above: the cover of Trabajo's Gamelan to the Love God
When British electronic duo Plaid played New York's Le Poisson Rouge in 2011 to support their album Scintilli, they had an unusual opener: A New York City-based, 26-member Balinese gamelan ensemble called Gamelan Dharma Swara. Seated onstage among bronze metallophones, gongs, flutes, and drums, the group used ice-pick-like mallets to create an intricate, twinkling cacophony that changed tempos frequently and fluidly, following the lead of wooden hand drums. I was initially surprised that Plaid didn’t ask a rising electronic musician to kick off the show. But as they recreated the complex layers of Scintilli onstage, I found that certain rhythms and sonorities were suddenly reminding me of the gamelan music I’d just heard. It was like a personalized recommendation for electronic music fans: If you like us, you’ll love this.
Gamelan is a centuries-old, percussion-based style of traditional music from Southeast Asia. Members of a gamelan ensemble play bronze or bamboo instruments, each repeating a variant of a melody within a unique framework of scales, at different tempos, creating a song made of intricate layers. It can instantly alternate from loud and chaotic to quiet and soothing. (Maybe the Pixies owe “loud quiet loud” credit to 17th-century Indonesians.)
Gamelan Dharma Swara playing at Brooklyn Bridge Park last summer
“We had a few people say it was their first experience with gamelan, and they really enjoyed it,” Plaid’s Andy Turner told me recently via Skype. “We’ve been exposed to it over the years from various different sources. It’s very repetitive. Phrases go on and on for a considerable amount of time. Coming from a dance music background, that made sense to us.” Looking back on Plaid’s 25-year, nine-album career (their tenth, Reachy Prints, is out May 20 on Warp), the gamelan influence is clear. “We’ve tended to use bells and gong-type sounds a lot over the years,” Turner says. “They’re percussive but also melodic. You can have sort of pitched rhythm.” Plaid also collaborated with a London-based Javanese gamelan ensemble, the Southbank Gamelan Players, in 2010.
“For people who aren’t familiar with gamelan, it can seem improvised,” says Bethany Collier, president of Gamelan Dharma Swara and Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University. “It’s so hard to understand how all of these people are playing all of these crazy instruments.” The primary difference between gamelan and Western music is that low-pitched gongs maintain the basic structure of a song, whereas in a pop song the higher-pitched singer is the anchor. “You have to flip your ears around,” Collier said. But there’s a clear connection between gamelan and electronic, Collier says, in their shared emphasis on layering and building.
“Orbital records or Autechre, there’s definitely an incredible amount of gamelan influence in that—whether they’re aware or not,” Evan Ziporyn, music professor at MIT and founder of the Gamelan Galak Tika ensemble in Boston told me over the phone. “It’s music that has a narrative, but not a linear narrative. Things are going to cycle, there are going to be patterns.”
The similarities are easy to hear, for example, when you listen to a gamelan recording from Nonesuch’s “Explorer Series,” (which is responsible for recruiting many gamelan fans) and then to Plaid’s “Get What You Gave” from Spokes, Four Tet’s “Circling” from There Is Love in You, or Dan Deacon’s “USA III: Rail” from America. The songs vary stylistically, but they all value patterns, repetition and stratification in a strikingly similar way.
“Gamelan is one of those things in music school that’s like ‘Dude, you have to listen to this!’” Dan Deacon told me over the phone. He got into gamelan in college, and subsequently bought “gigs and gigs” of it on eMusic and other sites, in addition to a few vinyl finds. “I think that electronic musicians enjoy it because all of their instruments contribute to the one goal.”
“Conceptually, we have borrowed from it extensively,” e-mailed Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, who stumbled across one of Nonesuch’s Balinese gamelan samplers on cassette at Tower Records as a teenager. “To Western-trained ears, the sound consonance and dissonance living together has been a huge inspiration to us.”
“It is like any influence or inspiration—it is a conversation you add to,” Björk told me in an interview in 2012, not long after she released Biophilia, which utilized an instrument she helped create, the gameleste. Björk, who discovered gamelan as a teenager, commissioned an Icelandic organ maker to gut her old Celeste and fill it with gamelan-like bronze bars and a MIDI controller, so that she could recreate the sounds of an ensemble. The gameleste is dominant on songs like “Crystalline”.
Last week at Bushwick’s Shea Stadium, Trabajo, an electronic duo from Ridgewood, Queens played a set of industrial-tinged dance music that featured gamelan samples, culled from Nonesuch albums, Indonesian tape blogs, and live performances from YouTube. Their energy was infectious as the room approached half-full, and they fused heavy bass beats with bell and gong sounds. A fan danced joyfully and haphazardly at the front of the crowd, while others half-nodded their enjoyment nearby. “We wanted to take part in this great diverse tradition, to be in dialogue with it,” Trabajo’s TJ Richards told me afterward. “And since access to gamelan instruments in the US is very limited (and expensive) we knew sampling was the best way to join the conversation.”