Java-Futurism is an aesthetic-anthropological research project that follows the ongoing decolonisation of sound art, noise, and experimental music from the perspective of Indonesia. Java-Futurism is a term coined by Lintang Radittya, an instrument-builder and noise musician from Yogyakarta. Lintang is a collaborator of the project and one of our sources of “ethnographic theory”.
Lintang Radittya performing with his self-build noisy Wayang puppet with a small synthesizer attached. Teater Garasi, Yogyakarta, 2018. Photo: Sanne Krogh Groth
Working ethnographically at the intersection of musicology, performance studies, and anthropology, we trace the artistic and curatorial decentering of the Western aesthetic tradition as sound artists, noise musicians, and experimental instrument-builders from the Global South – aided by critical European festival curators – have burst onto the global scene, challenging the aesthetic genre of experimental music and the Western bias in art history.
Noise and experimental music in Indonesia – a place in which few people experience noise as a problem – is a genre-breaking and raucous phenomenon produced through vibrant forms of experimentation that defy classificatory boundaries. In Indonesian noise and experimental music, past and future, politics and aesthetics, creativity and possession, mysticism and technology melt together in new energetic ways that destabilise conventional histories of both art and politics, and open up to the possibilities of a decolonial aesthetics which in recent years has begun to capture the imagination of curators and audiences at European music festivals.
Setabuhan performing at the festival CTM in Berlin in January 2019. Photo: Nils Bubandt.
Across Indonesian urban centers, the experimental music and noise artists, for their part, are also social activists who are imagining new political, social, and aesthetic futures on the basis of a Javanese past that might never have been. Welcome to the futures of Java.
Java-Futurism runs from 2020 to 2024. It is conducted by Sanne Krogh Groth, a music historian from Lund University, and Nils Bubandt, an anthropologist from Aarhus University.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Swedish Research Council as well as the moral support from friends and collaborators in Indonesian noise and experimental music. Java-Futurism is very much a study with (and not of) them.
Java-Futurism is a term coined by Lintang Raditya, an instrument-builder and noise musician from Yogyakarta. The term plays on the political and temporal aesthetics of the concept “Afro-futurism”, and refers to the contemporary practices of sound art and sound activism found among experimental musicians in Indonesia that seek to investigate a past that might have been, in order to imagine and define a future that might be. The “Java” of Java-Futurism is not so much a place as an imaginary that is at once political, aesthetic, and cosmological.
We use Java-Futurism as our key theoretical concept in a modest attempt to decolonize our knowledge production. Java-Futurism contains, we suggest, an ethnographic theory. We think it holds the same philosophical explanatory potential as any concept derived from the corpus of Western philosophy. It is this potential that our project seeks to explore anthropologically and aesthetically. We argue that Java-Futurism alludes to the non-secular temporality that rules both Javanese mysticism and the Indonesian political imaginary, – a temporality in which the esoteric symbols (called pralambang) of traditional Javanese text are said to hold predictive power. In Javanese mysticism, the past – if properly “recognised” and “enacted” – does not merely predict the future; it enables it. As numerous scholars of Indonesia since Benedict Anderson and Clifford Geertz have pointed out, this temporality informs and structures also Indonesian politics. As the same time as this requires a rethinking of time and power, later critics such as John Pemberton have argued that this Javanese mysticism itself was also appropriated by Dutch colonialists and attributed to colonial ideas of Java. “Java” as a mystical isle was in that sense a colonial construction, one that would since play an important part in shaping Indonesian nationalism and postcolonial politics (Pemberton 1994). Java in this sense is not a place; it is a particular kind of political chronotope – a way of understanding and acting in time and space. Java-Futurism is the name, we argue, for this aesthetic perspective and practice in contemporary Indonesian experimental and noise music.
It is this chronotopic practice – a Java-Futurism situated between (post)colonial political history and Javanese mysticism – that Lintang Radittya articulates when he lets the shadow-puppet figure of Bagong (a character from the Javanese pantheon of demi-gods known for his critical outspokenness) determine the noise during his performances. One find the same kind of Java-Futurism in the work of Rully Shabara. As part of the project Zoo, for example, Rully and his collaborators work with a fictional ancient civilization, Samasthamarta, an alphabetical system called Zugrafi, and an oral language system called Zufrasi. The scriptures and language of this lost fictional civilisation tell of a time of impending doom – a lost historical apocalypse that looks very much like our own. A third example of Java-Futurism is the performances of the duo Raja Kirik, inspired as they are by Javanese possession rituals like jaranan and jathilan.
Finally, we have gathered our research about and with Ican Harem and Kasimyn from Gabber Modus Operandi into an article that has been accepted for publication in the American journal Resonance – The Journal of Sound and Culture.
The article will be out in the spring of 2025 and carries the title:
Trance Against the Machine: Transpositions of Aesthetics in Indonesian Electronic Music and Beyond
In case you’re interested, the abstract of the article is as follows:
This article explores the musical performances, aesthetics, and multi-situated reception of the Indonesian electronic dance music in Europe and Indonesia, focusing on the duo Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO). Since their first international tour entitled “Trance Against the Machine” in 2019, the duo has gained significant attention, especially in Europe, because they are seen as part of a “seismic shift” in the electronic dance continuum. The article critically analyzes this perceived shift in relation to GMO’s music. It advocates for a mode of analysis that simultaneously traces the situated and the multi-situated nature of aesthetics in electronic music. This analysis is inspired by an ethnographic theory developed in collaboration with the artists we study. We propose the term “transposition” as a translation of the Indonesian term alay, used by the members of GMO to describe their aesthetic vision, in order to pay attention to what might be called “aesthetic globalization” as both situated and multi-situated. We do so as part of an “aesthetic-anthropological” approach that seeks to bring aesthetic analysis into anthropology and anthropology into aesthetic analysis.
“What is noise aesthetics in a place where everything is “noisy” and where this noisiness, furthermore, does not seem to be experienced as a problem or provocation? Can one even speak of “noise” if it is not unwanted? “
These were the questions raised in our presentation at the conference Inter-Noise 2024 in Nantes, France.
Here is the introduction from our full paper, which later will be published in the proceedings from the conference:
INTRODUCTION The DIY music collective Jogja Noise Bombing in the Javanese city of Yogyakarta is known in international electronic music circles for its so-called “noise-bombings”, pop-up performances of harsh noise music played on DIY instruments in public spaces around the city. These performances have since early 2010 been performed in the noisy streets of Yogyakarta, both during the annual Jogja Noise Bombing festival and as impromptu occasional performances. Despite their international recognition within underground avantgarde music milieus, city ordinances regulating public order and soundscapes in Europe have meant that the Indonesian collective has not been able to organize similar “noise-bombings” in the Global North. European municipal misgivings about public pop-up performances of artistic noise contrast sharply with the ease with which organizers get to organize “noise-bombings” across cities in Java. European wariness about public noise bombings also contrasts with the way the Indonesian public reacts to them. Public performances of noise-bombings in Indonesia are either the object of mild curiosity or are studiously ignored by casual passers-by and figures of public authority alike in the performances we have attended. Rarely, if ever, do the performances provoke offense, objection, or attempts to shut them down. The noise-bombings, it seems, are not considered “noisy” at all. Why might that be?
This paper, in which we will try to answer this question, is a part of a larger research project called Java-Futurism: Chronotopes of Sound Activism in Indonesia, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project studies trends in experimental music genres in Java such as electronic dance music and noise music through fieldwork, performance attendance, digital ethnography, and interviews with artists and producers. We gather these diverse methods within what we call an “aesthetic-anthropological” approach that combines the analytical aesthetic expertise of Sanne, who is a music historian and sound studies scholar, with the sensory and historical ethnography that Nils has developed as an anthropologist during fieldwork in Indonesia over thirty years.
With a point of departure in this cross-disciplinary approach to the aesthetics and anthropology of the situated sound – aesthetic and otherwise – of noise bombings in Yogyakarta, the paper raises a discussion about the ontologies of noise as such by asking: What is the aesthetic and political appeal of noise music in a context where noise – in its broadest sense – is rarely considered disruptive? We propose the need to “pluralize” the scientific understanding of noise along two axes: aesthetic-historical and political-historical. Indonesian noise music provides an instructive exemplar for this need to pluralize a universal notion of noise that informs both Western acoustic studies of noise and Western aesthetic studies of noise music. These two Western universalisms of noise and noise music were shaped by a common history. Noise music emerged from early twentieth century Euro-American aesthetic experiments and developed into a specific musical genre in the 1980s as a trend that highlighted the aesthetic qualities of noise and marked a rupture with common-sensical, acoustic perceptions of noise as “bad”, “unintentional”, “unwanted”, and even “unhealthy” [1]. This signaled in the context of EuroAmerican history an aesthetic pluralization of noise from being merely unwanted or bad into also being a potentially valorized aesthetic expression [2]. This pluralization disrupted the notion of noise with critical socio-aesthetic implications [3]. In this paper, we follow a second pluralization that dove-tails with the first: namely what happens when “noise music” emerges in Indonesia, where other socially embodied histories of hearing have sedimented into different ideas about what “noise” might be in the first place. In this context, we argue, neither noise nor noise music are what they are in Europe. The paper, in that sense, argues for a scientific pluralization of noise that is both aesthetically and anthropologically sensitive. It proposes an aesthetic-anthropological and comparative approach to capture the social, aesthetic, and historical plurality of noise.
Did you find it interesting and do you want to know more? Click here to read the full paper.
Our October 2023 fieldwork kicked off in style with the launch of the Jogja Sonic Index (JSI). Wok the Rock, Indra Menus and Hilman Fathoni and their team had organised a presentation at IVAA on October 5th from 4-6 pm. Creative and fancy Instagram-posts from the new Jogja Sonic Index Instagram profile had already announced the event, and we were both excited and proud to take part. We were curious to see if other people were interested as interested as we were. We were not disappointed.
Around 50 archival-noise-experimantal-music enthusiasts showed up for the launch. Wok gave some background to the design of the site. It is created in WordPress to keep the costs low and ensure the longevity of the site. WordPress also allowed the site to be interactive and dynamic by making it possible for users to add information about new artists and projects. Menus underlined the importance of this first online documentation of the experimental underground scene in Yogyakarta (a cultural hub in indonesia), while Hilman gave us a thorough introduction to the site, its categories, and possibilities.
Currently, the site contains information about 79 genres, 193 individual artists, and 116 bands and artistic projects from or associated with the experimental music scene in Yogyakarta in the period from 1969 until today. Each post contains lists of discographies, and links to relevant publications, zins, YouTube clips, and other online information sources.
Dynamic and continuously growing as more artists, projects, and publications are added, we hope the Jogja Sonic Index can serve as a source of inspiration for Indonesian and other artists, as a historical archive for the community in Yogyakarta, and as a ressource for researchers.
Explore the Jogja Sonic Index yourself! In less than three days, the Jogja Sonic Index acquired more than 500 followers on Instagram. Join Jogja Sonic Index on Instagram.
The launch of the site on 5 October concluded with a tumpeng, a traditional ritual offering of yellow rice, shaped as volcano, with chicken and snacks. Traditionally, a Javanese Muslim prayer accompanies the serving of a tamping. On this occasion, Hilman asked everyone to utter a silent prayer according to their own belief. After this, another “Java-futuristic” ritual followed: informal get-together (nongkrong) and a bottle of imported champagne at the local bar Substore.
We hope these ritual at the launch will ensure a good future for the site and that artists, archivists and audiences in Jogja will continue to feed the Jogja Sonic Index with the information and goodies they have on their mind and in their lap-tops.
We are delighted to announce the ongoing construction of the Jogja Sonic Index!
The Jogja Sonic Index site will launch on October 5th 2023 from 15-18 at an event held at IVAA in Yogyakarta
The Jogja Sonic Index is a collaborative, interactive database containing comprehensive information about the more than one hundred people, projects, labels, and platforms that make up the vibrant electronic and noise environment in Yogyakarta.
The Jogja Sonic Index is the result of a series of collaborative workshops by a number of active Yogya-based musicians – organized, curated, and edited by Wok The Rock, Indra Menus, and Hilman Fathoni, in collaboration with and sponsored by the research project Java-Futurism.
The Jogja Sonic Index will be searchable by year, people, projects as well as genres. The index will contain a comprehensive set of links to albums, online performance videos, and other material, and it will provide, for the first time, a dynamic online catalogue, made by active members of the Yogyakarta electronic and noise music community themselves, of the history and constantly evolving nature of the multitude of creative experiments on the Yogyakarta electronic and noise music scene in the last two decades.
Snapshots from the Jogja Noise Index workshop, 2 September 2023
May 4 and 5 2023 we participated in and co-organised the conference “Music’s Institution and the (De)colonial” at Lund University. As a challenge to the theme of the conference we asked what to do, when collaborating interlocuters do not agree to word “decolonizing”? In our talk we focused on the work and performances of, as well as our talks and interviews with Gabber Modus Operandi, the Bali-based duo made up of Ican Harem and Aditya Surya Taruna, also known as Kasimyn. We began our talk by reflecting on Kasimyn’s explicit disavowal of the term “decolonial”:
“I fucking hate the word decolonizing. I mean, it is really flattering to have that discussion but to suggest that we are now the the real gabber, is another thing. This is not where we want to go.”
Kas, online interview, June 2020
In response to Kasimyn’s warning that a decolonial aesthetics all too easily becomes its own form of essentialism or exoticism, we talked about our attempts to begin aesthetic music analysis with emic terms. A case in point here is “post-alay”, a term introduced to us by GMO. “Alay” is an Indonesian pop cultural term. The word is short for “anak layangan” or ”kite-flying kid” and refers to the village kids who fly home-made kites, their skin turning dark from being in the sun all day. The term began to be used in the 1990s to refer to the cheesy or over-the-top and vulgar aesthetics associated with village youths who have poured in Indonesian cities in the millions over the previous three decades. Penniless, these kids would wear old clothes, use second-hand phones, and cultivate their own style of village-taste that was perceived as cheesy or vulgar by both the urban middle-class and the high-brow cosmopolitan elite.
Alay kids developed their language and aesthetics and today alay is for a growing number of Indonesian youths a badge of honour: it means “getting-by-with-what-you-have”; it means changing fashion, language, politics with the “fuck-you attitude of youth”. An alay aesthetics runs through GMOs music, performances, and visual representations – GMO refers to this aesthetic as “post-alay”.
We decided early on to begin our own analysis by learning analytically to rethink what aesthetics and taste might if studied through the term post-alay. We find the term alluring analytically because it speaks so well with what we have come to think of as “transposition”: the reworking of an aesthetic phenomenon into a different key. Alay and transposition are analytical synonyms that seek to trace the aesthetic nuances, histories and imaginaries in the work and globalization of Indonesian electronic music projects. Alay, after all, is an aesthetic transposition that turns village clothes into high fashion, and transposes what is vulgar and cheesy into something that might be urban- cool, in a self-mocking fashion.
We like the term transposition as a synonym for the term alay, because it, too, has multiple roots.
In conventional music theory, the term transposition refers to the notation or performance of music in a different pitch. But its range of meanings is much more comprehensive. In biology, transposition refers to horizontal gene transferal. In chess, it refers to the varying moves that will get you to the same position. And in magic, transposition refers to the sleight -of-hand through which a performer switches one object for another.
Horizontal transfers, pitch shift, alternative moves and sleight-out-handroots are all critical, we think, to understanding the way aesthetics travels in a digital age.
We are inspired by these multiple meanings to suggest transposition as the movements of assemblages of aesthetics and cosmology across space and context. We use it to think about what might once have been called aesthetic globalization. Transposition allows for a globalization that is not merely secular and historically linear but also entails the possibility of trancing and possession as well as imaginary pasts. Trance – understood both as a global dance genre and a form of possession in Javanese villages – is key to GMOs music and to its ability to be transposed into very different settings from CTM in Berlin to a small club in Denpasar. Transposition, as we have to understand, is in the music of GMO also potentially a trance-position: the possibility of trance-possession.
The conference “Music’s Institution and the (De)colonial” at Lund University hosted speakers from every continent on Earth except the Antarctic. All presentations and discussions contributed to the overall theme, and provided broad insight into how contemporary scholars from around the world deal with issues of colonialism and practices of decolonizing when (re)writing music history. Many hesitated to use the term “decolonial” uncritically, and presenting it with ambiguity. Others thought it made unequivocal sense in their working contexts, and stressed it along issues such as repatriation of archives, democratisation of academia, and co-authorships. (De)colonial music histories, we learnt, are not homogeneous.
On the occation of the performance by Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat at the “Sixth Edition Festival for Other Music”, 16-19 March 2023 in Stockholm, we interviewed Setya Jatilinuar, Roni Driyastoto, and Yustiawan Umar, three creative Javanese musicians, about the relationship between traditional Javanese gamelan and contemporary experimental music in Indonesia. The result of the interview was published in the sixth edition of the book series “Fönstret” (The Window), edited by John Chantler.
In December 2022 the project was presented at the symposium Computer Aided Composition organised by Laura Zattra and Giacomo Albert at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy. The presentation traced the early work with electronic music Indonesian composer Otto Sidharta, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands during the 1980s.
In the context of our project, Sidharta’s early position as a composer of computer music and modernist is not only a puzzle from a European perspective but also from the perspective of the Indonesian contemporary experimental music scene.
The presentation can be viewed on YouTube from 2:24:53.
The presentation takes its point of departure in the release of the album by Otto Sidharta “Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-92” (Sub Rosa, 2017), its categorization as Early Electronic Music and as part of a series focusing on so-called pioneers within the genre. What is remarkable is that Sidharta’s album is the only one with the notion of nationality in the title. The presentation discusses what “Indonesian” means in a context where most of the music on Sidharta’s album is produced in the Netherlands and Sidharta himself identifies with Western modernism, even though he also has roots in traditional Sundanese music performance. We argue that no clear teleological history can describe what is at stake in these historical threads between Europe and Indonesia.
In the conclusion of the paper we respond to the symposium’s invitation and intention to shed light on the the history of early “Computer Assisted Composition” in the following way:
“In a broader perspective the story of Otto Sidharta is an attempt to bring post-colonial studies to the fields of EAM and computer music studies. Sidharta’s career and life are in every way shaped by colonialism – from his childhood in the Dutch colonial house with the noisy radio transmitter to the lack of access to advanced technologies in Europe and Indonesia – and should be treated as such: as a colonial history. Such an approach to history opens towards a methodological awareness of the archive, understood, in the words of Ann Stoler, ‘not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography’ (Stoler 2002, 87). The archive should be approached with ‘ethnographic sensibility, rather than an extractive gesture’ (ibid. 109).
Otto Sidharta is, what anthropologists call a “colonial subject”, as he has been shaped as a composer under highly Western aesthetic and political influence and power structures. Even though we are speaking of a post-colonial time – Indonesia officially declared itself independent from the Dutch in 1945 – we continue to see the dependence and attachments that Sidharta still has to the Netherlands. This does not mean that there were no resistance in him: He would, as an example, not speak Dutch while being there (even though he could). Another more implicit example is, that he insists on using technology to explore the sounds of Indonesia in ways that makes sense to him and the context and traditions he grew up with.
The historical narration of Sidharta did not bring forth archival extracts and documents of evidence computer assisted composition. Does this then mean that Sidharta did not do computer assisted composition ? Well, maybe – and for good reasons – he did not do computer assisted composition in the strict sense defined within the context of IRCAM. However, we did learn, through oral history, that he worked with computers in the era of early computer music, and we learned that he found the computer useful and stimulating to his method of “intuitive composition” and in bringing interaction to the musical situation. This in fact is, we argue, computer assisted composition, because it is of relevance and because it brings nuances to the era of early computer music studies. As a result, it should not be left out.
Sidharta’s story is an example of a character in music history who all too easily falls into the oblivion or who is misrepresented. Take the notion of “pioneer”, as he is being described in the booklet to the album. In a former colony a pioneer cannot be the same as in the West. Sidharta is a pioneer in the sense that he was one of the first to do electronic music in Indonesia. But is he also a pioneer to the young Indonesian electronic music composers of today? To some yes, but to others no. The two artists introduced in the beginning of the talk say no, because Sidharta’s engagement with Dutch and Indonesian art and university institutions is negotiated, and even neglected by many Indonesian musicians today.
As presented, the unstable politics and technologies of Indonesia complicates a linear historical narrative. History consists of fragmented situations that only makes sense if the specific context is given. The lines of causal developments of music are multiple and broken, and the concepts that travel between North and South are constantly transposed into something new: Western Art Music, technology, modernism and pioneers are concepts that do not easily travel without transposing into something new. The same is at stake, we would argue, when it comes to computer assisted composition.”
At the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in Seattle, USA in November 2022, we presented some of the preliminary findings of our research into contemporary electronic music in Indonesia in a paper entitled “Sonic Activism: Unsettling Aesthetics with a Touch of Anthropology”.
The paper explored the ethnographic and aesthetic puzzle at the heart of our project: if noise music on the North Atlantic Rim emerged as a form of protest against an aesthetics of silence and the hegemony of rhythmic and tonal music, what is the aesthetic and political appeal of noise music in Indonesia, a place where pentatonic, polyrhythmic music is considered high taste and where noise – in its broadest sense – is rarely considered disruptive?
To address this puzzle, we discussed two analytical concepts that form the basis of two parallel research articles on which we currently work: transposition and equivocation.
In conventional music theory, the term transposition refers to the notation or performance of music in a different pitch. But its range of meanings is much more comprehensive. In biology, transposition refers to the horizontal transfer of genetic material that happens in bacterial worlds. In chess, it refers to the alternative set of moves through which one can get to the same position. And in magic, transposition refers to the sleight -of-hand through which a performer switches one object for another. Deleuze and Guattari described the synthesizer as a transposition machine: a thought machine that works like philosophy: an assemblage that enables thought to travel. We are inspired by these multiple meanings to use the term “transposition” as a way to rethink aesthetic globalisation in a digitised and mediated world.
Equivocation is a term we borrow from Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, and apply to noise music. Vivieros de Castro used the perspectivism of his Amerindian interlocutors to propose equivocation as an analytical alternative to comparison in anthropology. Whereas comparison is based on the idea that different people see the same thing in different ways, equivocation opens up the possibility a perspectivism in which different things are seen in the same way. What happens, we ask, if we do not assume that noise music is one universal phenomenon but multiple phenomena, the appear the same, only if one ignores the different worlds of sound, music practices and aesthetics out of which they emerge? Giving up on the certainty of noise as one ideal and universal phenomenon is for us a way of abandoning the questionable universal aesthetics inherent in Western art music. Noise music in an equivocal optic is not a response to a universal aesthetic but rather an “aesthetic multiple”.
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