Light and Dark: Kadapat’s Experimental Take on Balinese Gamelan

For the past decade, the Taipei music scene has seen a rising wave of dark, experimental electronic music. Acts have formed and sprouted offshoots; live venues have been established to house them, art spaces repurposed to showcase them, and labels founded to release their work. 

It’s the kind of music that makes for interesting narratives in scene roundups from outlets like The Wire magazine. (In fact, The Wire recently published one such feature, highlighting artists like Scattered Purgatory, Mong Tong and Forests. These are acts that traffic in cold synthetic textures, themes of urban alienation and a tense blend of the modern and the traditional.)

Irrespective of its conceptual quality, it’s easy for a listener to feel detached from a lot of this kind of music. To someone in the audience, an experimental music show can quickly devolve into a bed of noise and drones; glitchy beats, moody grooves and furrowed brows. The flashing LEDs and fluorescent glares from the digital touch surfaces of the instruments acting as the only sources of light among the shadows.

That’s when the raw, elemental impact of live percussion can make all the difference—the primal musical act of a human bashing a piece of metal with a piece of wood, or vice versa; the simple idea of: you hit this object softly, it sounds quiet and muted; you hit it hard, it sounds loud and gnarly. There’s great power in that, especially after hours of sputtering, mediated, black-box electronics.

It would have been about four hours into the final day of Sonic Shaman—a 3-day experimental music festival organised by an art group called TheCube Project Space—when I first saw Kadapat, an electronic-gamelan duo from Bali, Indonesia. Made up of I Gede Yogi Sukawiadnyana and I Gusti Nyoman Barga Sastrawadi (Yogi and Barga for short) Kadapat stood ominously on a foggy stage, striking metal and wood and revelling in the pure, organic force that they produce. 

They used traditional sounds of gamelan to create hypnotic rhythms, blending them with familiar electronics—808 kicks and saw-wave bass tones—then grabbing the resulting tones and tweaking, mangling and, at times, performing sheer violence to them; running them through heavy distortion and reverb, letting them swell and feedback, modulating and deteriorating as they looped. Periodically, they would also strike and scrape arcs of amplified metal with a violin bow, summoning sonic horrors amid the stately rhythmic ostinatos of the gamelan. 

Though they met while studying at art college, both Yogi and Barga had played in their banjar—a local community organisation—since childhood, and have backgrounds in traditional Balinese rituals and religious ceremonial playing. They didn’t start hanging out until their last semester in school, where they were both studying gamelan composition. For one of their final exams, they were tasked with composing a similar type of musical piece. 

“And we had the same supervisor, so that's why we got closer,” says Barga.

After graduating, they collaborated on commission work for various local media projects. “Because of COVID, a lot of the art scene changed to the digital scene, so they needed digital music,” says Yogi. “So Barga and I would often do digital music for dance, for film.”

But they soon got bored of making music to order and wanted to create something less rigid, without external pressure.

“I think we needed to make music without any disturbances, you know, without any rules,” says Yogi. 

Because they lived far apart, their process would begin by sending each other instrumental musical stems back and forth. The goal with each idea they shared was to create something that would surprise or impress the other. 

“When I work with Barga, I need to make a rhythm that can pull him in… I think Barga feels it too,” says Yogi, as Barga nods in the background. “I need to make something and then I need Barga to say, ‘Whoa!’ to my rhythm.”

In between their online musical exchanges, whenever they’d get a chance to meet up in person, they’d spend hours discussing the ideas behind their music—what they were trying to express through their experiments and how to create something new with the traditional sounds they had grown up with. This all led to the recording of their self-titled first album, released in 2022 on Gorong Gorong Records. 

The tension between the musical and the intellectual is at play throughout the record. Some songs were sparked by abstract concepts and local mythology; others were merely cool jams that eventually conveyed interesting ideas to them. 

On the track ‘Kidul’, they use music to reimagine the supernatural folkloric character of Roro Kidul in a different context. Yogi explains how “the mythology says there is a Javanese girl or a Javanese woman that sacrifices herself to the ocean and becomes a goddess. And we just imagine, ‘what if this was happening [during] colonisation and the woman who sacrificed herself was a Western woman [instead]?’”

On other tracks, they would just listen to the music they created and named the song based on the feelings it evoked for them, like in ‘Setra Kombat’, with its aggressive rhythms bringing to mind images of spirits fighting each other through martial arts.

After the release of Kadapat, the next challenge—and the next source of tension—was transforming those sounds to the live stage. Initially, they tried to recreate all the album’s sounds live, but they found that approach too limiting.

"We really struggled with that,” admits Yogi, “because of the polyrhythms, and needing to use headphones to determine the click [track], and then needing to press the Loop button as precisely as we could. It was not enjoyable.”

Barga reflected on their early struggles to connect with the audience: “we [were] too focused on the music.”

This led them to incorporate a number of more fixed, pre-programmed elements in their show, allowing the pair to focus on playing the live instruments and performing for the crowd.

When I saw them at the Sonic Shaman stage in Taipei, they certainly seemed aware of the visual and the gestural aspects of their presentation. Yogi commanded the right side of the stage; taller and wider, he hunched over the keys of his jegog—a small bamboo instrument with a 4-tone scale—punctuating accented notes by jerking his head and kicking his leg backwards. Barga, lankier, with sharp cheekbones and an unruly mop of curly hair, played a gendèr, a shimmering metallophone perched atop a multi-tiered stand, which obscured him and made him look vaguely menacing, as if he were playing inside a cage. 

The jegog and the gendèr are not usually played together, having different tunings and traditional musical roles in gamelan ensembles. Then again, those ensembles don’t often include laptops and synthesizers as part of their live shows either. 

Kadapat have been taking their unconventional show to different stages for the past year, mostly in Asia—they had recently finished a spate of shows in Japan—but also in Switzerland and Germany. They haven’t had a chance to do a full tour, but have instead booked sporadic shows or groups of shows in one country. Their music works as well in experimental art spaces (like the one at Sonic Shaman in Taipei) as it does in nightclubs, or even in venues somewhere between the two, like Berlin’s KWIA, an ambient listening bar with soft lighting and carpeted floors. 

“They’re just listening, not really in party mode”, says Barga. “Our music is really chaotic, so I [was] a little bit worried about it, but actually, people enjoyed it, and I felt ‘Oh, maybe people are dancing inside their body’”.

The duo like the freedom of being able to perform in these different types of venues and they are always curious to see how different crowds react to their music, how much they move, how they dance. Even in Bali, where people are more familiar with the intricacies of gamelan, people still react in different ways. As Yogi notes, “the beauty is that our music is mostly polyrhythms, so people [might] dance in different tempos.” 

At the same time, they have faced some pushback from more conservative members of their community, who might not like the way they combine gamelan with electronic sounds. While the members of Kandapat understand their objections, they feel that they were raised in the artform and are respecting its traditions. As Barga says, their playing changes depending on the event and context. In a ceremony or a temple, they can play in a traditional way. “But when we play the experimental way, we play [it] in an alternative space, so it's different.”

Yogi also thinks it’s important to push the boundaries. “We cannot put that gamelan into the museum and make it so traditional,” he says. “If we want the tradition to survive, we need to develop it. We need to make new things."

The duo are currently working on those new things, developing fresh material, with a goal to keep experimenting. They are more conscious about the pressures of live performances, so they want to take that into account in the writing of the new material.

For now, though, Yogi has other pressures in mind. He is getting married in January. “It’s stressful. That's my first wedding,” he says with a laugh. I joke that it might be a bit like the stress of a debut album. But if the wedding is anything like Kadapat’s first record, Yogi shouldn’t have much to worry about.