Those without truly adventurous musical tastes need not apply. There’s really no reason to engage with Senyawa otherwise, even on a hypothetical level. It’s akin to asking a 6-year-old to try the haggis; the bar for persuasion is just too high.
An experimental duo from the island of Java in Indonesia, Senyawa lie somewhere at the intersection of noise, punk, metal, world and indigenous music, though they don’t like to use any such terms when describing their art.
Indeed, vocalist Rully Shabara and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi’s creations are so insistently avant-garde that they defy any conventional comparison to any other musical artist, living or dead. Consider that the group’s primary tool for producing rhythm and melody is a many-times-redesigned zither-like bamboo string instrument called the bambuwukir. It is Suryadi’s own invention, is not mass-produced and is not available to anyone but its creator. That’s the dictionary definition of “unique.”
Vocalist Shabara is every bit as experimental and boundary-busting. Some of what of he does could be called “singing,” as we in the West understand it. But much of his style is something else altogether, a hard-to-scan mixture of rapping, barking, screeching, melodic keening and what could be interpreted as animal calls. In places where actual words are called for, Shabara reaches for the various native tongues of his island nation.
On his bamboo instrument, Shabara’s partner Suryadi provides accompaniment that ranges from the sharply percussive to—when he employs a bow on his strings—something very much like the richness of cello. The duo’s own Tumblr site refers to Suryadi’s style as “modern-primitive.”
Novice listeners might assume the music of Senyawa is drawn from some centuries-old tribal tradition of Indonesia. Such an assumption would be wrong.
“I did not start or study traditional music,” says Shabara. His approach is taking some elements of traditional music as he knows it, and combining them with his own musical impulses. “It’s more about trying to bring both extremes together and naturally merge them.”
The end result has catapulted the duo to international prominence, mostly in Asia and Europe. Audiences outside Indonesia often regard the group as a curiosity (The blog The Weirdest Band in the World ranks Senyawa number 25 on its “Weird 100,” right behind an artist named Anklepants who performs in a mask that features an animatronic penis for a nose). In Indonesia, however, the band remains relatively unknown.
The duo has been performing since 2011 and just released their seventh album in 2018. They were the subject of a short 2012 documentary film from French documentarian Vincent Moon titled Calling the New Gods, and have performed around the world with a number of avant-garde musical acts, from the Japanese grindcore band Melt Banana to Seattle-based “death-doom” artist Stephen O’Malley.
Senyawa is really a product of two musicians who are blazing their own paths: Suryadi as a creative “what-if” instrument-builder whose inspirations come from materials and form, and Shabara, who believes that a vocalist doesn’t have to “front” a group or even be intelligible to provide a musical complement to the instrumentation. When two such expansive thinkers collaborate, it’s going to result in something unusual.
The duo’s exposure to American audiences has been limited. Shabara says Senyawa has played San Francisco and Los Angeles once each. In the studio, the duo has taken advantage of looping and other electronica enhancements, but in a live setting, they depend much more on in-the-moment creativity.
Shabara’s approach to vocalizing is to unhinge the singer from his traditional spot in a group, to treat the human voicebox as just another instrument, and not necessarily a conveyor of language. Of Senyawa’s albums, Shabara says some of them are almost all sung in language. Others are entirely improvised vocal sounds.
“It’s about exploring the extremes of human voice, yes,” he says. “But for us, it’s also about accessing channels to reach a certain state where you can manage the energy.”
Senyawa
Jan 26, 7pm, $20
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford
