In ISSUE 3 we highlight several recording figures that have made significant contributions to the growing archive of music recorded across Indonesia. Giovanni Sciarrino and Danker Schaareman reflect on the realities of recording gamelan in two Cerita Kehidupaan interviews, while also shedding light on how their lives came to be transformed by Indonesian music. In connection with Schaareman’s research we also include a concise Recording Retrospective of Ritual Music from Bali I-IV, the only release to include recordings gathered during the impressive Swiss-Basel research efforts of the 1970s and 1980s.

Parallel to these stories, and based on interviews with I Wayan Wijana and Anak Agung Gde Puja of Bali Record, I Komang Pasek Wijaya shares a brief history of Bali’s most prolific and influential recording enterprise, which opened its doors in 1972 and ceased recording festival gong kebyar performances in 2014 due to decreasing demand for physical recordings. In order to pay tribute to the significance of their work, and with Bali Record’s permission, we have photographed all 14 of their cassette catalogs and made them available online. We close the focus on recording culture in an interview with Palmer Keen, one of the most prolific documentarians of musics across Indonesia today, and hear about his impressive work with Aural Archipelago.

In this issue we’ve included our first ever Local Spotlight, in which Putu Nova Handiyana describes a unique mixture of joged bungbung and pelegongan called Berko that originated in Kelurahan Pendem, Jembrana; we check in on the Terip family and the recent activities of Sanggar Tripittaka in Munduk; Cordey Lopez helps bridge gaps between gamelan and DIY-electronic art-forms with a feature on one of Bandung’s most prolific and eclectic composers, Fahmi Mursyid, that also touches on his recent Insitu Recordings release Akur; and finally, Oscar Smith reviews Australian Paris-based percussionist-composer Will Guthrie’s latest album Nist Nah.