A Vilnius-based Indonesian composer and a Berlin-based Japanese producer have recorded an album in three different nations and released it on an Ugandan imprint. As a result, Abu sounds as if it comes from nowhere and everywhere at once: a “mystifying new landmass, an imaginary island of ash.” To honor the spirit of the release, today’s review was born on one continent and the interview on another.
Along the way, one will hear shavings of sound from each artist’s home. Johanes “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi and Shigeru Ishihara intermingle gamelan percussion and taiko rhythms with chants and shouts that seem to come from deepest Africa or from the heart of the volcano. The music imitates lava: erupting, flowing, burning and solidifying. Once it has disrupted the elements around it, Abu incorporates them into a new sonic landmass.
In “Hai no uta,” two rings of an Indonesian bell preface more abrasive grinds and growls. A Javanese gong is struck; a high flute wails; a miniaturized choir sings a tiny song, recalling the Shobijin. The tension rises as the percussion begs to break through; and on “Abu,” it does. The tribal rhythms and guttural utterances recall KINACT’s Kinshasa in Action, also on Nyege Nyege Tapes; the continents seem connected again, honoring Pangea.
The deep bass of “Palau” reflects subterranean rumble: while over too soon, it gives way to the even more enthralling “Wujud,” whose industrial stumbles and starts are melded to mechanical glissandos, an Orcan, deep earth factory. “Hino Tori” is a wild outlier, bursting forth with bangha rhtymns reminiscent of “Get Your Freak On” and swiftly adding a pounding techno beat; one can imagine this as a club killer on any continent. The metallic middle teases a far different audience before finishing a water bottle and plunging back in, even more energized than before. Those waiting for their thrash moment will find it on the chaotic, ensuing piece: a far cry from the Indonesian bells that launched the set only half an hour before.
The LP’s primary draw, outside of its stunning juxtapositions of timbre, is its reaffirmation of a world without borders. Over countless millennia, magma has created innumerable landmasses, while the sea has often impassively reclaimed its own. Human borders mean nothing to geologic time. Abu is a reminder of the wealth of international music: entire species of music that much of the general public has yet to discover. We need not fear such encounters, as they do not threaten our own identity; quite the contrary. Instead, as in the case of Takkak Takkak, they broaden our language and deepen our experience. (Richard Allen)
Takkak Takkak photo by @mr_guep
Johanes “Mo’ong” Santos Pribadi has kindly taken time out of Takkak Takkak’s touring schedule to answer a few questions about the production process for Abu.
Your self-titled debut introduced a thrilling collision between DIY instrument building, Javanese traditions, Japanese electronics, noise, gabber and ritual percussion, often with a raw, playful sense of excess. On Abu, those same elements seem to have become part of a much broader imaginary world—less confrontational perhaps, but more immersive and narrative.
Did you consciously set out to expand the language you established on the first album, and what did this fictional “island of ash” allow you to express that the debut could not?
Johanes “Mo’ong” Santos Pribadi: I don’t think we approached Abu by asking how to expand what we had done on the first album. It was more about continuing a conversation that had already started. By the time we began working on Abu, we had spent more time playing together, building trust and understanding how each other’s ideas and sounds could interact. Naturally, the music started to move into different directions.
With the first album, we were discovering the chemistry between us. There was a lot of direct energy finding out what happens when handmade instruments, distorted electronics, ritual rhythms and dance music collide. Everything felt immediate and physical.
For Abu, we had already developed a shared language, so we didn’t need to prove that those elements could coexist. Instead, we could ask where they might take us. The fictional island became a useful way of thinking because it isn’t Indonesia, Japan or anywhere else. It is a place where histories, myths, disasters and dreams can exist together without having to explain themselves.
Ash is also an interesting material. It can represent destruction, but it is also what remains after transformation. New life often grows from volcanic ash. So Abu became less about representing a culture and more about imagining how things constantly disappear, mutate and re-emerge.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Abu is the way it dissolves fixed notions of place and identity. The album was recorded across Yogyakarta, Švenčionėliai and Berlin, while drawing on Indonesian, Japanese and Baltic sonic environments without allowing any of them to dominate. Rather than presenting cultural traditions as fixed inheritances, the record seems to imagine them as constantly shifting landscapes.
How did the experience of working across these different locations reshape your understanding of home, identity and collaboration?
Johanes “Mo’ong” Santos Pribadi: For me, identity has never been something fixed. Even traditional music is always changing. Every generation changes instruments, techniques and contexts. Tradition survives because people keep transforming it.
Recording in Yogyakarta, Lithuania and Berlin reinforced that feeling. Each place has its own atmosphere, but we weren’t trying to collect local sounds like souvenirs. We were more interested in how our listening changed when we moved through different environments.
Sometimes collaboration is less about combining different cultures than about creating a third space where nobody completely owns the result anymore. That’s what interests me. Instead of saying, “This is Indonesian,” or “This is Japanese,” we try to build a shared sonic ecology where those categories become less important than the relationships between sounds.
In that sense, home is not only a geographical place. Home can also be a process of making things together.
Your debut album was stylistically cohesive even with incursions into techno on tracks like “Salamander” and was driven by rhythm. One of the most striking aspects of Abu is its constant transformation and reflective nature. Ritual percussion gives way to hard dance rhythms, handmade instruments dissolve into electronic textures, and tracks such as “Api” and “Hino-Tori” move effortlessly between ceremony, ecstatic propulsion and the dance floor, while quieter moments like “Pulau”, “Nimbal” or “Funka suru mizu” provide spaces of suspension. Yet none of these shifts feels abrupt or arbitrary.
How do you approach composition when working together? Do these transformations emerge intuitively through improvisation and experimentation, or is there an underlying architecture that allows such radically different musical languages to coexist so naturally?
Johanes “Mo’ong” Santos Pribadi: Our process is actually very fluid. We improvise a lot because that’s how we discover unexpected relationships between sounds. But improvisation is only the beginning.
Afterwards we spend a lot of time listening, editing and thinking about how one sound transforms into another. We’re less interested in contrasting genres than in following the energy inside the sound itself.
A ritual drum pattern and a gabber kick might seem completely different stylistically, but physically they both work on the body. They both produce collective movement, trance or repetition. Once you stop thinking in terms of genre and start thinking in terms of vibration, rhythm and texture, those transitions become quite natural.
The quieter pieces are equally important because they allow the listener to breathe. Silence, space and suspension are also forms of rhythm. Without those moments, the more intense passages wouldn’t have the same impact.
So there is structure, but it usually emerges after experimentation rather than before it.
Both of your other projects—Raja Kirik (Johanes “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi with Yennu Ariendra) and Scotch Rolex (Shigeru Ishihara)—have always challenged musical categories, but Takkak Takkak seems driven as much by joy, humour and curiosity as by experimentation itself.
In a musical landscape that often takes experimental music very seriously, especially within an ethnological framework, does playfulness become a creative strategy for opening listeners up to unfamiliar sounds and ways of listening?
Johanes “Mo’ong” Santos Pribadi: I think play is a very serious activity.
When people hear the word “experimental,” they sometimes expect something difficult or intellectual. But curiosity usually begins with play. Children don’t separate learning from playing; they explore because they’re curious. I think music can work in the same way.
Humour also helps remove fear. If listeners feel that they have to understand everything intellectually, they might close themselves off. But if they can laugh, dance or simply become curious, they’re already listening differently.
In projects like Raja Kirik and Takkak Takkak, we’re interested in transformation rather than preservation. Traditional culture has always contained humour, absurdity, masks, tricksters and moments of chaos. Those aspects are just as important as the ceremonial or sacred ones.
So playfulness isn’t there to make the work lighter. It’s another way of opening possibilities. Once people stop worrying about categories traditional versus contemporary, ritual versus club music, acoustic versus electronic they become more willing to experience sound on its own terms.
(Interview by Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 