Otto Sidharta

Incredible and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Head-vibrating electronic drones conjuring a rare and arcane kind of acousmatic magick, with electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity. An hallucinatory ascent into narcotic-hazed Indonesian rainforest atmospheres which could almost be scoring some Werner Herzog absorbing documentaries. Otto Sidharta is born in Bandung, Indonesia November 6, 1955. In 1978 he studied music composition in Jakarta Institute of Arts under guidance of Slamet Abdul Sjukur, in 1984 he continue his post graduate study for composition and electronic music with Prof. Ton de Leeuw in Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam In 2015 acomplished his doctoral study at Institute Seni Indonesia Surakarta and finished in 2016. Sidharta's interest using environmental sounds and synthetics sounds as well to express his musical ideas developed when he was a student at the Jakarta Institute of Arts. He performed his first electronic music piece, Kemelut, based on water sounds in the First Indonesian Young Composer Festival (Pekan Komponis Muda) in 1979. In 1979 he begin to collect some nature and animal sounds on Nias Island, Borneo (Kalimantan) jungle, Riau islands, and some other remote places. These sounds were used as material for some of his works such as Ngendau, Hutan Plastik and East wind. And some others. Otto Sidharta is still alive and performing around the world.