From Issue 1
Imagined Traditions: Taikuh Jikang and Kohey Kawamura
Justin Devries
In Japan, traditional music is just traditional music, and new music is just new music. They are difficult to mix, but I try to do it anyway.
Umi To Yoru (title track)
You are somewhere off of the north coast of Indonesia sailing for an island called Walak. It is dark and you see nothing, but the sounds of this place drift into earshot across the water. You hear crickets and bird calls, a plucked string instrument, a chorus of voices singing in an indiscernible but somehow familiar language you later learn is the local “Walakanese”. As the music reaches your ears, the island slowly appears as if a fog had lifted before your eyes. Stepping onto land you see musicians arranged in front of a large glowing screen, upon which shadow puppets of children, roosters and pearls come to life. What was a nearly inaudible stream of beautiful sounds becomes violins, kendang (drums), bass guitars, reong (tuned gongs), steel drums, and gangsa (metallophones). This place is called into existence by Taikuh Jikang, a Japan-based collective led by Kohey Kawamura. They act as mediums, opening a window into this imagined reality while inviting us to explore and design it.
Despite the unusual combination of sounds, the performance comes across as effortless. It exists not as a fusion, but instead as the singular creation of a newborn tradition. In this place, Indonesian instrumentation and style sit comfortably alongside synthesizers and slinky bass lines, energetic chants and electronic drums. Combined as they are here, the timbral and visual mixtures seem natural and almost inevitable. Their art is immersive and engineered to include the listener, opening a sonic window into the island of Walak. In practice there is only a thin barrier between our world and theirs. Initially a multimedia installation in Japan, the world of Walak was partially fleshed out through performances during which ensemble leader Kohey Kawamura took questions about Walak from the audience and improvised responses.
After introducing the rituals, music, and geography of Walak at one such event, Kawamura received an email from an attendee. “She claimed to be an Oceanographer,” he explains, “who had investigated the ocean around Walak.” She found that the waters were full of oysters, producing an abundance of pearls. These pearls were readily collected by the people of Walak, and while observing them being collected she witnessed a ceremony. Every hundred years or so, when a watermelon-sized pearl is found in their waters, the islanders honour this discovery with a night of music and storytelling. In response to the email, Kawamura composed Umi To Yoru (Sea and Night), new music and an accompanying shadow play that brings the ceremony to life. The composition is meditative, and flows with refined feeling while shadows dance on the screen.
Kawamura is no stranger to collaborative contexts: in addition to being a composer, visual artist, and practiced in Indonesian shadow puppetry, he has worked with artists ranging from the Japanese experimental-pop masters Haruomi Hosono, Cornelius, and Yoshimi P-We to Indonesia’s Gamelan Cudamani, I Wayan Nartha, and I Made Subandi. Speaking about his experiences working across the boundaries of both culture and genre, Kohe notes that “in Japan, traditional music is just traditional music and new music is just new music. These are difficult to mix, but I try to do it anyway.” Perhaps his best known contribution to this effort appears on OOIOO’s album Gamel, an experimental rock album to which he contributed gamelan arrangements. Here he lays static kotekan (Balinese interlocking patterns) above repetitive guitar lines, mixes kecak (Balinese interlocking vocals) with experimental vocals, while Balinese reong and calung sit behind chaotic electronic and percussive soundscapes. His contributions to the album provide a tapestry of interwoven rhythms that nestle comfortably behind OOIOO’s distinctive angular rock. Kohe’s work with Taikuh Jikang, however, exists in a different space. Whereas Gamel sits comfortably within the lineage of European and American pop experimentation, Taikuh Jikang lacks clear and traceable roots. They instead embody a new artistic identity born of new soil.
It is worth noting that Taikuh Jikang is not alone in creating fictional musics that draw inspiration from “traditional” or “folk” sources. John Lurie’s fanciful African-American folk hero Marvin Pontiac and Michael Snow’s mock ethnographic field recordings are examples of imaginary musics supposedly born of cultures different from that of their creators. Taikuh Jikang’s music stands apart from these and other precedents in that their inspirations are just that: inspirations. Both the compositions offered in their discography and their performances are rooted in experience working with Indonesian music and musicians, and they do this while never stepping outside of their own uniquely identified and coherent world. Instead Indonesian arts are but one influence in a diverse constellation of sources, all of which are mixed masterfully in a way that obscures the elements which inspired them. Perhaps, then, this music is more conceptually akin to the intergalactic music of artists like Sun Ra and Karlheiz Stockhausen, or the fantasy-based music created by Tolkien enthusiasts. Such comparisons are interesting to consider, but remain unsatisfactory. We find no overt political or social motivations in Taiku Jikang’s work, and no desire to create what might have been or what should be. Walak instead seems to effortlessly exist with no purpose beyond exploring and creating itself, and as a place it feels both impossible and yet entirely real.
This is why it is hard to categorize or describe the work of Taikuh Jikang. This ambiguity is baked in, and is perhaps what makes the group stand apart from others working with Indonesian instrumentation and style. On this Kawamura remarks “I see my music as a kind of avant-garde, although some Balinese musicians have said that Taikuh Jikang’s music is cool, but not very complicated.” By combining elements drawn from seemingly disparate areas of artistic expression and letting them grow out of a fictionalized place, the group suggests new paths through the often challenging intercultural terrain of musical fusions. In doing so Taikuh Jikang fulfills no expectations – instead, they create new possibilities.
Justin Devries
Check out Taikuh Jikang on Vimeo:
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About the author(s)
Justin Ronald Devries
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