Review Summary: Music for our save room
Kunto Aji’s latest album truly came out at a very appropriate moment, especially for the native listener in the country. It is a time where most who would cherish Mantra Mantra are still swimming, trying to make it out alive, among the many currents that seek to hit and crash, to sink them into the bottomless sea of despair. Many are just fingerling, still learning how to use fins, yet are pushed to swim with or against the currents that is stirred by the generations before it without them ever telling how to best navigate it. There are only expectations, “When are you going to graduate?”, “When are we getting married?”, “When are you going to get promoted?”, and even disappointment directed at them, “Why are you not following the career path I laid out for you, my children?” and “Why do you choose a partner from a different religion?”. They don’t even bother to teach you how to breathe in between strokes. You feel tired, but they don’t care about it and keep rushing you to fulfill their expectations. With no time to fully rest, you somehow make up for it, stealing it in between days in order to breathe some air however brief and inadequate for it to properly rejuvenate you for the next swim.
That is where Kunto Aji’s Mantra Mantra came at us. It works like a spell to amplify the restoration effect your short rest may has. It is music that teleports the listener from the harsh and cold currents, temporarily to a much calmer waves of natural spring, that warms and repairs your chipped skin, preparing you for the next journey until you finally make it to the next island, alive.
Perhaps no music has more therapeutic effect on the country’s millennial than this. It gives respite to their plight, their struggle of being held to a certain standard and expected to perform without fail and without a say whatsoever. It is what they need in times where the old lamented that the young spends too much on coffee and unable to acquire property when partially it is the previous generations’ fault at making the present things much harder than they should be, creating an unfair situation for people who are currently living in the center of the storm. But finally, these could be halted, though not completely erased, but at least diminished in its urgency, set aside for things that are truly important. While the singer stated himself that he wanted to speak more of mental health with this album, what this album imports more to us is the big question that is carried by everyone and needs to be tackled first before listening to the dreams of old; what are you, what do you want to be, and what are you going to do? And so the album works not only as cure to physical and mental exhaustion, but also initiate you to a restoration that is much on a deeper scale, that is of the self. It restores our memory to who and what we are, and remind us to stay true to ourselves; to recollect the pieces that were shattered and assembling it so that we may know again which island should we swim to. Songs like Rancang Rencana and Rehat are highlights to these restorative frequency.
How is this achieved musically? There are nothing overly complex on the music itself, nor it is caused solely by the reception of the musician’s public intention and his content of the lyrics. The sound of Mantra Mantra is one of a very focused offering, down to every notes, carefully arranged to slowly layer by layer reveal its restorative property. It is not exactly right to say the singer just adopted more minimalist and mellower approach compared to his previous album as he still also makes quite upbeat yet introspective song such as Jakarta Jakarta that works as on ode to the country’s capital as the epicenter in which all these waves crashed into one big whirlpool. What the singer has presented to us is a deliberate placing of sounds, carefully cueing up when and where things should play and letting the other instruments beside his voice to take up the same space as the vocal itself. The results are songs where his voice are much sparser, less exposed than his previous album, but by letting the other instruments speak he managed to articulate his own voice better without having to say it all the time.
Pilu Membiru is one such example. In it, Kunto Aji sings so carefully and seems more concerned with articulating his lyrics properly rather than flexing his vocal capabilities in order to better convey the intention of the song. The beats are there and minimal, first appearing in the second verse but it doesn't feel quite subdued. Even the mellow tone and serenity then develops into a bridge where it culminated into a part where Kunto Aji’s voice, no longer the main attraction, provides a medium, by ways of words, where the listeners are mustered to join with him to croons along the words together in unison, as if it’s a rally to demonstrate in a street. In this way, the song about reminiscence of loved one is not sung solely by the vocal hero as his personal tragedy but shared together in a way that projects the event not with hatred and regret of loss, but with the beauty of relationship that once was and affirming the traces left carried presently in our heart for good reason. It became an outlet for our loss in a more constructive outcome, even if done in such a melancholic way. While the other songs not always develop in such way, these songs were crafted by the singer as if it were to be an outlet for the soul and heart and far for the pleasure of jury’s ear. And thus Kunto Aji has invented restorative mantra for us to chant along, and it is impossible to do so if it were not because of his close attention to how and when the syllables of his quite poetic lyrics (found in Saudade if you’re quite literate in Indonesian) must sound rather than showcasing his vocal range and improvisations like his peer.
Certainly no one expect this. No one expect the Indonesian Idol-turned-indie musician to be the wizard of the soul that conjures music so heartfelt that it becomes the voice of his generation. With this album he dropped the vocal-centric ways of the idol to something more subtle and elusive yet as tangible as the air we breathe. The singer who would step up front to showcase his vocal with the help of background music as presented in his previous album now embedded his voice along with the other instruments, even right to the row where his crowds and audiences stand and letting his entire generation takes the spotlight and speaks for itself about the break and rest that they rightly so deserved.
