#math-core

Converge - Axe To Fall

Gamelan music is something so great and complex that my writing skills can barely express its magnificence, however there is a single sentence said by somebody way more clever than me that abstracts pretty well all I can write in this post. It says: "Music is ubiquitous in Bali; its abundance is far out of proportion to the dimension of the island". Conceptually speaking, that's what happened with Niksala, an eight-piece band with cool outfits from Manchester that has suffered from the nullifying-boundaries influence of balinese gamelan music and mixed it with math-core. As weird as it can sound, in a non-orthodox manner this joint-venture is something more homogeneous than many can suppose. Let me explain myself with a little lesson of ethnomusicology: the main difference between javanese and balinese music is that the latter is more abruptive, noisy and filled with time and tempo changes, whilst the former is more gentle, harmonic and straight. Niksala are explicitly inspired by balinese music and try to adopt it in the most sensational and fancy way, that is why with a (not so) little stretch of formal rules of the genres has made Niksala first and only release something that maybe has not grown the artistic spectrum of gamelan music, but surely has produced a truly savage, insane and original blend of metal that worth full respect and more that just a listen. Anyway, needless to say that I think gamelan's works like this are way more exceptionally noisy and gorgeously muddle than Niksala roughest moments.