Our New Silence brings together diverse musicians from Athens, Georgia, in a pioneering effort to remix, reinterpret, and reimagine traditional music from Java, Indonesia. This project aims to create new music in a variety of styles – including pop, ambient, abstract, musique concrete – by drawing from a palette of sounds not usually available to us while simultaneously opening the possibility of a new brand of creative cultural diplomacy between the U.S. and Indonesia.  Through this unique musical dialogue and its expression of sonic solidarity to musicians half a world away, we are saying, “Hello.”

Hello.

New works are created from the recent 12-album music series JavaSounds, multi-tracked digital recordings that capture some of Java’s most renowned musicians playing in a range of traditional styles (e.g. gamelan, kacapi-suling, zitheran, degung). JavaSounds, recorded in Java by Kai Riedl and engineer Suny Lyons, contains the raw material with which Our New Silence musicians experiment, by looping, singing over, and integrating into compositions.

We are currently completing a set of recordings: some early instrumental sketches are available in the top right-hand corner. Hello.

This project is supported in part by Ideas for Creative Exploration (I.C.E.) at the University of Georgia.