Seek, and ye shall find (just be careful what you look for).
Senyawa is Indonesian duo Rully Shabara on vocals and Wukir Suryadi playing his home built instruments and on Alkisah (trans. once upon a time), released on Phantom Limb back in February, they call forth end times. Yea, end of the world end times.
Not for the feint of spirit, Alkisah mixes industrial noise, trashcan percussion and strings with possessed vocals, all layered and stacked from guttural growl to howling ecstasy, oozing like some primordial miasma of lava despair. Only more intense.
From the label:
Vocalist Rully Shabara (who has collaborated with Phantom Limb as a solo artist before Alkisah) mines the human voice for its strangest and most challenging sounds, chanting, yowling and throat-singing like a chorus of demons in one song and an arcane, chattering machine in the next. About them, rhythms skitter and crash around like gamelan, punctuated with trashcan drums here or bulging plumbing percussion there, while the doomier moments (such as “Istana”) crush with seething waves of distortion and Shabara’s mesmeric growls (a mix of Javanese, Bahasa, and other Indonesian languages). The record lurches from urgency to apocalypsis, twisting and twining fervorous Ramayana chant with animist mythology and hellish atmospherics.
Touch points include Sun O))), Earth, Ghédalia Tazartès, and Boris (minus anything remotely resembling cute), mixed with field recordings of ecstatic worshipers of murderous Gods.
Alkisah is a journey. Alkisah is an experience. Alkisah is fierce.