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Kadapat is Bali’s best hidden musical treasure
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Profane: Barga, one half of the duo, plays the gender – Balinese gamelan instrument more at home in religious ceremonies and royal rituals than underground raves (Courtesy of Kadapat) (Personal collection/Courtesy of Kadapat)
Uncompromising, sacrilegious, and intense – Kadapat is one of the best hidden talents in Bali’s promising music scene.
Finding Kadapat is a journey in itself. There is barely any footage of its intense live performances online. There are no traces of its music, not even a leaked demo or a teaser track on social media. In an age of hyper-visibility and bands releasing photo shoots before actual songs, Kadapat chooses to exist almost as a myth.
But for those who have watched Kadapat live, the hype is real: this is one of the most promising bands to come out of Bali in almost a decade.
“We have a different way of thinking about so-called tradition,” Gede Yogi Sukawiatnyana, one half of the duo, said. “We have no idea where we are going with this and who would want to listen. Maybe that’s why we’ve got along this far.”
With their art school background, their studious demeanor and their habit of bringing two different gamelan instruments on stage, you would be forgiven for thinking this was just another run-of-the-mill ethnic fusion balderdash group. But of course not. Kadapat's genre-defying compositions have taken it to clubs, underground raves and experimental shows alike, performing in front of rabid audiences that dance almost into a state of trance.
Its reimagining of traditional instruments has seen it push far into the left of Balinese gamelan music – mixing so-called profane instruments with supposedly holy ones, breaking boundaries and taboos along the way. Kadapat’s music is a distillation of the island’s complex musical story, and its inhabitants' desperate attempts to claw back its identity.
