The French / Indonesian band BALUNGAN breaks New Musical Ground with Gamelan and Guitars
The 13-member band kicks off its debut, Kudu Bisa Kudu, with the nostalgic steam whistle and intentionally garbled boarding call of "Javanese TGV", but as soon as the driving bassline gears ups, it's clear that we're riding a 21st-century conveyance. Gang vocals, hairpin-curve guitars, and accelerating arpeggios played on tuned percussion also announce that this is a multicultural journey-and in fact the group is made up of seven of Java's most open-minded gamelan virtuosos, plus six equally adventurous rock musicians from the south of France.
Gamelan-Indonesia's national music, based on intricately subdivided polyrhythms and played on shining, lavishly decorated bronze metallophones-has been an influence on European and North American musicians for more than a century, arguably beginning with the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle in Paris. There, French composers including Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy first heard a Javanese gamelan ensemble, and immediately reconsidered their notions of what music could be-and the repercussions, so to speak, are still being felt. Artists as diverse as jazz traveller Don Cherry, pioneering minimalist Lou Harrison, and the progressive rock groups Gong and King Crimson have incorporated gamelan-like rhythms into their sound, and while the influence of European music on Indonesia has been less widely celebrated, it's there: think of the guitarist Dewa Budjana, whom sometimes works Balinese motifs into his blazing fusion jazz.
But there's never been a gamelan-based cultural exchange as equitable as Balungan, named after the Javanese word for "skeleton", which is also used to describe the core melody of a musical composition. Nor has there been one as loud. The Javanese members of the band attack their gendèrs, gongs, and bonangs "like a rock ensemble, " says drummer and project sparkplug Guigou Chenevier, founding member of France's original Rock In Opposition group Etron Fou Leloublan.
