Devils and Wonders in Bali

At several points, this disc of Balinese gamelan recordings made in 1974 had me punching the air in excitement. There’s so much energy and drama in this music, and so much strangeness. It’s like being blasted with a musical weapon from an alien planet. The album consists of two suites of dance music. The first is the accompaniment to a performance of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, and uses a large gamelan of 29 instruments – mostly bronze percussion plus drums and bamboo flutes. The type of ensemble isn’t identified, but sounds like a gong kebyar, a flashy and explosive form that’s the most popular style of Balinese gamelan right now. But the real thrill is the second suite, a mixture of heroic and erotic dances recorded at a benefit concert for a school. This features a rarely recorded bamboo gamelan called a joged bumbung, with many players rattling away at a million notes a second on marimba-like instruments while what sounds like an extremely high-pitched oboe screeches over the top.

It’s brilliant, and all the more extraordinary when you consider that the players aren’t professionals, but farmers relaxing in their spare time. It’s as if a group of Morris dancers were to take their sticks and launch into Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood. Plus there’s a contender for the greatest liner note in history: ‘One can distinguish clearly, in the background, the shrilling sound of thousands of bats gathering in trees just above the artists and the audience’. Who could ask for more?