You don’t talk to Asep Nayak and peg him as a dance music provocateur. Timid, soft-spoken and disarmingly polite, he is more a reflection of his daytime self: a 22-year-old with wildly varying interests struggling to graduate from college. Drag him to any dance floor in the highlands of West Papua, though, and the kid turns into a star.

Except it won’t look like your garden variety dance gig. The music is fast paced, relentless, almost trance-inducing. A flash mob of men and women who barely know each other join forces in a choreographed dance routine they are instinctively familiar with. Meanwhile, a pair of small, rusty speakers are blaring music sourced from communal USBs or laggy YouTube connections. 

Forget everything you think you know about dance music. Welcome to the world of wisisi, Wamena’s dance revolution that is ready to take the world by storm.

“It’s not music for rituals, it’s not music for kings and it’s not music for the sake of aesthetics,” said Aditya Surya Taruna, better known as Kasimyn, a producer and DJ who performs with Gabber Modus Operandi. “Listening to it is beyond happiness. It’s euphoria. It’s a conscious refusal of problems.”

“Wisisi is not traditional music. But it’s not modern or alternative music either,” said Wok the Rock, a curator and founder of Yogyakarta-based netlabel Yes No Wave Music. “It’s an expression of embodied aesthetics and experience. Simply put, it’s who they are.”

Barely attempting to hide his giddiness, Kasimyn breaks into glorious laughter. “This is just pure dance music, man.”

From communal to eternal

The story begins in Wamena, a town situated in the highlands of West Papua. Pushed to the margins even by West Papuan standards, the region is popularly associated with natural disasters, civil strife and intermittent clashes between government forces and pro-independence fighters. Fertile ground, then, for electronic dance music.

Nikolas Surabut was barely 13 years old when he began getting bored of traditional wisisi, a ritualistic music and dance often performed at harvest ceremonies, funerals and weddings in the valleys of Baliem, deep in the mountains of West Papua. “You couldn’t really record these performances for posterity,” he said, speaking from his home in Wamena. “They play tonight, the entire village dances, but tomorrow all we have left are stories. I wanted something that would last longer.”

It was 2009, and the youthful Nikolas began consulting older friends who he knew “made music with computers.” They directed him to a catch-all music production software: Fruity Loops Studio, popularly known as FL Studio. Light, simple to use, and easy to pirate, the software became the weapon of choice for aspiring music producers working with a limited budget and even more limited hardware.

“My friends were mostly making reggae and hip hop with FL Studio,” Nikolas said. “I wondered if I could use FL Studio to recreate wisisi instead.”

A keen musician himself, Nikolas began breaking down the basic tenets of wisisi: a wooden, lute-like instrument Nikolas was well-versed in; pikon, a mouth harp made out of bamboo with a similar trance-like quality to the didgeridoo; and tifa, a percussion instrument made out of wood and dried leather, ubiquitous in many Papuan cultures.

“I tinkered with FL Studio and laid down beats inspired by tifa,” Nikolas said. “But mainly I was looking for sounds that best emulated the sounds of our wooden guitar.”

The end result was a masterpiece in taking tradition apart and moving beyond its constraints. Wisisi’s repetitive, mantra-like chants are recreated faithfully, but its middling tempo is set aside for furiously quick, propulsive beats. Each song is barely two and a half minutes long, with the traditional guitar melodies reworked into intricate rhythm sections and interlocking percussion. The cherry on top, of course, are the painfully retro robotic shouts and ad-libs scattered intermittently throughout the song.

“The great thing about FL Studio is that the final product is already in mp3 format,” Nikolas said. “So it was easy to move the songs to my phone and play them for my friends.”

In trance: A concertgoer dances himself into ecstasy at an Asep Nayak wisisi gig. (Courtesy of Organizing Committee Biennale Jogja XVI Equator #6 2021) (Personal collection/Courtesy of Organizing Committee Biennale Jogja XVI Equator #6 2021)

Nikolas set to work, insisting on playing his newfangled compositions at student protests, weddings, fundraisings and his local hangout spots. “My music spread from phone to phone, peer to peer, hangout spot to hangout spot,” he recalled. “You hear it at a party, and if you like it, you download it from the host’s phone. Slowly, it spread around Wamena.”

One of the earliest converts was Asep Nayak. Only two years Nikolas’ junior, Asep heard the now-grizzled pioneer’s music at a birthday party and was captivated. “When they played wisisi, the dance floor erupted,” he recalled. “I wanted to make this kind of music. So I asked around to my friends.”

Sure enough, they gave him a pirated copy of FL Studio and left the quiet lad to his own devices. Unlike Nikolas, he was no prodigious guitar player. He came from a stoic, deeply religious family, and was more renowned to his friends as a talented football player than a musician. Asep persisted, though, and began uploading his music through a newly popular video platform: YouTube.

It didn’t take long until Asep’s compositions perked the ears of electronic wisisi’s main man. “A friend brought my music to Nikolas’ house, and he asked whose songs this was,” Asep said. “They mentioned my name, and next thing I knew we were hanging out at Nikolas’ house. We got to know each other pretty quick!”

Even today, the mantra persists: Nikolas made it first, Asep second. The pair’s teenage kicks steadily infused Wamena’s party scene, supplanting genres beloved by its youths like reggae and hip hop.

Don’t imagine them taking over the DJ booth and performing live, though. Wisisi musicians are less live performers and more portable jukeboxes ready to take any party by storm. They would bring their music over to roadside stalls, birthday parties, hangouts and beachside barbecues on their phone or USB stick. Someone somewhere will inevitably bring speakers, the phone or USB stick is plugged in, press play, and cue pandemonium. 

All the traditional norms of popular music are thrown out the window. For one, there are no fixed titles for any song. Cursory searches of Asep Nayak’s YouTube history will reveal bewildering titles such as “Music Wisisi Wamena”, “Music Wisisi Baru”, and “Wamena Wisisi Slow”, while Nikolas’ repertoire contains the unhelpfully named ditties “Wisisi Terbaru 2021 (1)” and “Wisisi Terbaru 2021 (4)”.

There are no wisisi music festivals. Nobody has an “album” of any kind. There are no record labels. There is no fixed collective, crew or established scene. There is no formal copyright at play, no royalty scheme or even a fleeting desire for professionalism. The party is free, the music too, and the drinks there are strong and unrelenting.

Simply put, wisisi is music as popular anarchy.

“These Java boys…”

Perhaps these chaotic tendencies are what drew Kasimyn to wisisi in the first place. The Denpasar-based producer and DJ was “pandemic bored and descending into a YouTube rabbit hole” when he was introduced to wisisi, and immediately spread the word to his peers around the world.

“I sent Asep’s music to the organizers of the Nyege Nyege Festival [an experimental dance music festival based out of Uganda], and asked them to guess where this came from,” Aditya said. “They thought this came from West Africa. I told them nope, this is West Papua!”

Wisisi’s high tempo, raw compositions quickly drew comparisons to Malian subgenre electro balani and the South African dance craze shangaan electro. “They’re all made by people from marginalized places who are given a modern musical implement but don't actually know how to use it,” Aditya observed. “But because they have embodied their traditions, they appropriated these pieces of software to create their own sound.”

After a few months of excited chatter, Aditya established contact with Asep through his bandmate Ican Harem and Wok The Rock, his manager and record label owner. “The music has evolved from what Nikolas and Asep started,” Wok observed. “Producers in West Wamena would make calmer compositions with slower tempo, while others made pikalu – a more pop-friendly version of wisisi with actual, sing-along vocals.”

Interestingly enough, it was a music evolution led by youngsters. “A producer we spoke to had just graduated from high school,” Aditya said, laughing. “Even Nikolas was barely in his mid-twenties.”

What they also found was a complex social context. “It’s a Wamena thing, not necessarily a Papuan thing,” Wok observed. “When I first buzzed about wisisi here in Yogyakarta, some Papuan friends scoffed at me. This was not considered necessarily mainstream. Wisisi is marginalized and underappreciated there.”

It was this sense of defiance and opposition that led Aditya to consider wisisi as punk’s bastard cousin. But reading too much into wisisi’s subtext of resistance can lead to some problematic dead ends. 

“One time, a European electronic music magazine asked us to create a playlist, and we decided to give them a wisisi sampler,” Aditya recalled. “At the start of the playlist, we sampled a snippet from a speech by the Free Papua Movement [OPM].”

Asep contacted Aditya and protested the sample’s inclusion as misrepresenting wisisi’s cultural nuance. “He told me, ‘It’s not that I’m apolitical, I’m just tired,’” Aditya said. “He told me to Google ‘Wamena’ and report back what I saw. Every news story was about riots, war, displacement and clashes with the OPM.”

“‘Look, brother, we’re normal people,’' Aditya said, mimicking Asep’s weary exhortation. “‘We just want to live, dance and have fun. Even Google won’t let us live like that." And he was right. Even though he was just a kid, everybody saw his place as a political battleground.”

“Asep is no activist,” Wok said. “He’s a regular guy. He’s not caught up in politics, but because he’s from Wamena, he inevitably has an awareness of what's happening. His music has strong roots and is specific to Wamena, not Papua.”

This tentative introduction led to something even more serious: a live performance and two-week residency at the prestigious fine arts festival Biennale Jogja, held last October. Intending to showcase wisisi, Wok invited Asep to Yogyakarta and housed him at the offices of his art collective, Ruang MES 56. Aditya flew to Bali to see the performance – Asep’s first bonafide “live performance” – and recalled his backstage conversations with barely disguised glee.

“I asked him what he used to mix his songs, and he showed me what he called his “fancy earphones” -- a cheap pair of Samsung earphones he bought at a roadside phone store for Rp 50,000,” he said. Intending to one day release a wisisi compilation (something Asep was quick to agree to), Aditya asked Asep for the raw files of his music. “He just said: ‘Why would you remix my songs, it’s already great!’”

Upon returning to West Papua, Asep admitted that his Javanese sojourn had inspired him to take his music further. “I’m happy that those Javanese boys liked my music and gave me the opportunity to perform for the first time,” he said. “They gave me DJ controller sets and a camera. I’m more enthusiastic about making music and art now!”

Wisisi’s reputation as the domain of mountain dwellers is eroding fast, with Asep's newfound popularity landing him performance spots in the bright lights of Jayapura, West Papua’s biggest city. “I was invited to perform as a DJ in Jayapura recently, and when I played my music, both their speakers caught fire!” Asep said, laughing. “They can’t handle this music. They don’t know what they’re doing yet!”

Nikolas and Asep believe that in time, the world will wise up to wisisi. “Even people from Wamena sometimes don’t understand this music, especially if they’ve been away for a while,” Asep said. “But they will love it. They learn the dance. They take the music on their phones. And when they meet the diaspora elsewhere, they will lead the party. Eventually it will spread.”

“If you play wisisi, people will drop their work and rise from their beds,” Asep claimed. “Come to Wamena and find out for yourself.”