To this day Menak Jingga is the hero of a type of jaranan called jaranan buto, created in the 1960s in East Java.Īriendra and Pribadi fuse traditional and homemade percussion with unearthly digital noise and the pressurized assault of electronic drums borrowed from Dutch hardstyle and other high-energy club music. The Dutch tried to dehumanize him, creating a propaganda tale that cast him as a cannibal with a dog’s head, but the Javanese people subverted and reclaimed that image. Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi named Raja Kirik (“King Dog”) after Menak Jingga, a ruler of the last Javanese Hindu kingdom to fall to Dutch colonizers in the 1700s. Musician, composer, and multimedia artist Yennu Ariendra and composer and instrument builder J. Raja Kirik adopt and update the hammering, hypnotic musical language of jaranan, a communal shamanic trance dance from Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist era with roots that stretch back to the 11th century. I’m counting it as a 2021 release because I discovered it when Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes put out a remastered version with a bonus track last October.
The duo Raja Kirik, based in Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java, originally released their second album, Rampokan, in June 2020 on Indonesian label Yes No Wave. I won’t pretend to be in his league, but in 2021 I did have a clear favorite album-not a common thing for me-and I figure it’s never too late to share. When my colleague Leor Galil looked back on 2021, he said he’d listened to 750 new-to-him releases that year.
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).
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