January 19
Tarawangsawelas
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Tarawangsawelas is a musical duo from Bandung, who mainly perform a contemporary version of Tarawangsa, the sacred music from Sundanese West Java. Their album Wanci features teacher and maestro Pak Pupung Supena together with musician Pak Jaja.
Equipped with two instruments—the tarawangsa, a two-stringed fiddle and the jentreng, a seven-stringed zither—and a series of effects units, Tarawangsawelas conjures more contemplative, slow burning moods than the festive gamelan, Indonesia’s more famously exported musical genre. Wanci, released on Morphine Records and produced by Rabih Beaini in 2017, “manages to incorporate the essence of a traditional style of music and bring it into the 21st century, to a whole new audience, which knows (or used to know) close to nothing about the actual music and its place of origin.” (The Attic)
