the UK the wildly diverse Phantom Limb label has released the album, while the new experimental jazz-centric label Burning Ambulance is covering the US. 

With enthusiastic audiences around the world, the release of Alkisah would have normally seen the band embark on a lengthy series of live dates. Even with that on hold they remain busy, saying, “if this pandemic ends or not we will continue working. There have been several offers for tours in several countries… but currently citizens in Indonesia are prohibited from leaving the country except for state affairs. So we are preparing an online tour and are currently transferring a lot of our songs into acoustic (guitar acoustic and vocal) and percussion sets (vocal and percussion).” 

Musicians with the drive and creativity of Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi will not be slowed by a pandemic even if they can’t tour, nor by the less enthusiastic reception they have received from local promoters. “Indonesian promoters don’t take chances, but we have had great success with events abroad and will continue to bring our music to the world.” 

Read the review of Alkisah in the Songlines Reviews Database 

This article originally appeared in the April 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today