Jogja Pitstop
Today I’m feeling merciful, so here’s a shorter one.
I finally got some of my energy back from Typhoid and left Bali earlier this week, stopping by the city of Yogyakarta (affectionately known as Jogja) on my way to Jakarta. Tomorrow, I’m starting an internship in South Jakarta with a group called Irama Nusantara, digitizing long-lost cassette tapes of popular Indonesian music.
Jogja is sometimes dubbed the “cultural capital” of Java. It’s a young, student-filled city with a lively art scene. It’s also home to a fascinating technology/art subculture. Projects like Lifepatch, and Hackteria have thrived here for decades, bringing together scientists, musicians, and technologists in all sorts of unusual ways.
My original plan for Jogja was to catch an experimental music festival that happened last week, but the Typhoid gods had other plans for me. I decided to spite them as best I could, and visit Jogja anyway after the festival ended. I came with the goal of meeting with Lintang Radittya, the king of Indonesian synthesizers. Okay, yeah, I’m sure he would never apply that title to himself but he quite literally wrote the book on Indonesian synthesizers, and I certainly believe he deserves it. He’s an artist, engineer, and instrument-maker whose work has brought him to festivals, exhibits and universities around the world: Germany, Switzerland, Amsterdam, to name a few, and most recently Tennessee (exotic if you’re from Jogja!).
Lintang invited me into his space in the Lifepatch community studio in Jogja. He showed me some synths he was working on, and we spent the evening talking about technology, music, and memory.
He’s an artist of many kinds, but much of his work these days is focused on modular synthesis. If a traditional synthesizer is like a toy car, you could think of a modular synthesizer as a lego car: you choose all of the pieces that make up the synthesizer and put it together yourself instead of buying a fixed system. You can always switch components out in modular synths, they’re infinitely configurable. Modular synths have been around for 60 years, but Lintang was one of the first (many think the first) in Indonesia to build a one, about 10 years ago.
Originally a theater and political science student, he started figuring out how modular systems worked and taught himself basic electrical engineering after watching a Radiohead video with a modular synth. When he was starting out, Lintang explained to me that many of the necessary parts for synthesizers (that would be readily available in the West) could not be found in Indonesia, so he sourced recycled parts himself. Things are much more available these days, but Lintang’s approach remains as DIY as ever.
Many of his synths/modular components take inspiration from traditional Javanese Gamelan rhythms and scales. A typical synth would use the standard 12-tone chromatic scale (like the keys on a piano), but Lintang has built synths where only the 7-note scale of Javanese Gamelan is afforded to the player. We spoke for a while about his love for collaborating with traditional musicians, and bringing their knowledge into his work.
In my Watson application, I wrote a lot about information that is stored “beyond the algorithmic,” (an important distinction I felt, because my project is about technology). That is, information that can’t necessarily be digitally stored on computers. Lintang shared this interest with me, and has a deep appreciation for the craft and skill that goes into traditional instrument building. He confessed his desire to do more work that is not software-based, and instead closer to traditional instrument building. He told me he thinks technology based art work is on it’s way to becoming “all the same” because everyone is using the same tools (the same software, the same programming languages, the same root binary structure of information).
Something I’ve come toove about traditional instrument building in Indonesia (and I’m sure this is the case in many other places), is thatoften times an instrument is truly of a place: the materials for the instrument come from the land on which it is played. This was something that, to my mind, was completely lost in electronic instruments. Lintang proved me wrong, showing me a modular system he’s build that represents the city of Yogyakarta. I’ll spare you the details, but he explained to me in great detail how the design intentionally represents all sorts of cultural ideas, and geographic landmarks in the city. The rhythm structure of this module is also based on Gamelan rhythms, instead of a traditional quantized grid.
Okay, I will hold my promise of keeping things short and stop here. But one final thought I had writing: it would’ve sounded absolutely nuts if you told me last year that a few months after graduating college, I would be interviewing a modular-synth maker inspired by traditional Gamelan rhythms in a DIY studio in an Indonesian city I’d never heard of.
So, here's to finding myself in many more unexpected rooms, with many more people as kind and interesting and eccentric as Lintang.
