A Taste of Java in Waterloo
Behind the shutters of Sunday-night Sydney, an Indonesian duo creates a thousand ideas with one throat and a piece of bamboo.
Elizabeth Street is shuttered at the Waterloo end on a Sunday night. Orange streetlights and grainy grey shadows make for a nervous film set on the edge of Redfern Park.
The email says the gig can be accessed by the back alley. But there’s nothing happening. Around the front again and back to hang at the entrance, reaching for car keys, until … some guy pops his head out of a gate. “Is this where?” “Yep,” he says, wandering off into the darkness. Into the backyard. An overheard conversation: “Is there tobacco in this?” Down the wobbly stairs, into someone else’s kitchen, shelves packed with share-flat groceries, through a doorway, grab a spot on a bench among guys with patchy beards and their woolly-hatted girlfriends. Longnecks and coffee mugs. Scarves and glasses.
The three uniform-sized Indonesians in the room are Rully Shabara, Wukir Suryadi and some buddy of theirs from Yogyakarta, central Java. This intimate Sunday night set of music by Rully and Wukir is part of a slow tide of cultural exchange in our region, where unknown acts criss-cross the Timor Sea and beyond to expand the boundaries of music at either end. Small-time bands from Sydney and Melbourne have started to explore Malaysia, China, Indonesia and The Philippines, and in return we get a rare visit from Asia. It’s starting to pick up. You’ll hear more about it, slowly.
The room is dark, with plastic-tube lights at one end you’d hang at Christmas, on your neighbour’s house. Wukir, an instrument-maker, takes a length of thick bamboo strung with a dozen electric guitar strings, each with two fulcrum points, so that the fretless instrument has 36 notes (by my genius reasoning), and he starts to play.
At times sitar, at other times harp-like, with striking blows of percussive jabs that produce a thick drum beat, Wukir has turned us upside down. His orchestral, amplified bamboo stick is the outer reaches of Jimmy Page, the droning din of Ravi Shankar, the gentle lullaby of Harpo Marx (I don’t know any other harp players) and, always at hand, the belligerent chunk-chunk-chunk of James Hetfield.
Rully, with a straight back and that mysterious quality Indonesians have, warbles, whispers, screams, hyperventilates, produces a hard street baritone, but then he’s Woody Woodpecker, a kookaburra, a whistle, a shriek of steam.
A two-tone husky noses to the front, to brush Rully’s shins as he and Wukir reach a squealing, high-tone peak.
All the while Wukir’s left wrist picks out multi-rhythms with the accuracy of a computer, as whatever-the-hell-he-calls-his-homemade-instrument is manipulated between sounding sweet, surreal, sinister and, exactly what it is, a piece of jungle fibre with steel wire pulled taut over it and a pick-up lurking somewhere inside.
Rully and Wukir bring it to a close, with Wukir playing a long recorder-style flute and Rully alternating between falsetto, cooing and his deep, chief-like chants.
The cultural exchange complete, we exit and go home. Fast across the smooth Sydney streets, or at 35,000 feet over Darwin, back to Yogyakarta, deepest Java.
Jeremy Chunn
