Published:
April 5, 2016
The Indonesian duo Senyawa are playing in Bucharest, in Control Club, on Wednesday, April 6, part of the series of concerts Outernational made by Control Club in partnership with The Attic.
Senyawa is Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, two Indonesian musicians who formed the band in 2010 in Yogyakarta. The band's lyrics are in various languages of Indonesia, including Sulawesian, Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia. They mix influences from musical and folklore traditions from the Indonesian archipelago with experimental music and their neo-tribal sound has been described as a mixture of "punk attitude" with "avant-garde aesthetics". Members are connected to each other through a force that can be felt not only when you see them live, but also while playing a recording of them; a driving force that blends traditional and contemporary ideas.
After sharing the stage with Faust, Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine in 2011 at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Senyawa performed on a series of important music festivals, including Glatt und Verkert Festival in Austria (along side Japanese guitar master Kazuhisa Uchihashi), as well as the Malmo Sommarscen Festival in Sweden, Salihara Literature Festival in Jakarta, CTM Festival in Berlin, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Clandestino Festival in Norway and Oct Loft Jazz Festival in China.
The music of Senyawa breathes perfectly, with Wukir Suryadi disposing of modern-primitive instrumentation and Rully Shabara’s deft extended vocal techniques. The bambuwukir - instrument built by Suryadi - constitutes string and percussive characters, all in one instrument. The percussive organology looks like traditional instruments (such as Celempung or Lakado), and with the right amplification it can produce drum like sounds, while the strings could sound like siter, rebab, or kecapi. The head of this instrument resembles a bamboo spear, a symbol of the Indonesian struggle against the Dutch during colonization.