Ed Sheeran Followed Me to Bali (NOT CLICKBAIT)

For those of you who have been hankering me to start the blog, you can lay down the pitchforks. IT’S HERE. I left home a week and one day ago, and after being marooned for two days in Seattle because of some unlucky delays, I made it to Indonesia.

I unknowingly booked a hostel in the digital-nomad capital of the world, Canggu. I was rewarded for my lack of research with free yoga (in which I unfortunately did not partake), and Ed Sheeran's Shape of You pounding through my hostel walls from a nearby beach club every night (in which I unfortunately had no choice but to partake). I moved up north out of Canggu to a small homestay, but once again failed to research noise adequately. I am now woken up at 5am by a beautiful rooster kept in a cage a short distance from my room (This is, notably, still an improvement from Ed’s gingery rasp). The irony of the medium behind this entire project, sound, being my greatest enemy as I wake up in the morning, makes me laugh. Or cry.

Heavily inspired by ethnomusicologist Palmer Keen’s work, I was drawn to start my Watson year in Indonesia because of the sheer number of instruments, and instrument-makers here. Here in this new village, north of Ubud I am familiarizing myself with Gamelan, the "clear" first step studying music here (Gamelan is just one of many Indonesian musical practices, but certainly the most researched/well known).

I’m also, at the same time, taking what I am certain is a less common approach to studying music here: trying to find and learn from the makers of noise-making windmill instruments known as sunari and pendakin. I’ve become obsessed with these devices. Pendakin are kind of like the original drum machine. They play pre-set rhythms, using wind power to turn wheels which make percussive strikes. I see builders essentially become musicians here (at least momentarily) as they choose the rhythms their pendakin plays. Some larger pendakin become so complex that designing their rhythms really starts to feel as much like programming, as it does building. This sort of relationship between craft and programmatic thinking is sort of what this year is all about. And as a long time advocate for breeze-related art, I love to see this sort of wind related thing.

I’ve spent the last few days following vague directions to villages where people make pendakin, with the hopes of learning the craft myself. This is a work in progress, and I’ve been here less than a week so calm down, no, I’m not an expert yet. But I will preemptively take your pre-order for a custom pendakin. Family/friend discount negotiable.

This summer when people asked about what my fellowship this year will entail, I tended to leave it to a coy “international instrument building,” but the truth is I didn’t entirely know then, and I still don’t exactly know now.

As I wander here, talk to musicians, and follow my ears I'm drawn im pulled in what feels like infinitely many different directions. I’m not quite interested in mastering the craft of any particular musical instrument (nor do I have the time to), and I’m not just interested in one angle of musical technology. I’ve been feeling, in a weird way, more lost than ever. With Watson there’s no agenda, no syllabus and no objective metric for success besides what you impose on yourself.

Just in the past week here, I’ve come to learn about a fruitful weird noisy scene of young experimental electronic musicians in Yonyakarta (a city on neighboring Java), an effort in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta to digitize cassette tapes that hold much of the country's musical history, new experimental Gamelan-electronic music coming out of Denpasar, and a musician building his own Gamelan-inspired rhythmic synthesizers in East Java.

Any or all of these might be the next move for me. Or none of them might be. Time will tell, as I take time here to find my direction.

For now, I’m getting over some brutal jetlag, and leaving this rooster-protected home for a small villa on a rice field. Soon after I will travel East to the village of _____ where the metal pieces that make up Gamelan instruments are forged, with the goal of documenting and participating in the process of construction.

The above words are sort of for you, my dutiful reader/friend/professor/parent/suitor/boss/online stalker. But they are, selfishly, moreso for me to figure out where I’m going with all this.

So if you made it this far, I thank you for suffering through whatever vague collection of thoughts made it on paper today. As a present for your attention, I’ve gathered some sites and sounds I think are worth sharing.

With love from Indonesia,

Henry