In the decades since, Roots has remained a benchmark for musicians mining their own regions’ musical heritage to create something new.

Similarly, in a fellow tropical country, Indonesian artists have found ways to incorporate the country’s lush diversity of rhythms and instruments in their songs. From Guruh Gipsy with their experimental rock in the 1970s to the frenetic hardcore electronic dance music of Gabber Modus Operandi in the late 2010s, many have made it their mission to blend Indonesia’s percussive DNA into modern genres.

Enter KUNTARI, a post-industrial, experimental duo comprising multi-instrumentalist Tesla Manaf and percussionist Rio Abror whose music resists neat categorization. Since Tesla hung up his jazz guitarist career and debuted the KUNTARI moniker in 2020 with Black Shirt Attracts More Feather, the project has turned into a boundary-pushing exploration of raw, organic sounds.

By the 2022 album’s Last Boy Picked, Tesla leaned in more into ritualistic percussion over synthetic beats, a shift that brought Rio into the fold. Together, they released 2023’s furious Larynx, setting the stage for their latest and most kinetic work yet: Mutu Beton (Quality of Concrete), which even grazes the sludge metal and noise genres.

“We put literal blood and sweat into [this album],” Tesla said earlier in July on Facebook, noting that the record was three years in the making.

What sets Mutu Beton apart from its predecessors is how far deep the duo is now mining the country’s ancestral rhythms, embedding the gamelan-inspired tonalities into a tight, industrial ambience. If KUNTARI previously touched upon traditional folk sounds from regions like Yogyakarta to Bali, the duo now interacted with the historical sounds of their hometown, Bandung, West Java.

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