Hulubalang is the solo project of inventive electronic producer, sound artist, label owner, and DJ Kasimyn, best known as one-half of Gabber Modus Operandi.

Hulubalang
Photo courtesy of the artist

With an expansive knowledge of global club music, a keen interest in local sound traditions, and an ongoing desire to experiment, Hulubalang's productions depart from a similar place as do his productions for Gabber Modus Operandi or with his more dancefloor oriented alias Kasimyn: driven by the belief that the most contemporary sounds and age-old traditional music forms are clearly connected, his productions intend to connect past histories and speculations on the future without the need for boring and outdated categorisations. Yet with Hulubalang, Kasimyn explores more personal, and at the same time more conceptual and narrative terrain.

These ambitions brilliantly manifest on Hulubalang's debut album Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal, released in June 2023 on Jordanian label Drowned by Locals. The album, whose title roughly translates to »Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice«, is a sincere sonic contemplation on the emotions born out of a deep dive into the Indonesian war archives. These archives include a trove of photographs documenting the era of Dutch rule, captured through the lens of the colonizers themselves. Throughout the brutal noise scapes, ghostly samples, ferocious polyrhythms, and mutating club music tropes of the album Hulubalang centers on the peripheral figures populating these historical records – secondary characters, devoid of individual significance, who bear no names, receive no recognition, violently forced to serve as props in the broader narrative of history. The album is a personal act of catharsis stemming from a long lineage of anger. It stands as a sorrowful tribute to the non-belligerent victims of war and oppression and their »sacrifice«, to a village whose ritualistic dance, one night, was disrupted by external forces, causing the tune to shatter and leaving the dance caught in a space between innocence and pain. The Quietus lauded the album as »ambitious in every sense; technically masterful, conceptually complex, and emotionally potent«.

An av live show of the album featuring visuals of Singaporian visual artist  Brandon Tay premiered in Autumn 2023. Brandon Tay is an artist whose practice is concerned with the emergent complexities related to digital materials. Primarily working through digital media, mediated sculptures, and the moving image, Tay’s works often complicate the distinctions between the tangible and the incorporeal, whilst addressing and contending with the relationality of their complex natures.

Next to his work as Hulubalang, and with Gabber Modus Operandi, Kasimyn runs the label Gorong Gorong Records, aimed at showcasing a new wave of electronic and experimental productions from Bali. In 2022 Kasimyn produced several tracks for Björk’s celebrated release Fossora, and performed within Tianzhuo Chen’s durational performance piece TRANCE.

  • HULUBALANG - BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL by DrownedByLocals

  • HULUBALANG - BUNYI BUNYI TUMBAL by DrownedByLocals