The world is a battlefield. The apocalypse is imminent. And soon, the earth will be the land of the dead.
It may not be most people’s idea of fun, but doom and gloom is all in day’s work for Khuruksetra.
“We want to be the soundtrack to death,” said group member Danif Pradana on Monday at the Salihara arts complex in South Jakarta. “At the same time, we are seeking artistic satisfaction through sounds, movements and visuals.”
Khuruksetra is an all-male Indonesian experimental noise quartet, formed in Sydney in 2007, which eschews standard notions of music in favor of raw sounds.
The vocalist, Andra Fembriarto, doesn’t sing, but shrieks, squeaks, laughs and cries into the microphone.
“I create my own lyrics,” he said. “But the words are filtered by my vocal cords, and when they come out, the audience cannot understand what I’m trying to say.”
Meanwhile, Mikael Mirdad, Enrico Gobel and Danif — on bass, guitar, tin flute, kolintang xylophone (the list goes on) — manipulate their instruments to create their “soundtrack to the apocalypse,” which naturally isn’t pretty, but features distorted tones, scratchy whirs and droning wails.
“The guitar is a basic instrument,” Danif said. “But we treat it as an instrument that produces a variety of sound textures.”
Mikael said they added a twist to their guitars by wedging objects like screwdrivers, knives or forks along the fretboard, shortening the strings, and correspondingly altering the pitch.
Enrico confessed he often “abused” his bass to make noise. “I hit it with my hands, with a screwdriver and even with a hammer,” he said.
But on closer inspection, all this noise seems to tell a story. Khuruksetra is the name of a battlefield in the Hindu epic “Mahabarata.” And at the quartet’s first performance, in Sydney in 2008, the group recounted the story of the Khuruksetra war.
Another performance, inspired by the Balinese ritual Bela Pati, told of how a warrior’s widow committed suicide by setting herself on fire.
Though each of Khuruksetra’s performances features a narrative voice, the border between composition and improvisation is typically blurred.
“Once on stage, there’s no planning or preparation,” Danif said.
“I usually listen to the first sound that comes out and take it from there.”
Mikael said he makes sounds in accordance with his current location.
“When we play in places that are bright, my musical mood will be bright,” he said. “But when we play in dark places, I will play something dark.”
“Each time I play, I never know what and how I’m going to play. I just follow whatever happens,” he added. “Every time we perform, it’s a new experience for us.”
Sri Dean works for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, better-known as SBS. She saw Khuruksetra perform in Melbourne last year.
Screams, suggestions of violence, haunting speeches, weird makeup and spaced-out electronica are the things that constitute Sri’s first impression of Khuruksetra.
She said, “The band seems to want to create a sense of horror, but somehow produces beauty.”
Sri describes the vocals as frightening, while the instrumentation produces a pleasing mixture of beauty and sadness.
“The most frightening about the group’s music is the sense of isolation and loneliness it often conveys,” she said.
Adil Yamani, an Indonesian studying in Australia, has also seen Khuruksetra perform live.
During the performance, he said, one of them painted his body in black and crawled around the stage like a ghost.
“That was very creepy, but they were very into it and performed it professionally,” he said. “I shivered in the middle of their performance.”
Earlier this year, the quartet performed a theatrical noise piece at a cultural exhibition at the Indonesian Embassy in Singapore.
The group introduced a creature it called Lehak — an incarnation of the evil spirit that emanates in times of war.
Vocalist Andra depicted the Lehak, first masking his face with a conical straw hat, then taking off the hat to reveal his face, which was painted in black.
Yurika Gani, who was the head of the cultural exhibition committee in Singapore, said that Khuruksetra offered an extremely different kind of experience, one that she referred to as “terrifying.”
On Sept. 12, Khuruksetra will perform for the first time in Indonesia, at the Salihara arts complex.
Mikael describes the planned work as an illustration of the dead in the modern era. And the title? “Bliss, Plague and Damnation.”
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