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SAUNA 080CS
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Melbourne/Naarm-based musician and curator Rama Parwata, known for being the backbone drummer in bands such as Kilat, Whitehorse, and Rinuwat, releases his second major solo album titled Ceases on Cassauna/Important Records. Parwata's gripping new electro-acoustic work is a sonic exploration within the realms of post-free-jazz and experimental electronics. At its core, Ceases navigates the liminal spaces between rhythm and noise, structure and chaos. The album traverses a vast emotional and conceptual landscape, touching upon themes of impermanence, transformation, and the cyclical nature of existence. At the forefront of the album is Parwata's emotive compositional and performative approach, which serves as both anchor and catalyst for the album's journey. The percussion performance is cymbal heavy accompanied by deeply meditative drones and slow-moving melodies. The wash of sound touches on a spiritualism akin to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme Part 4: Psalm," albeit with a modern electronic vision á la Tim Hecker. With a keen sense of textural intricacy Parwata favors the emotional expression of electro-acoustic composition, weaving complex poly-textures that ebb and flow with hypnotic, prayer-like intensity. Each performative gesture creates a visceral immediacy that draws the listener deeper into the celestial, otherworldly sonic framework. The diverse array of electronic elements, meticulously crafted and seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the album are a testament of Parwata's capacity for acousmatic composition. From pulsating synthesizers to glitched-out samples, the electronic timbres in Ceases serve as both sonic embellishments and structural foundations, blurring the boundaries between organic and synthetic, acoustic and digital. Honing in on the electronics, a listener could be convinced they were hearing anything from spiritual-jazz, '90s rave, dungeon synth or doom. Through judicious composition, Parwata imbues each sound with a sense of transcendental allure and paints a soundworld that has a distinct "outerness." At times the narrative is pointedly bleak but over a few passages the sonic language often bends toward rejuvenation; finding respite in cadence. The title itself suggests a sense of cessation, of endings and beginnings intertwined -- a motif that reverberates throughout the album.
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SAUNA 062CS
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Tekanan is the full-length debut of Melbourne-based Indonesian-Australian drummer and sound artist, Rama Parwata. A thorough exploration of rhythmic capabilities and percussive improvisation under ever-shifting timbral and stylistic environments, Tekanan is Parwata's examination and documentation of his vast musical influences in electro-acoustic improvisation, Indonesian Gamelan music, free jazz, electronic music, R&B, and noise music, whilst still maintaining an entirely unique non-idiomatic musical voice. Tekanan sees Parwata experimenting with not only the drum kit, but additionally implementing no-input mixing boards, musique-concréte sampling techniques, junk percussion, electric guitar, and computer music production to create a relentlessly metamorphosing soundscape that abruptly, yet seamlessly oscillates between ethereal ambiances to turbulent barrages of rhythm and noise through five unique movements. Aptly named after the Indonesian word for pressure and stress, Tekanan was composed by Parwata with the intent of it being a listening experience which would pressure the listener to have no clear indication of the direction of the music and where it will ultimately settle, leading the listener on a sinuous, yet intriguing aural journey. This title additionally applies to the pressure of the challenging nature of the music, in a performative sense, which pushed Parwata to his physical and mental limits to perform and compose.
"As cliche or banal this might sound, I tried to make a record that was purposely made to be hard to put into a box. I didn't want to make a 'drumming' record or a noise record or anything of the type, but a record that just contained 'good' music (or what I constitute as being good). Many aspects of my musical life were injected into this release: gamelan music (the first music I was exposed to), noise, hip-hop, free-improvisation, Xenakis, jazz, electronic music. Ultimately this record is a homage to those musical influences." --Rama Parwata
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