Eccentric Sydney labels tenzenmen and dualplover work together to bring crazy Indonesian music to your ears.
Sydney, Australia. February 4th 2010: You may have never heard of tenzenmen or dualplover but for the last 5 to 10 years both labels have been at the forefront of introducing incredibly strange and obscure music from around the world to adventurous ears in Australia. Members of both labels have worked together previously on live projects such as Club Consolador De Dos Caras and now they have joined forces to release Zoo’s masterpiece CD ‘Trilogi Peradaban’.
Working with dualplover is always a pleasure and we’re both really excited about this release.” comments Shaun (tenzenmen). Both labels discovered Indonesia’s Zoo last year when on separate travels in the region and on return to Sydney plans were hatched for the release in Australia. Shaun continues “Sometimes something comes along which just blows you away and you wonder ‘Where the hell did this come?’”
The original Indonesian release for these recordings came as a 3 CDR box set, literally – 3 CDs and booklet in a sleeve housed in a wooden box with artwork painted on the sides - and won the band many awards in their home country. The patented dualplover dual sleeve design with some re-jigged artwork has been used for this Australian release. “It’s a beautiful thing – I think we’ve maintained the artistry of the original along with a more practical design for distribution in Australia.” said Lucas (dualplover).
Musically Zoo unleash some crazy traditionally inspired rhythms, driven by the bass and drums while Rully Sherman uses his voice in all sorts of ways to deliver their message. That description sounds bare and sparse but Zoo are anything but. Think along the lines of Japanese masters Ruins but shorter bursts of punk energy. The trilogy is a statement about evolution and the CD evolves in a similar fashion too, from the frenetic pace of the early tracks to the more melancholy and meandering thoughts approaching the end where traditional Indonesian instruments are utilised, perhaps to signify a return to a more grounded life away from the craziness of our modern lives.
Zoo’s ‘Trilogi Peradaban’ is in all good record stores from Feb 14th, also via mailorder at www.tenzenmen.com and www.dualplover.com (just $11 postpaid) and look out for the live experience later in the year.
have a listen and have a look!
late night listener appreciation...
ok - let's try the morning listeners then! :-)
mail list subscribers get special deals on this cd and the scul hazzards cd (both released this week) and an even better deal when buying both together!
from here
Gloriously mad! Hailing from Indonesia, Zoo combine the avant-punk of The Ex with the stop/go rock-in-opposition of Etron Fou Leloublan (or Ruins) and the pluristylistic craziness of Mr. Bungle or Sebkha-Chott. Loaded? You bet! 22 short pieces grouped into three movements, each track a one-two punch, yet no over-homogeneity issues – the music ranges from punk to tribal folk. Quality musicianship, clear artistic vision, and an excellent reassesment of Rock-in-Opposition’s heritage. Somewhere between Melt Banana and Savage Republic! I am thrilled after one listen. Pay attention to these guys!
from here
What the jiminy do I know about Indonesian music?! For all I know, an intellectually-impaired single mother in Jakarta has just accidentally synthesized the mythical long-lost note of E Sharp using nothing but a roll of old electrical cord and her teeth. Perhaps some sinister and ancient cabal is sworn to protect the horrible secret of E Sharp, and now it’s up to a sassy, effeminate hairdresser on the run from the law (or is he really only running from... himself?) to protect this young woman on her perilous trek to reach Dr Reginald Q. Oboe at the Vladivostok Conservatorium of Music before the accursed note becomes self-aware and Kills Us All.
This would be my educated guess. Fortunately, it’s safe for me to assume that you come from a position of relative ignorance as well. Three in ten Australians still think Indonesia is the country most likely to invade us. Australian tourism usually doesn’t progress beyond Ed Hardy-clad douchebags projectile vomiting en masse on the despoiled shore of Kuta Beach. Clearly, this is not an environment conducive to meaningful cross-cultural exchange.
Which is a shame, really. Over the last decade, one thing above all others has gifted Jakarta with a burgeoning DIY music scene. Firstly, the most easily accessible music media is MTV Asia, a 24 hour channel hosted by an endless procession of bland, American-accented Filipino girls introducing an endless procession of bland, American and East Asian R&B artists. Any casual watcher of MTV Asia will be hard-pressed to find such an egregious use of autotune and such an abundance of prepubescent men in all-white Beaver Boys outfits anywhere else in the annals of human civilization. it’s a truism of modern music that whenever the music industry tries to enforce hegemonic tastes onto the public, the vanguard of common decency takes to the barricades with electric guitars in hand.
So it is with Zoo’s album Trilogi Peradaban, a three part punk-rock “fuck you” to the stultifying blancmange that the failing business model of the major labels keep shitting out onto the airwaves and the narrow confines of the alternatives provided by indie and DIY labels in the West. It would be easy for modern-day hipster gentry in the English-speaking world to write this sort of thing off, but some cultural perspective is necessary here – too often we forget that not everyone in the world was bowing down and praying towards Seattle five times a day in the early nineties. Trilogi Peradban is part of the same musical renaissance that we went through twenty years ago – the purest expression of Cobain’s old “punk rock should mean freedom...” line – and this defies the Arctic Monkeys-induced cynicism to which people my age have become accustomed.
Indeed, there’s very little in this album that we’d recognise as “punk rock”, beyond the second part of Cobain’s Law – “...as long as it’s good and has passion”. Passion is in abundance on this album: passion for Indonesia’s heritage, passion for the country’s instruments, and passion for the local audience over foreign interlopers in tight jeans and asymmetrical haircuts. As the album’s trilogy progresses, whatever vestige of overseas influence gradually disappears as native instruments become more integral to the songs, and esoteric references to President Sokarno’s icy relationship with Malaysia in the 1960s and the Aceh independence movement are sadly lost on anyone unfamiliar with the language. So much of it is discordant, the singer’s occasional similarities with Mike Patton after a Red Bull binge can be off-putting, sometimes it actually does sound like they’re trying to find the long-lost E Sharp, but ultimately, this album is a forebear of great things to come from our northern neighbour.
Written by Sean Gleeson
from here
The little-known genre of zeuhl found its roots in France in the 1970s, spearheaded by the prolific and grandiose band/cult Magma. A genre that somehow managed to combine free jazz, opera, blues shouting, progressive rock, heavy metal and chamber music, zeuhl made its impact on the avant-garde music scene by showcasing the duality between bombast and primitivism.
Since the sound was forged in Western Europe, zeuhl has been flung far across the globe, with numerous bands springing up in parts of Japan and, in the case of new-school zeuhl thrashers Zoo, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Zoo pay homage to their zeuhl roots on Trilogi Peradaban (in English, “Civilization Triology”), the band’s latest release by Australian experimental music labels Dualplover and Tenzenmen. The album tells a story of societal devolution through the medium of highly syncopated bursts of bass and drums, frenzied vocalizations and, at its most primitive, ritual drumming and minimalistic folk balladry. The entire album lasts only 40 minutes, but contains 22 tracks.
The first 16 tracks on Trilogi Peradaban are evocative of the thrashy zeuhl sound championed by Japanese band Ruins, one of the many projects of uber-prolific drummer Yoshida Tatsuya. There is also a great deal of avant-grindcore influence, bearing similarities to the work of Melt Banana and Naked City. Much of the album's sound is made up of snaking bass lines and syncopated drumming reminiscent of a (somehow) more caveman take on the early powerviolence of Man Is The Bastard.
Across the entirety of the album, Zoo vocalist Rully Shabara Herman stands apart from the rest of the band, shouting, chattering and operatically chanting over the thrash-and-grind of his bandmates. The final part of the album is meant to convey a return to primitivism through organic percussion and neo-folk-influenced acoustic guitar arrangements that bring a calm ending to an otherwise frenzied album.
Trilogi Peradaban is an excellent, operatic take on neo-tribalism that makes a provocative statement, melding grindcore, folk and contemporary zeuhl sounds to convey a theme of societal collapse into a primal state of simplicity.