Jalang: Santau | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It is a curiosity of Australian geography that culturally we live as if our continent is situated somewhere in the Atlantic between the UK and the US; rather than where it actually is amongst South East Asia and Pacific Islands.

Music is no different. Overseas musical styles, news and touring acts come almost exclusively from the UK and US, while the average Aussie music fan would know virtually nothing about our neighbours to the north.

What musical delights could be lurking out of our vision across the Timor Sea in Indonesia? There’s the soothing traditional sounds of the gamelan and kulintang, or the wild polyrhythmic trance-inducing Javanese traditional dance. There’s the protest songs and harmonies of Papuan string bands, the experimental electronic sounds of Raja Kirik and Senyawa; and there’s hundreds of active and prolific punk scenes spread across the archipelago.

Now that I mention it, there are actually quite a few links between Australian and Indonesian punk and harcore scenes. Bands from here frequently organise DIY tours of South East Asia, as documented in the film The Other Option. A few years ago there were a number of Punks For West Papua gigs around Australia in solidarity with repressed people there. Go back before that and there were similar fundraiser gigs for punks in the province of Aceh detained in re-education camps by the extreme Islamist government there.

Musicians from the Indonesian diaspora have a presence in Australian punk too. Karina Utomo and her band High Tension’s 2018 album Purge was all about the slaughter of up to 700,000 communists and sympathisers in the 1960’s as part of military dictator Suharto’s rise to power. On a somewhat less serious note, Newcastle band Obat Batuk are named after an Indonesian cough syrup popular with cheap drunks.

We can add to that list Jalang. From Melbourne with a multi-racial lineup drawn from a variety of well-known previous bands; their name translates to “wild” or “promiscuous”, and their lyrics are a mixture of English and Bahasa Indonesian. Santau is their first release as Jalang, but follows two under their previous name Lai.

Jalang’s music is a slight variation on the d-beat hardcore so poular in Indoneia, with an added love of hard rock guitar riffs. Their theme, broadly, is being against racism - in cops, in governments, in music scenes.

Here, Jalang find another link between Australia and Indonesia - the struggle of Indigenous people to protect their culture and their land from the continuous advance of resource extraction and rapacious capitalism. Deaths Inside covers an issue too familiar for Aboriginal cultures here. Blood Of Soil draws direct links between Indigenous environmental struggles in the two lands: “Ancient sacred lands / Death by thousand cuts” sings vocalist Alda, and she lists Australian mining sites Pilbara and Carmichael alongside Indonesian struggles in West Papua, Borneo and Pangunan. She closes the song with “Indigenous land resist / Our hearts our soil our land”

It may seem unlikely, but in a culture with so few links to our northern neighbours, the universal language of hardcore punk is finding some common ground. Living between two nations with a complicated history, thick with violence and oppression; Jalang’s jackhammer drumming, searing riffs and furious screams point to a better way forward, a cultural bridge connecting the estranged neighbours of Australia and Indonesia.

- Andy Paine.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2213897365/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://jalang.bandcamp.com/album/santau">Santau by Jalang</a></iframe>