GLOBAL JUKEBOX
Indonesian musicians create buzz for their album by releasing it on 44 labels worldwide. By Grayson Haver Currin
Indonesian musicians go label shopping
When coronavirus lockdowns began to grow among the 900 inhabited islands of Indonesia late last March, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, like many artists worldwide, began to fret over their musical future. During the last decade, their duo, Senyawa, has emerged as one of the lone international emissaries of Indonesia’s rich experimental scene. They have hopscotched among the islands of Southeast Asia and flown abroad for prestigious festivals, earning 90% of their income on tour.
Their tumultuous mix of heavy-metal aggression and free-jazz bedlam — bellowed in Shabara’s athletic baritone, backed with Suryadi’s elaborate homemade instruments — has dispelled notions that all Indonesian music chimes like gamelan or hypnotises like one of its folk forms.
“When Senyawa started, if someone knew about Indonesia, they knew gamelan, Bali; they think everybody is playing traditional music,” Shabara said, laughing during a recent video call from Yogyakarta.
“If you wanted to go to the United States and scream, people expected you to play the flute. But people know Indonesian music now. That door was opened.”
The pandemic threatened to slam it shut again, so Senyawa came up with an unconventional plan. Last September, while making its new album, Alkisah, the duo decided its music would no longer be issued through a single label.
Instead, the group would make an open online call for any imprint willing to enlist in a global confederation, with each member selling small, localised editions of the same record.
In late February, at least 44 labels scattered across four continents began offering unique versions of Alkisah, each with distinct artwork and, in many cases, bonus tracks. It is the most daring iteration yet of Senyawa’s new credo: “Decentralisation should be the future.”
“It’s not about Senyawa anymore. It’s not about our album,” Shabara said, jabbing his finger toward the screen as a cross-legged Suryadi perched behind him like a mantis, taking long drags from a cigarette. “We don’t want to dominate anybody. This can be anyone’s music.”
Unless they’re self-released, most albums fall under the purview of a single label. Or perhaps one imprint handles a record in the Americas, while another takes the reins in Europe or Asia. At best, the stakeholders coordinate release dates or promotional strategies, with priority often given to the label with the biggest potential market share. They are unequal members on one loose team.
Senyawa wondered what would happen if it not only grew the team to an unusually large size but also gave the players relative autonomy. After all, Alkisah is a dizzying eight-song suite about the revolution that’s possible when world powers collapse, built into a fun house of prog-rock, noise, metal and a little traditional chanting. Why not rethink, from every angle, the very system that delivers music to listeners?
The duo doled out graphics and audio files, encouraging labels to make covers that might appeal to their audiences and to commission remixes that might warrant local excitement.
“We want the labels to have ownership. Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia,” Shabara said. The Beirut cover glows in iridescent orange and pink, the band’s name scrawled across it in Arabic.
One of four German editions is stark and striking, suggesting cool minimal electronics. Together, the assorted editions of Alkisah sport nearly 200 remixes.
When James Vella first heard Senyawa’s plan last October, he was conceptually intrigued, if pragmatically uncertain. His boundless British label, Phantom Limb, had previously issued Shabara’s solo work, and he loved the pair’s adventurous ardour. But could his fringe upstart afford to divvy the audience for experimental Indonesian rock with more than 40 other imprints?
“As fans, we wanted to say yes,” Vella said by phone from London. “But any tiny label is forever one release away from failure. If you invest time and resources in a record that doesn’t sell, it could be the death knell. That is slightly more complicated here.”
Vella began to understand, though, that this plan would enhance the sort of resource sharing some labels already use. Phantom Limb, for instance, partnered with a Belgian imprint to market Alkisah. The 44 labels now commingle on the chat application Discord, swapping ideas and information.
These private international companies have digitally merged into a de facto mutual-aid network, mirroring Senyawa’s ethos back home. With an instrument-building shop, studio, kitchen, sleeping quarters and even indoors beehives, their Yogyakarta compound recalls an artists’ loft from a bygone New York.
The group licenses Senyawa-brand hot sauce, cigarettes and incense for community relief. During the pandemic, Shabara has drawn 200 portraits of strangers, each of whom agreed to feed one neighbour in exchange.
We want the labels to have ownership. Somebody in Beirut may have the Senyawa album, but it should feel like an album from Beirut, not Indonesia
RULLY SHABARA
For the labels, it’s not just altruism. Senyawa contracted Morphine Records in Berlin to oversee the production and distribution of 2,300 copies for a dozen imprints, driving costs far lower than if those businesses placed separate orders.
One label in Bali will get 50 copies, another in Spain 200. The savings mean each transaction might net US$10, giving these boutique brands a rare shot at a modest profit. Phantom Limb sold what Vella called a “healthy” chunk of its 300 copies before Alkisah was actually released.
“There may only be 500 people who are interested in the record I am putting out, but I am trying to find all 500,” said Phil Freeman, whose Burning Ambulance is one of two tiny American imprints working with Senyawa. “Wherever they are in the world, great.”
Shabara gushed when he discussed this scheme’s future feasibility, detailing organisational refinements he imagines. And Rabih Beaini, owner of the German label handling manufacturing, suggested that bands big and small could increase their audience by recruiting a plethora of cooperative partners.
“You could have 100 labels that reach obscure markets in countries where you might not normally sell your music,” Beaini said from Berlin. “It’s quite utopian.”
But Stephen O’Malley — co-founder of the metal duo Sunn O))) and a label owner himself — warned against reducing Senyawa’s idea into a novel strategy for sales. Several years ago, O’Malley invited Senyawa to perform with him at Europalia, a biennial arts festival, with each event devoted to a different country’s culture. He revelled in their openness and enthusiasm.
“Senyawa are approaching this record as a way to connect with a lot of people, a way to collaborate,” O’Malley said from his home in Paris. “So why does it have to be sustainable as a business? Of course music is sustainable. It’s been around since the beginning of the species and transmitted the whole time.”
In September, when Senyawa recorded Alkisah, they reconvened near Borobudur, the iconic Buddhist temple built a millennium ago. Shabara and Suryadi isolated themselves in a friend’s sprawling home there, surrounded by a patch of jungle and a panorama of converging rivers and twin volcanoes. It was a postcard version of Indonesia — and a perfectly ironic place to capture a less stereotypical perspective on the world’s fourth most populous country.
“We are normal musicians like anyone else in the world who experiments. We just happen to be Indonesian,” Shabara said, his words arriving in a torrent.
“If we want Indonesian musicians to flourmusicians ish and be as highly respected as from the West, we have to think we’re part of the world, not the ‘Third World.’”
It would probably surprise no one that Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, has strong views on the harmful effects of fake news. What not many people may know, however, is that the internet entrepreneur is also passionate about the culinary arts, does all the cooking at home, and his current fascination is with Asian (particularly Indonesian) cuisine.
“My family says, ‘you’ve got to go on MasterChef!’ I don’t know,” a bemused Mr Wales says during a recent video call from London. The American-born executive took British citizenship last year.
A passion for new recipes and cuisines mirrors what he does at his day job — trying out new things and exploring online opportunities. Mr Wales does not think of himself as some kind of messiah or tech guru who gave the world an incredible resource that’s used by millions, including schoolchildren, as a learning hub. Rather, he says: “I think of myself as an entrepreneur, I like to work on new projects, experimenting and learning.”
Our conversation took place in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riots in Washington DC in January, shortly before the administration of Joe Biden took office in the United States.
Discussing the role played by fake news in the recent tumultuous times in the US, amid the backdrop of the global Covid-19 pandemic, Mr Wales says: “It’s been a very complicated time, we’ve seen the rise of a lot of disinformation, misinformation.
“We’ve been through an era where the (previous) president has denied obvious facts and made up his own narrative which he has pushed to a large number of followers.”
Despite this, “we also have seen very good journalism” and clear explanations of what is happening. “That does matter”, he adds.
Mr Wales is broadly optimistic about the future of journalism. “I see people are beginning to pay for journalism and we’re seeing the rise of subscriptions,” he notes.
“I think the rise in subscriptions shows two things. One, that people do want quality information. And it also means that, to the extent that people are subscribing, there’ll be more money for journalistic organisations to do their work. This is really important. However, I still worry a lot about the locallevel journalism.”
Mr Wales notes that in the US and elsewhere around the world, local newspapers have in many cases completely disappeared. “So there’s a hole in the market for local news.”
To a question on how Wikipedia as an organisation, which relies on public contributions for its content repository, tackles fake news, Mr Wales says the Wikipedia community is very thoughtful and very firm about wanting to see high-quality sources and to present facts in a neutral way. “I think that this kind of community approach is very, very powerful,” he adds.
He then points out, in the context of fake or sensational news: “The algorithms of many social media platforms are designed for maximising time on the site, to maximise engagement. And it turns out that outrageous statements get a lot of attention and generate a lot of noise. They (the social media sites) end up amplifying that rather than, oftentimes, the less exciting truth.
“We should be critical of these companies for using techniques like that, because it’s really damaging. And I think that they’re waking up to that and are understanding that they are becoming unpopular with the public for amplifying falsehoods, because people really do want quality information.”
On a similar note, he adds that most established news organisations have a real desire to present the truth in a factual manner, even if they “may have a certain (political) leaning in one direction or another”.
However, the problem is in the current business model, says Mr Wales. “What we see is that if your business model is advertising only, it’s very difficult to resist printing clickbait, because that’s what attracts attention. That’s what boosts you in the social media algorithms and so forth.
“So I would suggest that, because we’re seeing consumers now have a willingness to pay for news, we are moving in the direction of getting money directly from readers, which is what Wikipedia does. This is a very powerful technique for changing the ecosystem.”
While Mr Wales is optimistic, he notes that the propagation of fake news is a problem that “we are going to struggle with for some time”.
MILESTONE
Founded on Jan 15, 2001, Wikipedia — the world’s biggest open-source encyclopaedia — turned 20 this year. Recalling the journey, Mr Wales says: “I was watching the growth of open-source software in the late 1990s and getting really interested and excited about the internet, communities and things like that.”
The Wikipedia page dedicated to him notes that during his student days in Alabama, he became “an obsessive player” of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs), one of the original virtual role-playing games.
From that he gained insights into the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative projects.
In 1995, inspired by the successful initial public offering (IPO) of Netscape, a Web browser company, Mr Wales left his first job as an options and futures trader to become an internet entrepreneur.
The next year, he and two partners set up Bomis, a Web portal featuring user-generated webrings, which are a collection of websites linked together and organised around a specific theme. According to Wikipedia, Bomis hosted erotic photographs for a time, and Mr Wales is reported to have once described the site as a “guy-oriented search engine”.
Bomis provided the financial muscle for the subsequent ventures helmed by Mr Wales — Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation, which was established in 2003 by Mr Wales, and which hosts Wikipedia and related websites.
On Bomis, Mr Wales says: “People think it’s more interesting than it actually was. Basically, we created a search engine and Web directory. The similarity to Wikipedia is that anyone could come and create a category and add their favourite links to that category.”
During its heyday Bomis entered into a number of partnerships, the most successful of which was one with the NBC TV network in the US.
“Our site was hosted on their domain name and they paid us a lot of money during the dot-com boom. Then when the dot-com crash came, they didn’t pay us anymore, and we moved off their servers.”
However, by then the venture had generated enough seed money for the next ventures by Mr Wales. While Bomis was up and running, Mr Wales started what could be called the precursor to Wikipedia — Nupedia, also originally envisioned as an online repository of information. Started in 1999, Nupedia ceased operations in 2003.
“Nupedia was much more top-down (as opposed to crowd-sourced) content as I really didn’t understand online communities at that time. We created a seven-stage review process to get anything published on the website. This was more of an academic and traditional publishing model, which didn’t work because it was no fun,” he says.
Around this time, an employee showed him what was being called the wiki model (from the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki meaning “very fast”). The wiki model is a tool associated with Web 2.0 which allows anyone to interact with content directly, adjusting it or adding to it as they see fit.
“Very soon after that, we launched Wikipedia. And we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years. This was a pretty amazing change. From there, Wikipedia grew and grew; we at many times were doubling in traffic (to our website) every three or four months.
“In the early years there was a lot of struggle, just to buy enough servers and sort of to keep growing and raising money. It became quite important that the fundraising model would work. We were asking people for donations and were very pleased to see that it worked. That made all the difference.
“Wikipedia has always been dependent on the small donors — people giving US$20-30. This is really the backbone of what runs Wikipedia and remains so to this day.”
ENSURING AUTHENTICITY
Our discussion veers again to how Wikipedia ensures the authenticity of the information on its pages, given that anyone can potentially edit any page, in this era of fake news and ugly political and ideological conflict.
“Of course, we (Wikipedia editors) are all human beings and it’s very hard; we all think we can be neutral. But we all have some flaws. However, if you have a diverse group of people that helps; people who debate and discuss in a collegial and thoughtful way,” says Mr Wales.
He reiterates his earlier comment about relying on traditional, high-quality media outlets for news. “We think that’s incredibly important, rather than some random website someone just found,” he adds.
Mr Wales explains the importance of having a keen eye for the source of a piece of news to understand its authenticity. “A big part of what happens on social media is naive consumers don’t really pay much attention to the source of the news.
“They see and trust a piece of news put out by, say, The Business Times, Singapore. A fake news peddler may say instead of The Business Times, ‘Business News, Singapore,’ and a naive consumer may not understand the difference between what is an authentic news site and a fake site.”
Mr Wales adds that Wikipedia editors spend their lives obsessing over quality sources. “If they see something that sounds surprising, they look a little closer, and they find that it’s not real news but a fake site. These kinds of things are part of what matters and really it’s about having a strong community that actually is very passionate about getting it right.”
He acknowledges reports about attempts to manipulate content on Wikipedia for financial and other gains. “It is something that we talk about and keep an eye on,” he says. According to him, it could be something quite innocent, like a positive write-up about a company or an incident involving a company that does not come sanctioned by the CEO but was done by someone who works there.
At the same time there have been concerted efforts to manipulate content, he adds. “A few years ago, we found that a public relations firm in London had created dozens of fake accounts and they were attempting to do certain things and we banned them all. It was a big scandal for them in the press, because it was such a bad thing they had done.
“I can’t say that it (manipulation of content) never happens. But it is something that we very much oppose. And I think largely, we have it under control,” says Mr Wales.
FUTURE IS BRIGHT
To a question on how he sees the future now that Wikipedia has turned 20, Mr Wales says: “Well, you know as sort of the ‘father,’ I hope that the stormy teenage years are behind and now we can begin an adult journey.
“I think, in 10 years’ time, you will see Wikipedia being very similar to what it is today — we aren’t going to become TikTok; we’ll remain an encyclopaedia.
“The editing interface will continue to improve, particularly on mobile devices. However one of the big changes that will happen, but will be invisible to most of us, is the growth of Wikipedia in … the languages of the developing world, because the next billion people are coming online from there.
“We want to support the growth of a strong Wikipedia in those languages. And that’s a big focus of how we think about the future and how we support the next generation coming up.”
Mr Wales is of the firm belief that the digital natives of Generation Z have the patience to use a text-heavy resource like Wikipedia. “I do a lot of public speaking, and sometimes I speak to teenagers at high schools. The level of enthusiasm and excitement and their love for Wikipedia is just unbelievable. I come in and they’re cheering and they’re amazed.
“And I think, gee, when I was in high school, if they told us, ‘Oh, hello, 14-year-olds, the editor-in-chief of Britannica is coming to give a speech’, we would have been so bored,” he says with a smile.
Ever the busy entrepreneur, Mr Wales gives a glimpse into his next venture. “I have this pilot project, WT Social, which is a new type of social network. We have around 500,000 members, it’s small but growing. I find it interesting; we still have a lot of work to do to get it right but it is growing.”
On the premise behind WT Social, he notes that to date, social media isn’t all that “social” in terms of interactions; it’s more about clicking a “like” on a photo or leaving a comment or posting or sharing a link.
“My family meets every week on Zoom to do a quiz as a fun activity, we interact and it is more human in nature. We are doing this in part because of the pandemic and since we live in different parts of the world,” he says.
The WT Social team is working on how to create “intellectual salons of video, how we can do quizzes, games, that sort of thing”, says Mr Wales, adding: “So I’m having fun building something that I wish (already) exists. We will be launching the stuff this year.”
Like the culinary delicacies that he likes to whip up for the palate, Mr Wales is looking to add spice and variety to how we interact.
The algorithms of many social media platforms are designed for maximising time on the site, to maximise engagement. And it turns out that outrageous statements get a lot of attention and generate a lot of noise