Tempat Angker: Horror Movie OSTs & Sound FX From Indonesia (1971–2015)
Various
Discrepant DL/MC

Diemajin
Diemajin
Drowned By Locals DL/MC

The Haunting
The Haunting
Sulphuric Darkness DL/CD-R

In the eyes of the West, Asia has historically been a Janus-faced entity – both the source of a Yellow Peril that threatens to take over Western civilisation and a land filled with exotic wonder. These twin tropes converged in the 1960s, as Japanese horror films began to gain critical acclaim at Western film festivals – Teshigahara’s Woman In The Dunes (1964) and Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in consecutive years. These films seemed to confirm that Asia, indeed, was a frightful place, one with nonetheless exotic traditions to marvel at.

Diemajin, The Haunting and Tempat Angker each take inspiration from Asian horror films. Diemajin (DJ DIE SOON and MA) borrow the sound design of 1960s Japanese supernatural films; ethnomusicologist Luigi Monteanni samples Indonesian films from 1971 to 2015 to create a sound collage; Polish artist and black metal vocalist Jakub Lisicki aka The Haunting crafts ominous electronic atmospheres and Japanese instrument samples.

Monteanni’s mixtape brushes against the specific historical context of Indonesian horror. During the bloody years of Suharto’s New Order military regime (1966–98), the horror film had its first major wave of popularity in the country. After killing millions of communists and suspected dissidents, Suharto’s grip on cultural production led to the rise of certain narrative tropes that assuaged the social fears of the era: for instance, the male kyai who saves the heroine from supernatural horrors through his Islamic guidance.

Tempat Angkar extracts gamelan performances, mystical synths, folk rituals, intimate chatter and, of course, bloodcurdling screams from 43 films released before and after the New Order regime. It’s a unique historical archive rendered in sound, coupled with a short essay by film maker Riar Rizaldi that provides crucial context.

Diemajin, a collaboration between Berlin based DJ DIE SOON (Daisuke Imamura) and Tokyo based vocalist MA, take inspiration from the jerry-rigged special effects techniques – tokusatsu – used by Japanese fantasy, horror and monster films from the 1960s. MA’s voice sounds deep fried throughout the record, as if sampled from a film whose audio track has been degraded within the limits of recognition. Splitting synths, dramatic monologues, breathy whispers, harsh distortion; this is a cross between BBBBBBB and Three 6 Mafia, though heavily skewed to the former. Only “GYAFOOON” contains what you might consider a traditional hiphop beat, a limpid minor key loop interspersed with timely DJ Mustard “Hey”s. Other tracks lean towards noisy (“TYDOW”) or more atmospheric (“IZANAI”).

The Haunting is the weakest of these three releases, engaging with its inspirations at a shallow aesthetic register. The track titles are quite literal renderings of an imagined horror film (“The arrival of the evil spirit”, “Brutally torn apart”) while overly quiet mixing weakens the impact of its synthesized and sampled soundscape. The nod to “Asian (mainly Japanese)” horror feels tacked on, serving only to add a faint whiff of Orientalism to an otherwise unremarkable record.

The difference might lie in the fact that Diemajin and Tempat Angker don’t attempt to be scary or horrifying as such. The viscerality of the image fails to translate into sound: The Haunting’s literalist depiction of a horror movie narrative pales in comparison to the works that inspired it. Instead, Monteanni and Diemajin engage the spirits of history in Japan and Indonesia. As film scholar Michael Crandol has argued, the term horā wasn’t used in the 60s to describe films like Kwaidan and Daimajin; instead, these films that draw from fantastical Japanese folk legends were known contemporaneously as kaiki (strange) films, until Western commentators on the 90s J-horror wave collapsed these distinctions.

For Indonesia’s part, horror films were also known as film mistik (mystical) or film klenik (superstitious), also appealing to a local context seemingly filled with spirits. The wisps of throat singing on Diemajin’s “UYAMUYA” or the haunting laughter sampled in Tempat Angkar don’t fetishise a uniquely horrific Asia; rather, they point to how these ghostly images have been constructed over time.

This review appears in The Wire 491/492 along with many other reviews of new and reissued albums. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.