New article and audio interview about Khuruksetra at IFmedia, Issue #2

IFmedia | Indonesia’s Finest Media.

http://www.theifmedia.com/

Filed under: Khuruksetra, News

“I can’t appreciate that show!!!!!”

My sister Ruci Ameria forwarded me an e-mail from her friend who wrote her 1st time experience of watching KHURUKSETRA’s performance at Singapore. Since this is only an opinion written on facebook.com by my sister’s friend, the name of the author will be kept anonymous.  Enjoy!

—————————————————————–

I went to Indoverse 2009, an event by PPI Singapura. It was an event of Indonesian cultural performances, although mostly the performances were pop band performances. Then came one rather unforgettable show of “art”—the Khuruksetra (gosh, I had to look through my gmail to get the spelling right).

I guess you can google the group to find out more about it (which I am too lazy to do). But basically, from the one performance I saw, the group seems to be a modern art group that strives to cross traditional boundary and bring performing art to a different level. Different, uh huh. Before the performance started, the MCs introduced the performance as one on “the conflict of love”. Love. Right.

The lights were off. The stage was partly covered with black cloth. Three performers sat on stage. Their heads down. I think they were playing with guitars and a bass. Two screens on the wall showed the black and white video; what the video was about I’m not so sure either. The performers on stage, still heads down, started playing. Dum dum dum (I know a guitar doesn’t sound like that, but the whole thing sounds like that).

Then there was a man whose head was hidden under farmer’s triangular-shaped straw hat, holding sapu lidi in each hand, came silently from one side of the stage. To me, this guy resembled a barong. Though his head was hidden, I felt like I could see his eyes wide open. Dum dum dum.

A shriek broke out of that triangular-shaped straw hat. The creature went into spasms. More shrieks. My ears were hurt. The video on the screens continued playing a black-and-white montage of incomprehensible things. Then the video showed the creature, with sapu lidi on each hand, running through the woods. And approached a cow. Yes, a cow. I was thinking, is the love conflict between this creature and the cow? What the…

So the rest of the show just continued with shrieks, more shrieks, more spasms, an effort of gymnastic talent showcase, and the video that continued to show the love story of this creature and a cow (haha, I’m joking). The creature finally took off the straw hat only to show black-painted face. More shrieks. The video showed someone wrapped in long cloths, and a cow, I think the cow’s insides. Morbid. Yeah.

And it ended. Clap clap clap.

I just sat there. I told my friend who sat besides me, “I can’t appreciate that show.” He said the same thing earlier, and went off to the restroom in the middle of the show. I lingered on my seat, still watching this art performance that I could not comprehend.

Filed under: Khuruksetra

Khuruksetra: Singapore Live Report

Reported by Mirza Natadisastra.
Source: http://lensakulitinta.blogspot.com/2009/03/khuruksetra-cursed-leak.html

Khuruksetra: The Cursed Le’ak

Who would start a performance by banging a bass guitar with a hammer, and finished it with a sonic universe, and still left the audience in awe with a new audio and visual experience? Khuruksetra has successfully done all of the above in their latest performance in the Indonesian Embassy in Singapore.

“It was a fantastic performance. I can feel the battle to find the long lost love and I was amazed by the combination of the audio Khuruksetra produced, the video slideshow they put on screen, and the costume and theatrical performance by one of the members from Khuruksetra. It is simply magical,” Yayan Mulyana, the first secretary of Indonesian Embassy for Singapore, said.

In their third major city performance, after Sydney and Melbourne, Khuruksetra took on love as the theme for the performance. They took the audience to the khuruksetra battlefield to see how the Le’ak (creature from Mahabarata story) tried to find the love it could not get. It screamed, it scared, and it made the audience to stand on their feet.

Khuruksetra first heard in Singapore by one of the committees of the event who passed it on to the Head Committee, Yurika Gani. “I first saw Khuruksetra from their video performance in Melbourne, it was scary enough for me to decide to invite them come to Singapore for this event. But, seeing them live was so much different from what I’ve seen on the video, it was an amazing experience and an amazing performance.”

The Khuruksetra Singapore performance was ended uniquely, the audience left with three minutes of the visual slideshow still on play without knowing that the members of Khuruksetra has left the stage. Mikael Mirdad referred to John Cage, one the most famous sound artists of his era, for the occasion, “We left the audience seeing what’s left on the slideshow, a composition of trees, blood, and also animals. Khuruksetra is no longer part of the performance at that moment, it was the audience who has become part of the performance with their whispers and also their awkward applause. This is the statement that we wanted to delivered; Every sound in this world can be regarded as music, even silence. It was called Sonic Universe.”

The performance marked another milestone in Khuruksetra’s chapter. They have conquered Singapore, just like Sydney and Melboourne, by making the audience shivered and stood on their feet. But, they have never played in Indonesia. A performance that proudly brings Indonesian culture to its best and never played in Indonesia. Would it be caused by the audience who does not fit to Khuruksetra’s performance? But one thing for sure, they should have played in Indonesia a long time ago.

Khuruksetra
Indonesian Embassy for Singapore
Saturday, 28 February 2009

Filed under: Events, Experimental Music, Khuruksetra

KHURUKSETRA (Promo Teaser – Singapore 2009)

We are going to perform at an Indonesian Cultural Showcase at Singapore.

Filed under: Events, Experimental Music, Khuruksetra

The Omen of Khuruksetra

A short article written by Mirza Natadisastra about KHURUKSETRA’s performance at Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne.

Source: http://lensakulitinta.blogspot.com/2008/10/face-of-khuruksetra.html

The Omen of Khuruksetra

They come, they see, and they scare! Khuruksetra shows one of its best ever performance in front of 500 unprepared Melbourne crowd with its “Syair Jayabaya” sound and visual art performance.

“I thought they were here to scare people away,” Abelian Yodha, Junior Consulate of Indonesian Consulate General Melbourne, said.

After its 20 minutes performance that comes with pitch black environment, dark ambient, and a scream of a Javanese soul, Khuruksetra gets mixed response from the audience. One believes that Khuruksetra is performing a Satanic ritual and outraged by its performance.

“This is the kind of response that we’re expected from the audience, we are not here to make friends, we are here to make a statement about our music and our performance,” Mikael Mirdad said.

Khuruksetra is an experimental art project from Sydney, and asked about its history, Danif Pradana said, “It’s all started when I explored the idea of ‘Surrealist Automatic Feedback’.”

With Melbourne as a stepping stone, Khuruksetra has a long road ahead them. “This is just the beginning, we are playing with different concept on different performances, and our next goal would be playing in Bali as part of our cultural expedition,” Mr. Pradana said.

With Melbourne in its past, Khuruksetra is preparing for a bigger stage in its journey, and so should the audience. Warning! The Omen of Khuruksetra is haunting the world.

More to come on Khuruksetra..

Khuruksetra
Grand Hyatt Ballroom
Sunday, 5 October 2008.

Filed under: Events, Experimental Music, Khuruksetra

Khuruksetra: Behind The Recording of Dupha

“Dupha” is what we considered to be the most excorsistic side of KHURUKSETRA. It’s a sonic torment experimentation heavily influenced by the abrasiveness of the old school industrial culture in combination with the Study of Sound Design in Psychological Horror film by retracing back some prominent classic film such as The Exorcist, Eraserhead, The Silence of the Lambs, and even some modern example such as The Passion of the Christ, and 30 days of Nights.

“What would happened if Whitehouse or Boyd Rice is doing the sound design for The Exorcist? And what would happened if the film was set in Indonesia?”. That is basically our fundamental thought that triggers us to record “Dupha”.

Day by day we spend most of our time not only experimenting with different sonic possibilities, but also doing some Psychoacoustic Research in Horror films, either academically or simply in a direct case study. We situate our self as making a dub music production, where the studio is not only a place to record, but also as an instrument. It involves lots of room resonances recording, Foley recording, ADR, and definitely mixing, which is things that we normally do in doing a sound design for a film. We set up various microphones in every corner of the studio floor, where Andra our main vocalist is locked in that room with a headphone in his head listening to the extreme sonic waveforms that is being playback from the monitor room. Through that claustrophobic acoustic environment, Andra reacts it violently by screaming, grunting, and whispering for almost 30 minutes. The microphones capture his voice from every corner of the studio floor.

Meanwhile in the monitor room, we create a noisy texture of drone noise using a vintage analogue modular systems manufactured by Doepfer. For those who don’t know what is an analogue modular is, is basically a rack of synth where you’re creating a different waveforms of sound by patching cables to the rack. So what we see basically is a live collaboration between the monitor room and studio floor that is all mixed in Pro Tools. At the ends, it creates a sensation of listening to an old-school power electronics music with the sound design of the exorcist on the background.

Filed under: Experimental Music, Khuruksetra