On an adventurous holiday with Nusantara Beat
This debut album was highly anticipated, because Nusantara Beat has been a festival hit for years. Here we hear how Indonesian instruments meet surf guitar, hip synths and buzzing sound effects on a bed of gamelan. This music swings, sways and sways, surprises with buzzing electronics, has great melodies and breaks new ground in every song. Meanwhile, Megan de Klerk sings coolly in Indonesian, which is also unknown to her (which she has now mastered).
Listening to the Dutch six-piece Nusantara Beat is like an adventurous holiday, to areas where tourists do not swarm and the residents do not speak English. That is the mood evoked by the Dutch six-piece’s self-titled debut album. Their music is an expressive, atmospheric and original-sounding mix of styles. The group members, who partly have an Indonesian background, based their work on, among other things, the sounds from ‘Nusantara’; the Indonesian archipelago. They immersed themselves in Indonesian music for a long time, studying the krontjong genre, the special pelog scale (specifically for gamelan music) and characteristics of Sunda Pop, a 1960s style that incorporated funk and psychedelics.
Their interpretation sounds both authentic and stubborn. Authentic because of the sound that is a bit ‘old-fashioned’ (due to the use of reverb), stubborn because of the mixing of styles. It is cheerful and ingenious at the same time.
Live at Lowlands, Noorderslag or Le Guess Who, the group excites the audience with songs such as ‘Bakar’ and ‘Ular Ular’, which are sung phonetically even though the audience cannot understand the Indonesian lyrics. The group members already had experience in other bands, for example EUT (singer Megan de Klerk), Altin Gün (percussionist Gino Groeneveld), Jungle by Night (drummer Sonny Groeneveld), Mysterons (guitarist Jordy Sanger) and POM (bassist Michael Joshua) and Surf Aid Kit (Rouzy Portier, guitar).
They have some similarities with groups like Kruangbin (US) and Altin Gün (NL), because they make unintelligible songs popular with Western audiences. They also share a love for surf guitar and a large share of percussion, as can be heard in compositions such as ‘Ke Masa Lalu’ and ‘Cinta Itu Menyakitkan’.
The result is clear as icicles, each instrument delivers a delicate flow, a swinging pattern or a tinkling tune. Their music swings, sways and sways, surprises with buzzing electronics, has great melodies and breaks new ground in every song. De Klerk’s English texts have been translated by Michael Joshua into Indonesian and also Sundanese, a language from West Java. For the Dutch listener it remains inscrutable and exotic – without becoming kitsch. Sometimes De Klerk’s vocals hint at K-pop or J-pop, other times she sounds fierce and witchy (in ‘Bakar’). In the closing ‘Cinta Itu Menyakitkan’ the sugary tenderness is almost sentimental. But not, because of the subtle shifts in sound that keep the listener alert. At Nusantara Beat the past vibrates along in contemporary sounds. A previously unknown world is created that you would like to gain access to.
Hester Carvalho
Herman van Veen: ‘Bloemgezang’ could also have been called ‘Samenzang’
Herman van Veen (who turned 80 on March 14) calls his new album a ‘flower song’ Plus. It is not only an anthology from his overwhelmingly rich career, it is above all a melodious, beautifully constructed ode to Dutch songcraft, even Dutch nature and to young singers and musicians with whom he sings. ‘Samenzang’ would be just as good a title as ‘Bloemgezang’.
Van Veen goes far back in time, to 1969, with the first big hit ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen in the translation by Rob Chrispijn. An idea that is as obvious as it is brilliant is to give singer Maan the text given to Suzanne, so that Van Veen’s heavily voiced voice harmonizes with Maan’s soprano. Van Veen not only forms a vocal ensemble with Maan, but also with daughters Anne and Babette, his wife Gaëtane Bouchez, colleagues Simone Kleinsma, Karin Hougaard, Roxeanne Hazes and André van Duin. The album is richly varied and spans generations and musical styles and is a tribute to singers or comedians such as Thé Lau and Freek de Jonge and poet Remco Campert. The cover ‘Onderaan de dijk’ by Lau with Roxeanne Hazes takes the listener to the place sung about, “the little kingdom at the bottom of the dike”.
The warm depth of Van Veen’s voice comes to life beautifully in collaboration with Anne van Veen in the love song ‘Overal en geen geen’: the ‘you’ in question is heard in the beat of the wings of seagulls, he smells in blackberries, linden, hogweed, roses and chamomile.
Engagement is inextricably linked to Van Veen’s career. He expresses this with all the artists in ‘Wiegeliedje’ by Freek de Jonge about the war that you cannot resist: Name the children of war / So they are closer to you. Beautiful is ‘Als ze als’, about a young woman who, if she had been cherished as a child, would have been capable of love. A song in which #MeToo resonates. Impressive.
Kester Freriks
Chamber music in that gigantic one Eighth Symphony by Mahler
If you are a supporter of the less is more-conception of art you can use Mahler’s Eighth Symphony better to skip anyway. Everything is great about Mahler 8: length, instrumentation, ambition, usually also the vibrato of the soloists. This recording of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and its future chief Klaus Mäkelä, live during the Mahler Festival last May, is no exception. The physical CD will not be released until next spring, but the album has been on streaming services since last week.
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A small miracle: the audience does not stand up en masse to sing along at the end of Mahler 8
The disadvantage of this greatness is that it actually only works if you are there live. Anyone who has ever experienced this symphony, with a large orchestra, three choirs and soloists nicknamed ‘Sinfonie der Tausend’, in the concert hall knows: the crushing first movement blows away any reservations. Listening becomes a form of survival, thinking stops. In this way, with his least Mahlerian symphony (folk tunes, mountains and natural beauty are far away), Mahler has created a sound mass that is best approached as an independent natural phenomenon. Sitting opposite it is a sublime experience – in the room.
What remains of this on Spotify, other than a souvenir for the lucky ones who were there (the performance received five balls in this newspaper)? Not much, you think at first. The monumental first part, which begins at its climax and stretches for more than twenty minutes, irrevocably loses its tension, no matter how gracefully Mäkelä molds and directs his four hundred men.
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Read more about this ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ in our Mahler symphony guide
But the funny thing is: the fortissimos gradually change in meaning. They become transitional passages between the long sections of drawn-out reflection that are secretly the real highlights live – the delicate ‘Infirma nostri’ in the first part, for example. The second part, a mini opera after Goethes Faustis full of it. Immediately the instrumental ‘Poco adagio’: electrically charged. Or the choir ‘Dir, der Unberührbaren’: so tender and refined that for a moment you think you have taken a turn towards chamber music in the Kleine Zaal.
Joep Stapel
Charlotte de Witte: High energy, sharp kicks, technically solid production. But no emotion
“In the silence between the notes / Enter the realm of the unknown”whispers an esoteric female voice on ‘The Realm’, the opening track of the debut album by Flemish techno producer Charlotte de Witte. The unknown, that is the promised land. You hear that more often in music: “Emotion is in the silence“, says jazz great Wynton Marsalis in a documentary to one of his students. But on ‘The Realm’ by De Witte, silence does not sound like an invitation to reflection, but rather an announcement of the repetitive violence that follows. The beat comes in tight and hard, with the precision of a stroboscope, an adrenaline machine. That promises something.
De Witte (33) is one of the most successful techno DJs in the world. De Ghent is a regular guest on the main stages of major music festivals such as Tomorrowland, Coachella and Lowlands and this year was named the best techno DJ in the world for the sixth time in a row by the leading magazine DJ Mag. But despite her large number of EPs (more than twenty), there was no debut album yet. There is now: a personal work, released on her own label KNTX, with her own name as the title and, in her own words, her love for the dance floor as the driving force.
The music is indeed dancefloor-oriented: high energy, technically solid production, unrelentingly sharp kicks. But those who are looking for more than that, for emotion in the silence, are left somewhat empty-handed. While previous work by De Witte surprised in terms of sound and tension, such as the hypnotic ‘Selected’ or her monster hit ‘The Age of Love’ (remix), the suspicion remains that this album was not made for the underground club, but to be ready-made for mainstream sets at major festivals. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it is a bit bland, in the sense of ‘bland’, without herbs.
Corny result
The first half of the album feels distant, without friction. ‘The Heads That Know’, with banal spoken word lyrics by the Welsh drum & bass producer Comma Dee, tries to evoke something of depth, but that does not work with lyrics like “When I’m on stage with the mic in my hand / Got a vibe with the gang.” ‘Hymn’ resembles a self-repeating drinking song for a Mario Kart game. That can be quite fun, but it is not challenging. The track ‘Vidmahe’, where misty Sanskrit vocals convey a spiritual longing, rubs against the clichéd and perhaps also against cultural appropriation. The intention will be sincere, but the result will be corny.
Fortunately, there are also tracks on the album that show that De Witte’s musical roots lie in nightlife. ‘No Division’, with lyrics by XSALT, comes closer to the atmosphere of ‘The Age of Love’, with surprising layers. ‘Higher’ has a welcome grainy breakbeat and ‘Unite’ and ‘I Want You’ contain some of the escapist melancholy that characterizes her earlier work. The highlight is ‘Domine’: finally a track without hackneyed vocals, where that wonderful gurgling radioactive acid sound and those alien ribs that seem to be run over with a metal pipe in the distance take center stage.
Unfortunately, the hackneyed vocals return immediately afterwards on ‘After the Fall’, featuring Australian singer Lisa Gerrard (known from the film’s soundtrack). Gladiator). It is of course a matter of taste, and at large festivals this vocal pseudo-spirituality is often well appreciated, but here and there it drowns out the musical qualities of the best techno DJ in the world. You can expect some individuality from that.
Jonasz Dekkers
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