Senyawa - Brønshøj (Puncak)

Pitchfork 74

It’s safe to say there is no other band on the planet quite like Senyawa. What do you call the music of this Indonesian duo: folk? Doom metal? Unplugged minimalist noise improv? In fact, it is a little bit of each. Wukir Suryadi plays the bambuwukir, an instrument of his own design—an amplified zither, fashioned out of bamboo, that looks like it could double as a weapon. It does the work of many instruments, and from it he ekes bowed string passages, plucked and strummed guitar-like sounds, and even woody, percussive rhythms. He has long hair and an intense mien, and onstage, he looks like a metal guitarist coaxing spirits from an alien relic rescued from a shipwreck.

As for Rully Shabara—how best to describe what Shabara does? You couldn’t call him a “singer,” exactly. He never simply sings. He incarnates the fleshy essence of the human voice: He shrieks, he ululates, he jibbers. Sometimes, he dips down to a low, throaty growl, its texture as pronounced as the clicking of a dial; in his falsetto range, he is a bird of prey honing in on a small mammal. He lies somewhere on a spectrum connecting Diamanda Galás and Mayhem’s Attila Csihar.

Brønshøj (Puncak), the follow-up to last year’s Menjadi, is darker and more abstracted than that album. In place of melody or rhythm, see-sawing drones and scraped textures predominate. The record is the product of an intense session held in a basement studio in Copenhagen’s working-class Brønshøj neighborhood. The duo would agree on themes—cues like “old shed,” “McDonald’s,” or “forest,” although none are necessarily discernible from the music itself—and then commence playing. Suryadi ran his bambuwukir through a short chain of cheap guitar pedals, including a looping device; Shabara used an old-school Shure 55SH Series II—the “Elvis microphone”—and the mixer’s built-in reverb and echo effects. For two days, the duo jammed, cooked Indonesian food in the kitchen next to the studio, smoked, and jammed some more. Beyond the vinyl master, there was no post-production.

The album’s five songs reflect their genesis: They are slow, drawn out, and meditative, and they admit little daylight. (“Puncak” means “summit” in Indonesian, but the music feels more like a series of plateaus than peaks.) “Brønshøj 1”—all five of the album’s tracks bear simple, sequential titles—is a kind of invocation. In an approximation of Tibetan throat singing, Shabara explores the lowest, gravelliest reaches of his voice, as though caressing his larynx with a scouring pad, while Suryadi bows funereal drones. It sounds a lot like an acoustic cousin of Sunn O)))’s blackened doom, and the closing “Brønshøj 5” continues in a similar vein, applying fuzz-pedal distortion to Suryadi’s guitar-like leads as Shabara paces in slow, teasing circles around the root note. Continuing in the avant-metal vein, the short “Brønshøj 3” takes a few strands of similar material and simply runs the tape in reverse; it wouldn't sound out of place as an interstitial sketch on a Blut Aus Nord album.

In its pursuit of a singular mood, the record is slightly less dynamic than Menjadi or the duo’s self-titled 2010 album, but the album’s two longest tracks offer a fuller indication of the duo’s range. On “Brønshøj 2,” Suryadi loops a glowering pedal tone and twists the tuning peg on a second string as he plucks it, creating an eerie, undulating effect; Shabara largely hangs back, laying down a smoky backdrop behind Suryadi’s high-necked riffing, which suggests the liquid glint of lap steel. “Brønshøj 4” combines bowed melodic phrases with a looped rhythm reminiscent of thumb piano; it is the album’s lightest track, melancholy yet also comforting. Toward the climax of its 11-minute run, as silvery string loops begin to burn white-hot, Shabara finally lets loose with a succession of inhuman shrieks and growls, lightly augmented by delay. He sounds like a synthesizer; he sounds like a pterodactyl. Yet, despite the obvious, formidable power of his voice, he never feels the need to fully unleash it; he sticks to the sidelines, directing his voice away from the listener.

It reminds me of something Shabara did when the duo played Krakow’s Unsound festival this fall. At the end of a song, he stepped away from the microphone and unleashed a brief operatic run, which went soaring over our heads. Even unamplified, he dominated the cavernous hall. This short, intimate album functions in similar ways. Rather than attempting to bowl you over, Brønshøj instead invites you to lean in closer, and rewards handsomely when you do.