A Different Beat

Boys, and girls, in the band usually fit conventional stereotypes. Ben Otto meets a rocker who quietly dares to be different.

Yulia Candra doesn’t give off the aura of a metal rocker.  The 24-year-old speaks quietly and exudes the calm of a practiced meditator, or someone just up from a nap, or a young woman with a trump card behind her smile. 

Her hair is neither gravity-defying nor striped in competing peroxides and her regular fashion — tapered jeans and a short-sleeve T, just a little blush — would leave her lost in a crowd, smaller than life, missable.  Only a slight huskiness in her voice hints there’s more to the story, something louder and made for center stage.

A few times each month, Yulia is frontwoman for the four-person pop metal band LaQuena, a Yogyakarta university-born ensemble that plays a Metallica, Beatles, Green Day, and Jewel-inspired rock.  If the mix sounds incompatible — she calls it sweet punk rock metal —she’s heard it before, and it’s the kind of fusion of disparates she’s comfortable with. 

“You never know where inspiration is going to come from,” she says, “so I never want to set limitations on finding what works for me.”

To watch her perform, as she has more than 300 times in the last five years, is to think she’s quite clear on this point.  With a white custom Gibson slung low on her hips, her eyes backlit in a constellation of glitter, the anti-diva looks alternately at peace and possessed in front of a crowd, but never out of place.
“I can get a little crazy on stage.  People that know me outside of music are always surprised by it, just like people in the audience would be surprised to see me offstage.

“But that’s me. Two different parts of me, but both me.”

At the heart of the Bantul, Yogyakarta, native is both this idea of unlikely blends and a corollary belief that no part of her life is in contradiction with another: not in the quiet girl who sings above the mosh pits, not in the songwriter who majored in management, not in the onstage wailer who, as a young girl, wanted to be an Islamic leader because she thought that was the best way to become a good person.

Music was in the air in her early years, with her Marine father playing bass in a keroncong traditional music band and her older brother studying the violin.  It wasn’t until junior high, though, that Yulia herself picked up an instrument for the first time, and then because, at height of her tomboy years, the coolest thing to do was play the guitar.

When friends asked her to step up to the mike a few years later, as a first-year at YKPN STIE economics institute, she hesitated. 

“I could sing, but it turned out I didn’t know how to sing and play at the same time.  But by then it felt silly standing in front of mike without a guitar, so I learned.”

In the beginning her parents were skeptical, not because of the music but because of the time required to make it.  They set a single rule — school first — and then left Yulia free to became one a handful of women in Yogyakarta fronting a band with both vocals and rhythm guitar.  

“Rock has a lot of negative stereotypes — sex and drugs and excess — but LaQuena isn’t about that at all.  We’re about passion, entertaining, living a healthy and inspiring life. I think my parents always saw that.

“As far as Javanese women being quiet and reserved, or even subservient to men, I’ve never felt that pressure.  Rock is really the opposite; it is about being who you are, what you want to be.”

Asked whom she admires, she rattles off a long list of both Indonesian and Western bands, and then stops at singer-songwriter Melly Goeslaw.  “I think that’s the goal.  She’s her own person in every way — unique sound, unique fashion, unique voice.”

Her motivation comes from a tight-knit group of fans and the band, which has existed in various permutations of same-age musicians since 2003.  Yulia, the band’s only female member, is one of two remaining original members, and all four current band members were born within eight months of each other.

“They’ve been like brothers, through all the fights and successes.  That’ll be the hardest thing to say goodbye to if this comes to an end.”

An end of sorts might be near, despite some recent successes. Last year the band opened for Dewa in Yogyakarta, and in 2004 they were included in a compilation album produced by Aquarius Musikindo.  In 2006 they self-released their first album, Yang Baru (The New).

But the end of college has seen everyone looking to the future, and Yulia, who graduated last year, is busier herself. Six days a week she works at an art gallery in north Yogyakarta, and in her free time she’s equally likely to be strumming up new songs as she is to be thinking of a future in business.

 “Growing up, everyone around me was involved in businesses of some sort. And actually, there are a lot of similarities between music and business.  They both require confidence, self-belief.  They both reward hard work, and they’re both full of uncertainty.”

This is another point she hits repeatedly. 

“There’s always doubt.  With our music, there might be tons of people who can’t stand it but a few who do like it, and that was always enough to keep playing.” 

She sings the lyrics of her favorite LaQuena song, Di Bawah Hujan (In the Rain), and stops at the chorus.  “It’s about reminding us that we’re not alone, that we have to help each other keep moving on.”

Naturally she’d like the band to move on as well, but says that, realistically, ten years from now she sees herself having a family of her own and a little business on the side.   As for the joy that music brings her, it may be that the same woman will simply switch venues as she enters the next stage in her life. 

“I’ll always play music, even if it means just singing with a couple friends at home.  Quieter songs, maybe.”

If the quieter songs are slower, acoustic, and spotlight-free versions of the same sweet rock punk metal, those who know her will have little cause for surprise.

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