Chasing the Phantom by the Balinese master Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat already drew comparisons to electronic music, with its muted strikes and metallic shimmers, its rippling melodies and glitching repetitions being likened to the sampled chaos of Alvin Curran or the skittering rhythms of classic Oval.
On his latest album Teratai Åkande, the Copenhagen producer Anton Friisgaard best known for his tape loops and ambient soundscapes pushes further in this direction, corresponding with Dewa Alit and eventually collaborating with members of the Gamelan Salukat after attending a performance by the ensemble at Roskilde Festival back in 2018.
Pande Made Gangga Sentana, I Nyoman Suwida, Dewa Badukz, Suryana Putra and Pande Made Gangga of the Gamelan Salukat recorded with Friisgaard in Ubud, the town in Bali set between rice paddies and steep ravines which from fashion to traditional forms of music and dance has developed a reputation as a site of cultural interchange. Friisgaard brought their recordings home, editing and processing them over the course of the past few years for a synthesis of acoustic and electronic cadences.
The album opener ‘Syrati’ shows this conflux of environments and forms, with the pagan poetry and vestal charge of its chimes redolent of the Björk opus Vespertine and some of the more plangent or propulsive tracks from Biophilia, such as ‘Crystalline’ and ‘Virus’ for which she commissioned an original instrument called the gameleste, a midi-controlled device which incorporates gamelan-like bronze bars in a celeste housing.
These chimes on ‘Syrati’ are eventually subsumed by fourth world pipes and reeds, whose rise and fall seems to shift the tectonics of the underlying percussion. Through a muffled and faltering wheeze, ‘Havun’ ferries new age choruses, while the impish metallophones of ‘Cemille’ flit and spiral around a central drum beat, which reverberates up and down the sides of a steep ravine or burrows deeper into the forest with all of its attendant creature features.
This is the secret to Teratai Åkande which shows a certain reverence for gamelan and Friisgaard’s experiences in Ubud, while reshaping both the tradition and his own electronic practice as the producer conjures a misty and tenuous yet rhythmically complex jazz and tropics or fourth world ambiance.
The resounding gong of ‘Erantai’ seems to herald less some grand edifice than a bed of silt and sticks, wound through by sinuous reeds, while ‘Kampaka’ is more propulsive, a hurried gamelan overlaid by interstitial and then carbonated synths. ‘Lavitir’ slows everything back down for an immersive exploration or torchlight procession through paddy or thicket.
And after the muted horns and rousing pan pipes of the short ‘Kunyikke’, the album closer ‘Solesia’ unfurls a dolorous horn in the depths of the forest, with a slight winnowing quality as the sound rustles and moans back through the canopy and shrub, plaintive chime duplets giving way to a winding frolic and dank heaves as the whole exhales in one breath.
