Senyawa’s music rises from the belly of the beast and crawls out of its gaping maw. Each wail, drone, and plucked guitar string from the experimental Indonesian duo evokes the feeling of deep-set hunger; every sound contributes to the tension. Instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi and vocalist Rully Shabara delight in exploiting this powerful sense of yearning, employing a spectrum of emotional registers—in one moment hushed despondence and in another punishing solemnity. When the spell finally breaks, what follows is all the more compelling because of the delayed release.
Senyawa’s Sujud, their first album for the Sublime Frequencies label, is an ode to terra firma; it takes its unifying theme from the Bahasa Indonesian word “tanah,” which translates as “soil,” “ground,” “land,” and “earth.” The theme is reflected across many of the record’s song titles: “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” “Terbertaktilah Tanah Ini (Blessed Is This Land),” “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil),” and “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World).” The duo’s work seems like a reaction to the current environmental crisis: Suryadi builds many of his own instruments out of natural materials, including the electric guitar on the album, and Shabara’s resonant baritone shapeshifts into feral growls and yelps, lending an organic cast to the music. It often sounds as if Senyawa are summoning the deities of nature, undeterred by the wrath that would inevitably follow. Where 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak) favored airier meditations in which Suryadi’s homemade string instrument, the bamboo wukir, undulated like thick plumes of smoke above Shabara’s throaty incantations, Sujud spasms into offense mode. Now, Senyawa assert their darkness and eventual redemption with newfound temerity.
Sujud begins with an exorcism. Over the course of “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” both Shabara’s exalted plainsong and Suryadi’s erratic electric guitar fuse, gradually becoming increasingly distorted. Suryadi throws conventional strumming out the window, instead scratching at the strings with frenetic energy. Together, the two sound as though they’re trying to break apart the earth to expose its ravaged interior. The dust eventually settles on “Penjuru Menyatu (Unified Counters),” the turning point of the album, where Shabara’s vocals shed their formerly atmospheric form and take shape as an almost punk-rock shout, lyrics fully enunciated. The song’s gauzy opening melodies breathe in deeply before the thunderous riffs go chugging uphill, Shabara’s wails accelerating, pedal to the floor.
There is no obvious path to deliverance, but Senyawa reach a final state of peace by the album’s conclusion. Shabara’s grainy ASMR vocalizing turns the high-pitched cooing and shoegaze haziness of “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil)” into a tingly, full-bodied listening experience. The album’s impact lingers in these serene interludes; songs like the closing “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World)” would lose their warlord intensity without the dynamic contrast. Those slivers of light only accentuate the stretches of unrelenting darkness. By the end of Sujud, it’s clear whatever folkloric spirits were previously conjured must return to the tanah, and the only way to achieve this is for Shabara to vocally divide himself into a 10-man chanting circle over Suryadi’s frayed guitar until we’re suddenly left with deafening silence.
It’s not so much that Senyawa are unlike anything you’ve ever heard but the way they unify disparate genres under a single umbrella that makes the band’s approach so striking. Sometimes breaking boundaries doesn’t mean creating an altogether unfamiliar sound—rather reworking a bricolage of already existing elements. On Sujud, Senyawa nearly sink to their knees under the heaviness of doom, folk metal, and noise, all the while proclaiming their humble fealty to the earth.
