Catriona Richards

Jakarta Globe, December 15, 2011

Whether you’re looking for Chinese porcelain, wooden puppets, traditional textiles or deep-sea diving helmets, most locals in Jakarta will point you in the same direction: Jalan Surabaya. The popular market strip in Menteng, Central Jakarta, is lined with curios and antiques — some real, others made while you wait. It is also the unlikely meeting place of one of the capital’s newer hip-hop outfits, bringing together artists from Indonesia and Australia.

Hip-hop collective Jalan Surabaya, named for the members’ shared love of sorting through dusty piles of vinyl records at the street market, has just launched its first international EP, “Alam Maya” (“Virtual Reality”), released online by Danish label UrbanWorld Records. The samples and sounds on the recording are all taken from vinyl records found on Jalan Surabaya.

Introduced by a mutual friend, Australian electronic artist Unkle Ho (Kaho Cheung) first met local rapper MC Bellal (Rifqi Nadjib) and DJ Danger Dope (Muhammad Zaki) at Jalan Surabaya to sort through the troves of vinyl. Picking up a selection of traditional Indonesian music, pop hits from the 1950s and some old-school beats, the trio immediately set to work putting together a handful of tracks, blending old sounds with new.

MC Bellal said Jalan Surabaya was the best place for vinyl in the capital. “There are lots of vinyl shops in Kalibata, Kemang, Tebet and at the malls,” he said. “But they sell at a fixed price and treat you just like any other customer. On Jalan Surabaya, we can bargain, have a chat and eat fried snacks while we browse, or even start a tab with the stall owners if we don’t have the money right away. That’s something we can’t do anywhere but Jalan Surabaya.”

On the day they met, the group took the vinyls back to Unkle Ho’s recording space in Central Jakarta to start experimenting. MC Bellal wrote rhymes on the spot as Unkle Ho and DJ Danger Dope cut and mixed samples from the records. The mutual friend who introduced the crew, Yogyakarta-based MC Nova Ruth, later joined in to add some vocals to the mix. The result was an energetic sound with folk undercurrents, haunting melodies and punchy lyrics in Bahasa Indonesia.

Unkle Ho, known in Australia both as a solo artist and as a member and producer of the popular hip-hop group The Herd, said that while he couldn’t always follow the Indonesian lyrics, the group’s shared language of music helped minimize communication difficulties.

“At first my Indonesian wasn’t that great and it was quite tricky trying to write a song with two guys whose language I couldn’t speak,” he said. “But eventually, we started speaking this hybrid kind of musical English-Indonesian language, and by the end it was very fluent.”

MC Bellal said that the collaboration felt almost effortless. “It’s so crazy that we could just come together and make music that can open our brains, themes that can be taken and expanded; the kind of music that will give you an ‘eargasm,’ ” he said. “So cool.”

“I really liked [MC Bellal’s] rapping in Indonesian,” Unkle Ho added. “He speaks English as well, but I really wanted him to rap in his native tongue. It’s such a good language for hip-hop, it just works really well.”

Last year, Jalan Surabaya played gigs almost every weekend across the capital, from cultural institutions such as Taman Ismail Marzuki, Ruang Rupa and the Jakarta Institute of Art (IKJ) to nightspots like Jaya Pub, 365 Ecobar and the Grand Indonesia mall.

The group was also actively involved in organizing the ILMU festival, which brought together Australian and Indonesian hip-hop and electronic artists last year in Yogyakarta.

Jalan Surabaya’s new EP explores the old concept of alam maya , or imaginary worlds, and applies it to the virtual reality of the Internet and the effect it has on human relationships and social values.

“Technology spoils everyone/It’s just too easy/Don’t need to bother going anywhere/Sitting in one place you can go everywhere/Taking a stroll in a virtual world,” MC Bellal raps.

It’s a message that rings especially true for the members of Jalan Surabaya, whose album was released on the other side of the world last week without the band’s having left Indonesia.

The group’s EP was taken up by UrbanWorld Records, an online label based in Copenhagen that aims to promote international artists who are experimenting with traditional music styles. For UrbanWorld, Jalan Surabaya seemed like a perfect fit.

“Even though we are based in Denmark, the music industry of today is global, so it doesn’t really matter if the music is from Indonesia, Ghana or Peru,” said label owner Mikael Palner. “With platforms like iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud it is easy to reach music fans all over the world. We need to unite the world and music is a very good way of doing it.”

Having worked with Unkle Ho as a solo artist in the past, Palner was eager to take on the new project. “Unkle Ho was actually the first single I released,” he said. “So after he had been living in Jakarta, he wrote and sent me some tracks from his new project, Jalan Surabaya. The mixture of beats and exotic vocals were a perfect match for the sound of UrbanWorld.”

The deal was sealed in March, but it took until December for the EP to take shape, as Palner sent the tracks to various international artists for remixing. The remixed tracks are available on the EP, along with two original tracks by Jalan Surabaya.

Since Unkle Ho moved back to Sydney early this year to prepare for the August release of The Herd’s latest album, “Future Shade,” the Jalan Surabaya project has been put on hold, but the group is optimistic about collaborating again in the future.

“I’ve got a few frequent flyer points saved up. Maybe Unkle Ho might make a little surprise appearance in Indonesia and Jalan Surabaya will reform, briefly, for one night only. Just saying,” Unkle Ho said, laughing.

For MC Bellal, the EP release is enough of an achievement in itself. “In the end, we have been able to make friends with musicians on the other side of the world, collaborate in ways I never would have thought possible and turn our idea into reality,” he said. “Who knows, maybe someday Jalan Surabaya will even make an appearance in Denmark.”

Alam Maya
Jalan Surabaya
Available for download from UrbanWorld Records
http://www.jalansurabaya.com
http://www.urbanworld.nu