Senyawa & Black to Comm

Senyawa is an experimental musical duo from Java that evolves traditional Indonesian music into a very unique, contemporary musical form. Accompanied by Wukir Suryadi on the Bambuwukir, a bamboo zither he invented and built himself, his duo partner Rully Shabara sings with an impressive vocal range, from guttural droning to frenetic chants at high registers. Senyawa's seventh album, »Alkisah«, was released in 2021 by a multitude of independent record labels from all over the globe, each with different packaging and design. Pitchfork writes about the album, »Of all the genres the duo taps into, the forest-shaking doom of heavy metal is most responsible for giving the music its gravity. That’s especially true when things get lower and slower, as in «Istana», which stretches howls across Sunn O)))-worthy bass rumbles, and «Kabau», a meditative mesh of chords that comes off like a translated Metallica ballad«. Black To Comm, the project of Hamburg-based Marc Richter, plays as support. His digital avant-garde compositions refuse to follow common patterns and are based on sampling, various acoustic and electronic instruments, and obscure software. Also in 2021, Richter released »Alkisah Versi Hitam« – a radical deconstruction of Senyawa's album, which Richter reassembled from the fragmented snippets of the original.