Q: We are very interested in the trajectory of your creative practices and their connection to the theme. Could you provide us with a little more information about your background?

I grew up in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I think my life properly started in middle school: I started playing classical piano, practicing painting, as well as reading philosophy and literature. I remember, my uncle gave me this big book by Bertrand Russell, "A History of Western Philosophy," which was an important starting point in my interest in philosophy. I also spent a lot of time reading Indonesian literature, by writers such as WS Rendra, Chairil Anwar, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ayu Utami, and Seno Gumira Ajidarma. During the middle of high school, I got a scholarship to continue my studies in the Netherlands. I then moved to the US for undergraduate study. I started to take gamelan seriously during those years.

I think that my adventures, both intellectually and geographically, deeply influenced my work: I try, not necessarily to synthesize, but to hold together all these disparate elements into a condensed artistic moment.

Q: The creators participating in this magazine work across various mediums, including moving images, interactive installations, music composition, etc. What factors influence your choice of medium for your works?

I am highly interested in mediums that unfold in time. My thinking, both in a pragmatic and conceptual manner, is closely tied to time: relationship with forgotten history, with the victims of past tragedies, with a hope for redemption. I find that music, as it foregrounds time, enables me to artistically explore these ideas.

Aside from this, there is something highly appealing to me about working with performers. In my gamelan group, Sandikala Ensemble, the crux of my approach is to work with the knowledge that the musicians have, but at the same time, challenging them. It is a dual act: respecting the history of the musical tradition, but also trying to push them towards something else.

Q: How does your work reflect or actively engage with the cultural and social dynamics of your community or the communities you interact with? Are there elements in your art that seek to bridge, disrupt, or transform these dynamics?

My work enacts a double move: it bridges and disrupts at the same time. It reflects my contradictory attitude towards tradition: respect and resentment. There is a passage in Adorno’s lecture on philosophy of history, inspired by Hegel’s "Philosophy of Right," where he argues that we ought to both honor and despise universal history. My artistic attitude is located in the same arena. The gamelan tradition carries with it historical sediments that I would like to confront. It carries the aura of the Javanese court (which I despise) and alignment with the Indonesian national project (which I equally despise). But at the same time, it carries memories of resistance.

Take, for example, the often forgotten story about Pontjopangrawit, a Javanese gamelan maestro who was taken by the Dutch colonial authorities to Boven-Digul prison in West Papua. There, he made his set of gamelan instruments with found objects to be performed with other inmates. This is such a fascinating history, and it becomes even more complex considering the present occupation of West Papua by Indonesia. These multiple sites of histories are the things that are in the back of my mind while I write my music.

Q: What real-world strategies or methodologies do you employ in your art practice to manifest your visions of the future? How do these tactics serve as forms of resistance or intervention within the current socio-political landscape?

There are two primary strategies that underlie my artistic practice. The first one is person-specific musical work. This comes, primarily, from my reaction towards composers who write for gamelan instruments but simply delegate the performance to percussionists who have no experience whatsoever in performing gamelan music. I thought that this was absurd; nobody would think to delegate a performance of a Beethoven piece to gamelan musicians untrained in Western music. It is crucial for me to work with musicians who are trained in the gamelan tradition and use their musical knowledge as the starting point. I’d like to also mention the names of these amazing musicians, the members of Sandikala Ensemble: Yusti, Roni, Kuncung, and Seno.

The second strategy is concerned with distorting traditional gamelan forms, traditional gamelan musical devices. I intend to create a negative image of the gamelan tradition. For example, in Sandikala, we have a set of cengkok—melodic fragments to be played in the Javanese gendèr instrument—that somewhat resembles the traditional cengkok, but at the same time, is alien from its original form. This aesthetic of alienation is further heightened by our customized instruments. In Sandikala, the instruments have a distinct tuning system, which takes its cue from the Javanese system, but at the same time, to use the word I have used previously, they are distorted. With this, I hope to metaphorically heighten strange elements that are already there in the tradition, but are not yet fully explicated.