Balungan - Kudu Bisa Kudu [CD]

Gamelan Indonesia's national music, based on intricately subdivided polyrhythms and played on shining, lavishly decorated bronze metallophones-has been an influence on European and North American musicians for more than a century. Artists as diverse as classical composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, jazz traveller Don Cherry, pioneering minimalist Lou Harrison and progressive rock groups Gong and King Crimson have incorporated gamelanlike rhythms into their sound. But there's never been a gamelan-based cultural exchange as equitable as Balungan, named after the Javanese word for "skeleton", which is also used to describe the core melody of a musical composition. Nor has there been one as loud. The Javanese members of the band attack their gendèrs, gongs, and bonangs "like a rock ensemble," says drummer and project sparkplug Guigou Chenevier, founding member of France's original Rock In Opposition group Etron Fou Leloublan.