Paradise (on two wheels)
Aside from hunting musical windmills and getting completely wrecked by typhoid, my month and a half in Bali was also consumed building a digital archiving system for a community radio station and joining a traditional Gamelan ensemble.
I did not plan on radio being a part of this fellowship, but it didn’t take long for me to give in to the primal urge to find a nearby broadcaster. The broadcaster in question was Paradise Under the Sun, a community radio station in Denpasar (the urban center of Bali). After finding a picture of the station manager sporting a shirt from a band I love, I had a divine feeling we’d get a long.
My hunch was spot on. Dannika, the manager in question, gave me the warmest welcome I could have asked of. He met me at the radio station studio one day and emphatically insisted that his calling in life was to be a “bridge” to anyone who wanted to come to Bali, with a serious interest in the local scene. And a bridge he was: he threw me a guava lavender seltzer and insisted we walk the streets of Denpesar for some proper Indonesian food. We spent the better part of an entire day together. When I asked what his favorite band was, he told me the name and then immediately pulled out the band's sticker from his phone case and insisted I take it. To date, I’ve received form Dannika: 1 limited edition PUTS tee shirt, PUTS hat, a keychain, at least three lunches (I insist to pay but it’s literally impossible), and an invitation to go stay with him and his mom at the house he grew up in East Bali. The man is a giver.
He and his friends, as it happens, are also big into bikes. And not just any bikes. Randomly, they are obsessed with Surly Bikes – a local Minnesota bike brand. I can’t make this stuff up.. it was like we were destined to meet. Dannika had no idea what or where Minnesota was, but as soon as I made the connection that this is where I was from, and where Surly bikes are from, we reached a new level of kinship. He started calling his biking friends on Whatsapp, explaining he’d met a fellow cyclist from the land of Surlys. Soon, we were having coffee with another one of his biking friends, Adex. It was so strange finding people on the other side of the world that I shared so much in common with – from bikes, to bands, to the grunt work of running a collaborative volunteer-based radio station.
I thought the afternoon was about to end, but Dannika informed me that there was a meetup hosted by a group called DATs (Denpasar Art and Technology) outside the studio. He insisted I come. The event was some kind of visual/audio technology get-together: a bunch of musicians, programmers and artists all collaborating on live visuals, being projected onto the side of the building. Many of them were using a software I also tinker with called TouchDesigner – funny enough I’d never hung out with anyone before in the U.S. who was a TouchDesigner nerd, and here I was in Indonesia suddenly surrounded by them.
A few days later, Adex and Dannika hooked me up with a bike, and took me on a ride through Sanur (East of Denpasar). We wove through heavy afternoon Denpasar traffic, making our way to the beach. We cruised to more cafes, and tucked away art-echibits. Along the way a whole cast of of creative characters they were friends with came and went, including a chef and a Dickies-sponsored tattoo artist. Adex and I bonded BIG time over our shared experience running poorly-organized speaker rental businesses.
A few nights later, Dannika invited me to a DJ-set he was playing, another collaboration with DATs. It was here, over the roar of Adex’s speakers that we hatched the idea that maybe I could program PUTS a new digital catalogue. Just days earlier, before discovering PUTS I — like the good CS major I am — had been thinking to myself “if only there was some sort of programming project I could do.” Luck had struck.
After weeks of rather unfamiliar work (searching for pindekan, learning gamelan) it was so nice to sink back into something I had done before – programming a radio station website. I focused on making this archive free to host, and aligned with the needs of the radio station: a platform for one specific community. I spent a lot more time with Dannika, talking about what an archiving system should look like, and how it can best serve the community of people who are going to be using it.
I could blab for a while in the abstract about why working on archives feels important to me, and why capturing a local scene at a certain time is such an attractive pursuit. This project, though, was also an excuse to keep hanging out with the PUTS guys. It led to me enjoying more nights and long afternoons with Dannika and his friends, and through them I got to really see the the Bali scene.
Bali was challenging for me at first because it felt hard to escape the tourist crowd. It seems at first that tourists are everywhere. But walking around the PUTS studio in Denpasar, just 20 minutes from some of the busiest tourist hot spots (in the world, maybe?), I was almost always the only foreign person around .
I am told Bali’s international draw has had a unique effect on the music scene. It’s brought in huge investment into pristine clubs and venues, but many of these venues are focused on booking international talent, not so much Balinese artists. The local scene is often steamrolled by promoters and profit-focused curators at huge beach clubs. I think this makes places like Paradise ever more important. The local scene in Denpasar (and Bali as a whole) is huge, and fruitful, and passionate, but it is in constant competition one of the biggest tourist economies in Asia. In that way it depends heavily on places like Paradise.
Because of Dannika I was able to get a beautifully genuine slice of life in urban Bali, help with in a pretty critical music archiving project, and see Denpasar on a bike — something almost no one does (for good reason, if you don’t have a fearless guide!). I’m forever grateful for his open arms.
You can check the preview version of my catalogue here: paradise.henry-b.net (for the Computer Science Nerds out there, I’m using React + Typescript + Next.js + Vercel + custom Sanity CMS). And if you click on the schedule and it’s empty it’s because Dannika forgot to do his job. #notmyfault. Check out the screenshots below for what it should look like. I think the station will fully transition to this site sometime in November. exciting!
The front end (what you see):
The backend (what DJs see):
Until next time
