'Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah' is the Soundtrack to Jakarta's Underground Dance Parties

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who runs the small cassette tape label Pepaya Records handed me a copy of his first release—an electronic music compilation titled Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah. The cassette featured an understated cover—a black-and-white image of Central Jakarta's skyscrapers—and 14 tracks that cover a wide range of electronic music, from the soul-influenced deep house of REI's "Evening Mood" to the beach grooves of Android 18's "Aquatique."

In a matter of days, Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah was seemingly everywhere—which is pretty crazy considering Pepaya Records have zero internet presence. You can't even download a digital copy of this tape off Bandcamp or Soundcloud—both mainstays of cassette and electronic music culture. Instead, the tape, which was released with the help of the Jakarta-based arts collective Studiorama, is available via an email address listed at the bottom of the group's website.

The tape is the spiritual successor of Jakarta Movement '05, a landmark release that helped reignite interest in electronic music in Indonesia more than a decade ago. That comp. united DJs, collectives, and producers like Agrikulture, Homogenic, Junko, and Riri to give rise to a scene that today is responsible for some of Asia's biggest EDM festivals.

I met Aldo Ersan Sirait, the founder of Pepaya Records, at a coffee shop in South Jakarta to figure out how Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah had gained so much traction in the Indonesian capital. The idea to release an underground electronic comp. began with an article he wrote for the website JakartaBeat about how in 2014 the city's youth were switching from indie and underground rock shows to electronic music.

But while big-name festivals like Djakarta Warehouse Project and State of Trance regularly draw thousands, something else was "happening in Indonesia, almost like a grand search. It's common to find people dressed in t-shirts, jeans, shorts, and all sorts of indie-rock apparel shaking their hips on the dance floor," he wrote at the time.

"I saw many new and old artists who were clandestinely mixing and produced their own songs," Aldo told me. "They were hidden from the mainstream, playing basement shows, without falling into some sort of festival culture."

For Aldo, those nights were a revelation. "The fancy image is gone," he wrote. "Everyone blends in … restaurants and lounges had been transformed into some kind of a nightclub where underground disco madness took place." Indie rock had become stale, he said. Aldo, a long-time fan of acts like Talking Heads, Television, and Spoon, felt like the local rock scene was stagnating. But Jakarta's mega-clubs offered only a slight reprieve.

"The coverage of the rock scene is so damn vast that people can easily get bored," Aldo said, before turning to the capital's mega-clubs. "Behind those big-room clubs, DJs, musicians, and producers are not only aiming for big crowds and all sort of hedonism, but they are also looking for experiences on the sidelines."

What stood out to Aldo was a rising scene of DIY electronic musicians booking events and DJing parties at a diverse range of venues across South Jakarta.

"Nowadays, young people book their own studio for rehearsing, mixing and DJing," he said. "They just make music for the sake of music; the way it was meant to be played: to make people dance."

But the tracks on Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah are world's apart from the EDM that's played at most of the capital's clubs. Aldo wanted the comp. to serve as an anti-establishment statement about dance music. If EDM is the crass commercialization of the scene, then Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah is its opposite—intimate, eclectic, and independent.

"I think we should make it impermeable and robust, of course by convincing the participants that this is more than just a trend—this is something real, man," Aldo said. "Mainstream dance music culture with all that glamorous lifestyle is so passe, man. People dressing to kill, buying tickets and drinks, making out, and partying until dawn… but I am not gonna police thought. I believe that people have their own reasons."

Music archivist David Tarigan, the man behind the massive online music archive IramaNusantara.org, said Indonesia's electronic music scene is only going to grow.

"The scene is getting wider, people of any age can participate and that's the coolest part," he said. "There are so many more electronic music genres compared to a decade ago."

While Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah represents only small cross-section of Indonesian artists, Tarigan believes it will garner more attention in the future.

"I can say that this compilation is so 'South,' haha. You know what I mean, " Tarigan said, referring to South Jakarta—where most of the city's hip nightlife and restaurants are concentrated. "But it offers more than just dance music. It's about how you express yourself."

On a Friday night in late October, I was down in Kemang, South Jakarta, where Pepaya Records and Studiorama were throwing a party showcasing the acts on Dentum Dansa Bawah Tanah. The party was at the upscale rooftop bar FJ on 7, but there was no entry fee and no dress code. Standing there, I suddenly remembered something Aldo told me when he first handed over the tape.

"For me the glamorous and expensive laser works are so yesteryear," he said. "No dress code is needed to just dance. It's just you and the machines."