"Resonansi" - Newtoy x Muarasuara

The Indian musicologist Inayat Khan once said, “The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.”

So what kind of sonic universe was birthed from the merging of two sound-obsessed collectives from the UK (Newtoy) and Indonesia (Muarasuara)? What mysteries of the sonics did they manage to uncover? What new possibilities were they able to conjure up from a mish-mash of practices, aesthetics, and subcultures? Newtoy’s Joel Cahen has the answers.

Resonansi came out of a mutual interest in sharing music and sound skills by two organisations, Newtoy in the UK and Muarasuara in Indonesia. With the support of the British Council, we managed to create an engaging and varied programme of online workshops and commissioned music.

This was the first time both organisations attempted to deliver a pan-national collaboration, and it worked out very well. We communicated mainly through WhatsApp, holding meetings as necessary. I found Muarasuara through a mutual connection; having a curiosity in the Indonesian experimental music and sound art scene, we have found that we share a creative and musical aesthetic. We are both interested in sub-cultures in music and art and are working towards increasing its exposure to a wider audience.

We brought together an interesting group of artists to our shared networks. Six artists who shared their perspective on the Listening Arts in three themes: 

Listening to Ourselves through workshops by 

• Rully Shabara (ID), who delivered a workshop on the Raung Jagat group vocal technique.

Listening Spaces through workshops by:

• Rebecca Horrox (UK), who delivered a practical workshop on performing live ASMR and turning them to live binaural sound compositions.
• Miki Rizki Kurnia (ID), who delivered a practical workshop on musical appropriations and modulations of environmental recordings.

And Cultures of Listening through workshops by:

• Antonio Roberts (UK), who instructed participants in the basic techniques of using code to create and manipulate sounds.
• Indra Menus (ID), who gave a fascinating retrospective of Indonesian Noise Music history.
• Blanca Regina (UK), who looked at the spaces for listening created by the NFT environment online, helped us create CRYPTOSOUND, an online sound gallery on Mintbase, viewable online and VR, and uploaded with minted sound work from workshop participants as NFTs. The Cryptosound gallery is a project that we will take forward and continue using as a shared space for our network’s sound art work.

The online workshops used live translation to make it accessible to both English speakers and Bahasa Indonesia speakers.