By: Arief ‘Ayip’ Budiman
Translated by: Beta Divotya. A
Bali is one of the world’s premium tourism destinations, where art, tradition, and culture become an important representation of creativity. Last year, Bali Creative Community (BCC) organized Bali Creative Festival (BCF) to arrange a new articulation towards the wide dimension understanding of creativity.
BCF want to make creativity into an eternal value through the creation of education vehicle, network and dialog, and also nurturing interest and talent. That conservation of values was shown with the organizing of the 2nd BCF on last November 25-27. The festival that carry “A (journey to) Bali Creative Destination (ABCD)” program identity will take place at a special location, on Maissonette Inna Grand Bali Beach football field, Sanur.
The idea of “Bali Creative Destination” was to encourage Bali to become a model as well as a gate for the creation of globally Indonesia’s creativity. A number of creative subsectors in Bali, one of them is music, has penetrated the national barrier and performed on stage abroad.
Superman Is Dead has done a tour to several cities in the USA and Australia. The Hydrant also has rocked the stage in Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The list will get longer if Bali’s musician that plays in the world music domain like Balawan, who are more appreciated abroad, is put on.
The penetrating force of Bali’s musician in foreign country erased a little bit of polarization between Jakarta as the center and Bali as the edge in the national music scene. There are no more reasons to be debating about local or national existence if there is a wider market.
Because of that reason, this current BCF’s stage was not presenting musicians from Jakarta. “We are confident that with what musicians of Bali have achieved in local and national level has formed a big appreciations from music fans, so a festival does not need to present Jakarta’s musicians to attract audiences,” said Vice Head of 2011 BCF Committee, Rudolf Dethu.
The BCF stage presented music performances from different genres and ages for three days at the Maisonette Inna Grand Bali Beach. Superman Is Dead, Navicula and The Hydrant will perform on the opening day of the event. On the second day there will be a lot more performers, among them are; Joni Agung, Triple X, Geekssmile, Nymphea and younger musician like Nosstress. On the third day there will be performances from traditional rooted music groups like Khatulistiwa and Bona Alit. Besides that, there will also be performances from Jegog Jazz, Ito Kurdhi with Abad 21, Dialog Dini Hari, and 1970’s Bali’s music scene living legend, Ketut Riwin.
Music Scene Documentation
The specialty of this year BCF is the launching of BLANTIKA | LINIMASA book that records journey of non traditional music scene since its birth until present. Rudolf Dethu which had the idea for this book publishing did a nomenclature for popular music in Bali into two: BaliBali and Balinesia.
This naming system made it easier for mapping, with a base categorization on language of the lyrics, not the genre. BaliBali is for musicians whose lyrics are in Bali language, and Balinesia is for musicians whose lyrics are in Indonesia language or English. This cross-genre nomenclature is interesting because possibly it is only happening in Bali, where many musicians used their local language for non-traditional music like, punk rock or reggae.
This is not just about the language. BaliBali musicians had an incredible history, like Lolot which has his album sold for 70.000 copies, a number that is difficult to reach by present musician. Yes, Bali has a lot of anomaly.
Besides the interesting naming system, the publishing of this book was also very interesting. It might be the first book in Indonesia that documented local music scene. This book is written by two journalists not from the music scene, Anton Muhajir and Alfred Pasifico. The third writer, Gede Robi Supriyanto, Navicula’s vocalist, gave more value especially about how he first knew Bali’s pop song when he live outside of Bali (Palu) until now, as an active Bali’s music scene person.
The starting process of writing this book was from the writers’ discussions with several important music scene persons in Bali. They are musicians, senior journalists, recording persons, and local record label persons. This discussion became the base for initial mapping, so that no important narration left out because of the writers’ ignorance.
The publishing of this book hopefully will create a more comprehensive record, also corrections if there are mistakes. And more importantly, the book hopefully will invite similar effort in other cities. Because history is only own by them who wrote it.
