Stars and Rabbit, bit of a mystery from Indonesia
Something from Indonesia this time, and I bet you would have never guessed the video above is from there. It’s by a folk-pop group called Stars and Rabbit which brought out its first album, Constellation. You can get it digitally on iTunes or buy a hard copy on their website.
There’s a lot of interesting pop music being made in Indonesia, check Beehype for more. I am intrigued, for instance, by this group called Ramayana Soul, which seems to mix traditional Javanese music with psychedelic rock from the seventies and modern urban music. Ultra cool, but only available on cassette tape, and a drag to get my hands on.
Stars and Rabbit may sound very western at first, I was immediately reminded of the American folk singer Jesca Hoop because of the somewhat eerie, wailing way of singing combined with the countryesque guitar riffs. However, in Vietnam we once visited a traditional water puppet theater, where the songs struck me as a kind of country & western opera songs, which propably does not make any sense but Stars and Rabbit sounds very much like that.
Also, on an album of Thai folk-pop I own, The Sound of Siam (which blows me away every time I listen to it, by the way), a mix of traditional Thai Luk Thung with various western pop genres can be heard that also has similarities with Stars and Rabbit.
So I am guessing that this is a very South East Asian thing. I am very curious to know, though, if the country & western sound is coincidence or whether America cowboys were maybe inspired by, I don’t know, Asian rail-road workers or whatever.
Anyway, Constellation is a fantastic album which I highly recommend.
RSS