Sujud

Since 2010, avant-garde Javanese duo Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi have been conducting a series of sonic trials on the far fringes of Indonesian folk, deconstructing its traditional elements and harnessing the curious energies released to create intriguing, if sometimes demanding, music that evades classification beyond the rather undescriptive ‘experimental’ label.

Certainly their grungiest album of recent years, and all the more bewitching for it, Sujud flirts with both a quasi-religious and heavy metal aesthetic throughout, driven by the concept of tanah, a Bahasa Indonesian word meaning ‘soil-ground-land-earth.’ Musically, this is manifest in the sustained, distorted chords of a heavily de-tuned guitar (built especially by Suryadi for the album) and many incantations and invocations to various spirits, as Shabara throws his voice through an impressive gauntlet of styles that include impossibly deep throat singing, the heavy vibrato of Javanese folk songs, unearthly falsetto and gorilla-like wheezing, along with other, less describable noises that make it difficult to discern the point where the vocals stop and the effects begin.

Despite the inherent darkness of the album, it's never gloomy, and as the disparate and surprising elements come together, amid the madness lies a sentiment that is oddly redemptive. This is an altogether unique album.