Bunyi-Bunyi Tumbal translates to “a synthetic feeling for anonymous sacrifice,” revealing the chaos that took place in the producer's native land of Indonesia during the Dutch colonization.
Hulubalang's performance titled Bunyi-Bunyi Tumbal was premiered at Trades Hall, Melbourne as part of the Now or Never Festival.
Kasimyn as Hulubalang in the show is in collaboration with Brandon Tay, a Singaporean artist who contributed visuals — artificial intelligence-based animation inspired by photographs of Indoneisans taken during the colonial era.
The process of making Bunyi-Bunyi Tumbal to around 2013, when Kasimyn began collecting Indonesian photo archives using the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands. From the emotions he felt while looking at and delving into the archives, he tried to synthesize the sounds using electronic music technology.
Perhaps some of us have danced while listening to a sad song, remembering a failed love story, but is it strange when we dance while witnessing a tragic picture of suffering?
Kasimyn played heavy electronic music rich in distortion while a video depicting faces of residents with Indonesian facial characters - also at times distorted to impress a sense of surprise or suffering - was played on the big screen behind him with Indonesian facial characters that are also sometimes distorted to impress a sense of surprise or suffering.
In the description of the festival, it is explained that Bunyi-Bunyi Tumbal, both audibly and visually, was inspired by the war period and the colonization of Indonesia, especially inspired by the photographs of ordinary Indonesian people in the colonial era - photographs that are displayed in the museum without any description of what their names are and what their personal stories are.
Now and Never - City of Mebourne
The explanation of Kasimyn, the voice maestro behind the Hulubalang character, regarding this has opened up new insights.
One of the fundamental questions he posed was: 'Why do we always associate music and dance with happiness? Isn't this perception a product of modern Western culture that has become so entrenched in our thinking? '”
“(This idea of dance music was) formulated by the West - that it was close to hedonism, close to leisure, close to pleasure-only, especially the one in the club, whereas in my opinion, I didn't see the difference between the day of death in Toba wearing dance and sometimes laughing,” he explained.
It is quite a miss when we describe music in Bunyi-Bunyi Tumbal as a process by which one combines western-style electronic music with Indonesian regional songs.
Such examples are already common in discotheques.
Kasimyn tends to dismantle the foundations of electronic music and rebuild it using the breath of traditional Indonesian music. In other words, imagine if the dance music we know today was originally formed without the principles of Western music, such as the 12-tone principle, what would it be? That's what Hulubalang tried to design.
The explanation of Kasimyn, the voice maestro behind the Hulubalang character, regarding this has opened up new insights.
