Other Minds is pleased to present Piwal by the Balinese composer and gamelan musician Putu Septa. Septa represents a new generation of maverick Indonesian composers, “evident,” as ethnomusicologist Oscar Murakami-Smith writes in his liner notes, “from the title of the multi-movement piece presented on this album—Piwal, a Balinese word which may be defined as ‘rebellion,’ ‘resistance,’ ‘disobedience,’ ‘denial,’ or ‘deviation.’”

Piwal is Septa’s attempt to square the traditional lineage of gamelan musicianship and composition with his interest in more experimental forms. The music swerves and changes codes with alacrity: traditional gamelan sounds suddenly give way to enveloping bass tones borrowed from avant-garde electronics.

Putu Septa was brought into gamelan by his grandfather, who was a founder of the gamelan group that currently performs in the forecourt of the Ubud palace in Bali. More recent mentors have been Wayan Gde Yudane and Dewa Alit, both of whom rebelled against state-sponsored control over gamelan composition by explicitly—and sometimes antagonistically—breaking long-established compositional and instrumental rules. Septa learned directly from Alit as a founding member of Alit’s experimental gamelan group Gamelan Salukat and continues these maverick tendencies but couples them with his internalized mastery and respect for traditional gamelan forms; the subtitle of Piwal is Garapan Tungguhan Konvensional Untuk Ekspresi Inkonvensional, or “the arrangement of conventional instruments/ensembles for unconventional expressions.”

Piwal is an ecstatic sonic journey that, similar to ‘60s and ‘70s American experiments with Indonesian music, redirects questions around gamelan composition from “what is traditional” to “what comes next?” Discover Putu Septa’s voice for a new generation of Indonesian composers.