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 18 days 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 left Canggu for the rice fields of Ubud, but am now woken up at 5am by a 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, depending on the day.

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. Indonesia is home to some 1,300+ ethnic groups spread over thousands of islands, many of whom have their own unique musical traditions and instruments.

Gamelan, though, is probably the most widespread and well-known Indonesian musical tradition outside of Indonesia. Thus, it was the clear place for me to begin my studies. Gamelan music is characterized by its intricate, interlocking patterns and cyclical compositions, played on ensembles of mostly metal instruments. Gamelan is found almost exclusively on the islands of Bali, Java and Lombok.

Step 1: Gamelan.

After moving from Canggu, I spent my first week in Indonesia outside of Ubud (an inland city, sometimes known as the “cultural capital” of the island). Here, I learned to play a Gamelan instrument called the Gangsa from a local teacher, Putu Odo. Putu, by his own admission, kind of “owns” the Gamelan scene in this part of Bali. He teaches hundreds of students, and is a well-regarded contemporary Gamelan composer. Between lessons at his house, we enjoyed many long conversations about his life, and the way he thinks about music.

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The way he (and many other Gamelan musicians I’m sure) thinks about music is so interesting to me, and so different from anything I’ve learned previously. Many Gamelan players never use notation systems, so pieces are all stored in the memory of people like Putu.* He thinks he knows at least 300 pieces. But, he tells me that he does not feel they are stored in his brain, so much as they are stored in his muscles. When he plays a piece from memory he does not think of it nor hear it in his head consciously. He explained to me that to recall a piece, he puts his hands in the right starting place, and trusts the rest of his body to follow.

(*notation systems do exist for Gamelan, but they are not used by any of the musicians I’ve worked with)

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Gamelan music is stored in the bodies of many people like Putu across Western Indonesia and, in this way, the repertoire is quite literally alive. (I’ll spare you for now… but another interest I have on this fellowship is organic information storage, and archiving practices… so this is totally cool stuff!!). As someone who abandoned reading music many years ago, but still kept avidly pursuing music, I found it was actually quite reassuring to hear about this way of knowing and music-ing from a serious teacher/musician like Putu. I always felt that my way of engaging with music (memorizing by feel) was weird and unusual, but here in Gamelan music, it’s the norm. Putu, in fact, told me it’s weird for him to play with Western musicians reading from scores, in some of the cross-cultural Gamelan collaborations he’s done.

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This does not mean at all, though, that Gamelan is untouched by modern systems of information storage. Gamelan music is in fact being recorded all the time (both on cell phones, and in studios), and compositions often travel over the internet. One day, Putu explained to me, as I rode on the back of his motorbike, that often people would upload videos of his compositions to Facebook. Other composers across the island will then start teaching his pieces to their groups. These other ensembles will then put their own musical decorations on his work and perform slightly altered versions. I asked him if he thought of this as theft, and he laughed at me. He explained to me a clear distinction he feels between “social” music (music that is created to be shared) and “profit” music (music created to make money). The former, he thinks, is by far the most common form in Gamelan. Putu fundamentally relinquishes control of his music, and operates with this expectation that people will take and alter his work. His work will be changed (remixed, if you will) and travel all over, without accreditation.

I’m currently releasing an album with my band, and going through the steps of meta-data entry and credit allocation, that anyone who releases music is familiar with. This rigid system of exact accreditation, and analytics, and static recordings was really the only way I knew to think of music distribution before this conversation with Putu. I really hope to keep meeting and learning from people like him this year, who will challenge the mental models I have of music and the world.

Step 2: Pindekan.

If Gamelan is the obvious way to study music in Indonesia, my second strategy to learn about music here is the exact opposite. On one of my first days in Indonesia, I had a conversation with Palmer Keen, who tipped me off to the existence of a noise-making musical windmill known as Pindekan. Pindekan are kind of like the original drum machine: a shaft rotated by wind power drives a mechanism which hits different bamboo bars at very precise times, creating looped rhythms. As the wind blows, a pindekan plays the same rhythm over and over again. They are often used in Balinese celebrations, or put in rice fields as decorations that serve the dual purpose of scaring away pests.

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For those of you familiar with me and sculpture-savant Oliver Black-Johnson’s recent work on the Blockenspiel, you know I already have an obsession with devices that autonomously hit things in semi-musical ways. I also consider myself a long time advocate for breeze-related art. So it probably comes as no surprise that I became determined (some might say unhealthily obsessed) with trying to find the pindekan, and the people who make them.

There is relatively little information online about these devices, or where to find them. So, I took matters into my own hands and spent days wandering around small villages in the Gianyar area, which are known for their wood carvers and craftspeople. I walked and rode on the backs of scooters for hours, using Google Translate, and my own poor mime skills to ask anyone and everyone I found about where to find pindekan. (I’m saving the details for another post… but this eventually ended in success).

The cool thing about the pindekan, is that the people who make them are as much musicians as they are craftspeople. They are doing the same thing that embarrassing underground teenage beatmakers (I can say this because I was one) and highly skilled famous electronic musicians/composers alike do: realizing a drum sequence in their heads, and expressing it as a loop with some form of technology. Some larger pindekan are so complex, that building them seems as much a task of programming (or a sort of physical computing), as it is building.

What next?

This summer when people asked about what my fellowship this year will entail, I tended to leave it at 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 in what feels like infinitely many different directions. I’ve been feeling, in a weird way, more lost than ever. With Watson there’s no strict agenda, no syllabus and no objective metric for success besides what you impose on yourself.

But just in the past two weeks here, I’ve come to learn about a fruitful weird noisy scene of young experimental electronic musicians in Jogja (a city on neighboring Java), an effort in Jakarta to digitize cassette tapes that hold much of the country's popular musical history, new experimental Gamelan-electronic music coming out of Denpasar, and a musician building his own Gamelan-inspired rhythmic synthesizers in East Java. I’ve also been invited to start rehearsals with a local Gamelan group.

I’ve managed to go from having a daunting amount of free time, to having many meetings and outings to schedule. This is a good problem to have!! But nonetheless challenging for my detail-averse brain.

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

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 sights and sounds I think are worth sharing.

I have some shorter updates coming soon: on my visit to a Gamelan forgery, the pindekan saga, and the last couple days I’ve spent riding bikes with a couple semi-unemployed Balinese guys running a community radio station.

If you found anything unsatisfactory, or detected grammatical errors in my writing, please don’t hesitate to send a strongly worded letter to the editor: (henrywburkhardt@gmail.com).

Until next time,

(here’s a stream of some recent photos: https://www.are.na/henry-burkhardt/watson-pics)