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Saturday, June 1, 2013

News: Strawberry Rain to reissue Kelompok Kampungan album from Indonesia

For the second month in a row, Strawberry Rain have come up with a reissue for an album I've never even heard of. This is a super rare artifact from Indonesia, a country that continues to unearth albums that few knew existed. As soon as I saw the magic word "Paebiru", I wanted to hear it. You can check out some samples from the Strawberry Rain main page. After hearing them, it's certainly on the folk side of the Cortes and Remalho masterpiece, but I can definitely understand the comparison. And I'm always up for hearing albums that make their own instruments! I think this title will be well received by many.

Label says: "One of the true gems of the Indonesian scene, this album stands to be one of the best, and also one of the most unique albums to come from the region.  Banned by the Shuko government soon after release, it remains somewhat obscure to most collectors up until now. An album created by Bram Makahekum (who had no musical experience or training at all) Kelompok Kumpangan had multiple members by trying to recreate the sounds of nature, even using original handmade instruments invented by the band themselves.  The end result is nothing short of brilliant, one of our personal favourites from the region.  There isn’t much to compare this to, maybe the Indonesian equivalent of a Paebiru or Genesis from Columbia at times, but it’s very unique and stands on its own.  Wonderful progressive folk of the highest caliber interweaving flutes, violins, acoustic guitars, Indonesian percussion and other instrumentation.  We can’t stand behind this one enough, it’s truly brilliant.  700 copies housed in paste on covers, includes insert with photos and history written by Indonesian music journalist Denny Sakrie.  One time limited edition, CD limited to 1000 copies and has 4 songs not on the LP version that were never released on vinyl before.  We will be releasing a 10″ of these songs in the near future."

2 comments:

Progczar said...

I just got this LP, thank you for pointing it out. Now, actually, the sound clips soooo not even begin to do it justice. It is not as folksy as you deem from that sampling. This music bears little resemblance to anything else, really...

The piece is utterly magical and gets quite aggressive a bit of the way into the first side. Cannot say that the "Paebiru" comparisons are off the mark, there is some of that spirit in here, as well as myriad other hallmarks from the underground scenes all over the world. This is like the Lula Cortes & Ze Ramalho in an offhand way.

Basically this album is just as easily name-checked with all of these kinds of attributions:

The Indonesian Paebiru
The Indonesian Algarnas Tradgard
The Indonesian Jan Dukes de Grey
(re: Mice and Rats in the Loft)
The Indonesian Grupo Agua
(re: Transparencia)
The Indonesian Musica Dispersa
The Indonesian Balaklava
(re: Pearls Before Swine)

..and if you want to pull harder:
The Indonesian Kristen Nogues
(re: Marc'h Gouez)
The Indonesian Boudewijn de Groot
(re: Nache en Ontij)

I'm just sayin'.. names can drop.

Purple Peak Records said...

Thanks Cesar for the comment. I look forward to checking it out!