Скачать или смотреть Garu performed at Dung Kluruk on 07 June 2025 by Wukir Suryadi and Ken Ueno

Garu — Ken Ueno & Wukir Suryadi (Salatiga, Central Java)

This performance documents a daylong collaboration with Indonesian experimental music pioneer Wukir Suryadi, recorded in the mountains above Salatiga, Central Java.

Wukir crafted two extraordinary instruments—called Garu—from abandoned plows he found in a field. Forged from agricultural tools shaped by decades of labor, these instruments carry the sonic memory of land, work, and weather. Together we performed on an outdoor mountain stage from sunrise to sundown, allowing the music to unfold in direct conversation with the environment.

The piece is structured as a living ecology of sound:
morning birds at dawn, cicadas in the heat of the day, frogs emerging at dusk, and the slow shifting of mountain light becoming part of the composition itself. A village elder opened the event with a traditional blessing, offering food to the spirits and grounding the performance within local cosmologies and communal life.

In this remote mountain setting, noise and distortion are not treated as transgression, but as proposition—signals of a futurity articulated from a place often invisible within Western cultural imaginaries. Here, a local agricultural tool is reimagined as a noise instrument; sound is shaped not by studio abstraction but by land, ritual, weather, and community. Performed within a local ceremonial frame, the work quietly announces a vision of future music that is resolutely local, materially grounded, and outside the gravitational pull of Western cultural centers.