FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Future Collective Is the Retronica Duo Blending Pop and Politics

The band's sophomore album "Mundo Animal" will make you dance to catchy beats and reflections on the rise of Indonesia's right wing.
Photo courtesy of the band

Future Collective likes to try new things. Like their approach to music, the Jakarta-based electronic duo prefers to keep things fluid and unpredictable in everything that they do. After releasing their critically-acclaimed sophomore album Mundo Animal in late December, Future Collective may turn into something completely different in the future. Tida Wilson, the more talkative member of the group, says they may not even play the same kind of music at some point.

Advertisement

“If I achieve an objective, I get bored quickly,” Tida tells me. “So perhaps my way to get around it is to keep Future Collective ever changing.”

Tida and Sawi Lieu's ambitious scope of sound was apparent in their 2014 debut album #1: Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine. A local music blog Wastedrockers once described Future Collective “retro-futurists”—an oxymoron, but I agree. Future Collective blends a wide array of musical influences of the past such as '60s pop, krautrock, tropicalia filtered through the lens of electronic music and modern production. They are as much indebted to UK '80s new-wave The Style Council as they are to krautrock-pop wizards Stereolab. It’s like electronic music for music nerds, not club goers getting wild to bangers on the dance floor every night. It's not to say that you can't dance to Future Collective, but there’s equal focus on melodies and atmosphere as well.

Their debut album garnered them enough attention from the local music scene and landed them an opening slot for chillwave posterboy Neon Indian's show in Jakarta in 2015. Fast-forward a few years later, the duo feel like they’ve stepped up their game.

Mundo Animal is pretty cohesive sonically and thematically,” Tida says. “The first album is a bit all over the place.”

Mundo Animal—means "animal world" in Spanish—expresses the band’s rumination on the world’s chaotic and “regressive” state, Tida says, though he seems reluctant to go into specifics. Tida thinks that people are still mentally behind our own technological advances. “Perhaps we’re not just ready,” Tida says. “You can see the evidence everywhere and Mundo Animal describes just that.”

Advertisement

Tida goes on and on about his concerns with where the world is going, while Sawi sits next to him quietly. Tida says the rise of right-wing fascism in Europe, US, and the Middle East has affected Indonesians and how they react to different issues in the country. “There are many similar examples of the [rise of the right wing] here,” Tida says, “But many seem to turn a blind eye to it.”

Cramming socio-political messages in catchy electronic-pop music can be tricky—it's easy for those messages to just get lost. Take “Molposnovis", the album's first single. Borrowing its title from a 1919 Russian movement that explored theories and concepts in art, the song is actually one of Future Collective’s catchiest and most accessible tunes—perhaps in part due to the guest vocals from Anindita Saryuf.

The band is fully aware of this, especially considering most of their songs are instrumentals. Unlike hip-hop where you can say a lot of things clearly, Tida says, Future Collective is more limited in terms of music arrangement. However they argued that getting into the music first—the melodies, the arrangement—may make the listener dig deeper into the meaning behind a song. “I like it when people listen to my music first regardless of my political ideology,” Tida says.

Trying to get around this problem, the band always makes sure to include their commentary on their album sleeves, explaining their point of view. They even take it one step further by putting out Construct, a bi-monthly digital publication where they lay out their thoughts in poems, essays, and visual art. It’s interesting, though a bit pretentious. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Advertisement

Throughout history, musicians have injected social-political messages in their instrumental music in one way or another. In 1963, John Coltrane composed the mournful melodies of “Alabama” to honor the four girls killed by the Ku Klux Klan in the Birmingham church bombings. In 2013, DJ Stingray and Gerard Donald’s NRSB-11 released Commodified, a techno album with track title such as “Consumer Programming”, “Living Wage”, and “Market Forces”—a critique of capitalist consumerism. And who can forget Canada’s post-rock giant Godspeed You! Black Emperor with their radical ethos towards the music industry?

Pop music has always been compatible with politics—just look at Efek Rumah Kaca, who manages to deliver some of the catchiest and haunting pop songs while criticizing the Indonesian government and paying tribute to a human right activist. So what Future Collective is doing is nothing new. However, it’s hard to measure whether or not they have succeeded in spreading their message. As of now, Future Collective is perhaps too young and too small to make a considerable impact.

But whether you can appreciate their politics or not, it’s the dualities within Future Collective’s approach to their craft that gives them their identity. And to really understand the music, you need to get to know the the dynamics of the two people behind the project.

The 29-year-old Sawi played in a myriad of noise and experimental projects prior to Future Collective. He didn’t care for structures in music. “I didn’t understand music compositions,” he says. “I just did what I wanted with no regard for anything.”

Tida, on the other hand, has always been about pop music conventionalism. He spent his younger days playing in power pop bands, so he's used to the more traditional approach of songwriting. Much like his musical background, Sawi is loose and a bit random (he spends two minutes explaining his admiration for Looney Tunes characters when I ask him about Tida's politics), while Tida is more articulate and confident. Sawi is the kind of guy you want to chill out with while getting high, whereas Tida is the guy you go into endless debates with.

In Future Collective, these two polar opposites meet in the middle. Sawi brings out his flair of experimentation while Tida keeps the song structure and pop elements intact. With Mundo Animal, Sawi and Tida have produced music, while not completely innovative, that may just challenge the more mainstream definition of what pop music is. It’s retro but modern—it’s catchy but also cinematic. And most importantly, it’s well-produced and accessible.

There's no way to tell just yet if Future Collective’s attempt to start socio-political discussions will bring any result, or be dismissed as a gimmick. But looking at the state of world, Indonesia included, any endeavor to change things, no matter how microscopic or minuscule, is appreciated. At the very least, all we get is a dose of catchy, captivating electronic pop music from these guys. That doesn’t sound too bad to me.