From gridlock and neon-lit urban panoramas to rural sociology and agricultural events; from the banality of everyday life to collectivist efforts in music. This selection of contemporary music videos from Indonesia reflects on the representation of landscape and how it intertwines with the musical and visual narratives that it projects. The landscapes portrayed are not only a cosmetic background but also an essential foundation of the films’ aesthetic approach, both aural and visual. This list explores the connection between landscape, music, and humans in a place composed of 17,508 islands.
Artist: Yennu Ariendra & J «Mo’ong» Pribadi Santoso (Raja Kirik)
Track: «Raja Kirik» (Indonesia, 2018)
Video: Yennu Ariendra & Asa Rahmana
Raja Kirik offers a magical reflection for anyone who is excluded and marginalized by the systemic violence executed by those in power. Through the protagonist, a low budget 21st century version of Menak Jingga (Red Knight; the king of Blambangan, a vassal state in Majapahit empire), who appears gallantly facing the endless horizon, Raja Kirik shows how natural landscape is the last resort for survival. A last resort for the battles that colonial landscapes have had to endure for centuries; a landscape that has been controlled and extracted from by the state. Here nature offers an alternative: the possibility to say «no». Enough is enough. In its slow cinematic approach, Raja Kirik’s video is an abstract form of the aesthetic of refusal.
Artist: Individual Distortion
Track: «The Witching Hour of Jakarta» (Indonesia, 2017)
Video: Adythia Utama
Individual Distortion is a cult figure in the electronic music scene in Jakarta. Unfortunately, not many people realize that, in terms of content, music, text, and image, this project has strong ties to Jakarta as a city. In «The Witching Hour of Jakarta», filmmaker Adythia Utama presents a montage of Jakarta’s landscapes, showing a topography that most people who live in the metropoles are probably familiar with: skyscrapers, wide roads, dense traffic, and artificial lights that spark the humid sky. The intimate link between Jakarta’s landscape and Individual Distortion’s music also resonates with how the editing style and visuals illustrate the notion of acceleration. On the other hand, the music of «The Witching Hour of Jakarta» is a binary between calm and hasty, slow and fast, chaos and order. A binary that also exposes how Jakarta as a landscape affects the psyche of those who inhabit it.
Artist: Prison Gank
Track: «Jail !!!» (Indonesia, 2021)
Video: Gerry Alting
Made on an iPhone 5, «Jail !!!» was shot entirely in a prison in Jayapura, Papua. It shows the carceral landscape of Indonesia, specifically the eastern part of the archipelago. What is fascinating about this music video is that all activities related to recording, editing, and distribution were carried out by a prison guard, while Prison Gank itself, as a collective, consists of several inmates. In fûkeiron («landscape theory»), filmmaker Masao Adachi explains that behavior that is labeled by society as criminal can be analyzed through a cartographic investigation of the relationship between a person and the landscape they inhabit.
However, in «Jail !!!», this seems to work in reverse. Here the director, a prison guard, wants to convey that the carceral landscape in Indonesia can be analyzed through the activities of its inmates. Most of their collaborative audiovisual products show the prison treating the inmates well, instead of critically questioning the prison system in Indonesia. In spite of the solidarity that I share with anyone incarcerated and the necessity to distribute this video broadly, considering how Indonesian authorities treat Papuans, I think this music video is a PR stunt by the police that needs to be viewed with a critical perspective.
Artist: LÔRJHU’ feat Rifan
Track: «Nemor» (Indonesia, 2020)
Video: Badrus Zeman
Constructed as a form of visual ethnography, «Nemor» – literally meaning «dry season» – represents the dry season atmosphere that occurs on the fringe of Madura Island. Sung in Madurese, «Nemor» explores the activities carried out by people who have a strong attachment to nature: from tobacco farmers to salt farmers who interpret dry season as an important aspect of agricultural practice. The landscape in this music video is not only the background, but also the foreground, underlying people's habits and their relation to agriculture and labor. Seasons, as meteorological states, play a big part in the temporal contexts which determine the rhythm of life for the people depicted in this video. As an artistic product, «Nemor» offers representation: it is a document by people with lived experience of agricultural life and capitalist relations on the frontier, not a product constructed from outside Madura.
Artist: Sir Dandy
Track: «Jurnal Risa» (Indonesia, 2020)
Video: Roufy Nasution
Production: Gerombolan Struzzo
What makes this video special is its tendency to make fun of content creators as urban explorers in Indonesia. Urban exploration as an internet phenomenon in Indonesia is closely linked with the assumption that a place or landscape is haunted because it has never been visited by any human souls. Instead of thinking about the failure of development, poor urban planning, and land eviction, most urban explorers in Indonesia are more interested in seeing abandoned landscapes as ruin porn, colonial ghost remains, and potential portals to other worlds. This tendency is what Paulo Freire calls «magical consciousness», a tendency to make meaning based on supernaturality instead of social and political attachments. Recorded in the remains of the Kampung Gajah Wonderland theme park in North Bandung, the music video, produced by Gerombolan Struzzo, seems to subtly parody this tendency.
