Senyawa serve up a vision of hell today in a track so divisive Tobin actually leaves the studio, declaring “The End” of the show. The song is 9 minutes of utter brilliance but not appreciated by everyone it seems. In their rich 11 year history Senyawa have managed to blend traditional Indonesian sounds with punk and avant-garde. Senyawa have done this brilliantly despite Tobin’s scathing attitude toward Alkisah – today’s featured track. Earlier this year the band collaborated with 44 independent labels across the globe on the release of Alkisah. The labels were able to create their own artwork for the LP along with remix and master the tracks to appeal to local tastes. Quite a revolutionary thing in the music industry.

Disco reappears on the menu too today. Tobin has resisted his primal urges for too long and has finally given way. Therefore, we bring in two disco classics from Rare Pleasure thirty years apart. Old favourites Sault provide a 90s themed club classic and Jamie mixes things up last minute with Declan O’Rourke. Join us for this week’s Music Discovery, let’s dive straight in.

This week’s tracklist

1. Let Me Down Easy (short version) Rare Pleasure
2. This Thing That We Share Declan O’Rourke
3. Free Sault
4. Alkisah I Senyawa
5. But It’s You (yeah) Daytime Television
6. Superfine Feeling Rare Pleasure

More about Senyawa

Indonesia’s intense, vital experimental duo Senyawa release their newest album Alkisah via Phantom Limb. An explosive, exploratory trip through Senyawa’s unique sonics, Alkisah represents masters of unpredictable experimental music pushing their own boundaries.

Instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi performs on homemade instruments, created from bamboo and other natural material, offering a rarely explored link between the ancient, traditional, mystical musics of South-East Asia and the contemporary avant-garde. Vocalist Rully Shabara (who has collaborated with Phantom Limb as a solo artist before Alkisah) mines the human voice for its strangest and most challenging sounds, chanting, yowling and throat-singing like a chorus of demons in one song and an arcane, chattering machine in the next. About them, rhythms skitter and crash around like gamelan, punctuated with trashcan drums here or bulging plumbing percussion there, while the doomier moments (such as “Istana”) crush with seething waves of distortion and Shabara’s mesmeric growls (a mix of Javanese, Bahasa, and other Indonesian languages). The record lurches from urgency to apocalypsis, twisting and twining fervorous Ramayana chant with animist mythology and hellish atmospherics.