Gamelan is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments used are metallophones and a set of hand-drums called kendang, which keep the beat. The kemanak, a banana-shaped idiophone, and the gangsa, another metallophone, are also commonly used gamelan instruments on Bali. Other notable instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, a bowed string instrument called a rebab, and a zither-like instrument called a siter, used in Javanese gamelan. Additionally, vocalists will be featured, being referred to as sindhen for females or gerong for males.
Colin Carhart McPhee was a Canadian-American composer and ethnomusicologist. He is best known for being the first Western composer to make a musicological study of Bali, and to develop American gamelan along with fellow composer Lou Harrison. He wrote original music influenced by that of Bali and Java, decades before such compositions that were based on world music became widespread.
Steve Roach is an American composer and performer of ambient and electronic music, whose recordings are informed by his impressions of environment, perception, flow and space. His work has been influential in the trance and new-age genres.
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Kecak, known in Indonesian as tari kecak, is a form of Balinese Hindu dance and music drama that was developed in the 1930s in Bali, Indonesia. Since its creation, it has been performed primarily by men, with the first women's kecak group having started in 2006. The dance is based on the story of the Ramayana and is traditionally performed in temples and villages across Bali.
Michael Tenzer is a composer, performer, and music educator and scholar.
Ingram Douglass Marshall was an American composer and a onetime student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick.
Prof. Dr. I Made Bandem is a Balinese dancer, artist, author, and educator.
Mantle Hood was an American ethnomusicologist. Among other areas, he specialized in studying gamelan music from Indonesia. Hood pioneered, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new approach to the study of music, and the creation of the first American university program devoted to ethnomusicology, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was known for a suggestion, somewhat novel at the time, that his students learn to play the music they were studying.
Soleilmoon Recordings is an American record label that began in 1987 as a cassette label, operating from the back of a record shop called the Ooze in Portland, Oregon, US.
Robert Edward "Bob" Brown was an American ethnomusicologist who is credited with coining the term "world music". He was also well known for his recordings of music from Indonesia. Many of these recordings, among the first widely distributed and commercially available in the United States, inspired a generation of musicians to study and perform Indonesian gamelan music.
Djam Karet is an instrumental progressive rock band based in Topanga, California. The band was founded in 1984 by guitarists Gayle Ellett and Mike Henderson, bassist Henry J. Osborne, and drummer Chuck Oken, Jr. The band's name is an old spelling of an Indonesian word that translates loosely as "elastic time".
Thom Brennan is an American electronic ambient musician, composer and synthesist. Active since the 1980s with his first album Mountains (1987), he belongs to the scene of Californian pioneers of electronic music. His style encloses the principal traits characterizing the evolution from Terry Riley's and Morton Subotnick's minimalism to the form of electronic new-age suite.
Dean De Benedictis is an American composer, musician, performer, and producer of experimental and alternative music. He is a trained musician and has released albums as a solo artist as well as played with groups such as Brand X and The Strato Ensemble.
David Sidney George Lewiston was a London-born collector of the world's traditional music. He is best known for his recordings initially released on LP on the Explorer Series of Nonesuch Records beginning in 1967.
Elaine "Ray" Barkin was an American composer, writer, and educator.
Christine Southworth is an American composer of postminimal music and works with combinations of Western ensembles, electronics, and world music ensembles including Balinese gamelan and bagpipes. She performs Balinese gamelan and gender wayang with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Gamelan Galak Tika, as well as Galician Gaita and Great Highland Bagpipes. She co-founded Ensemble Robot, a cooperative of engineers, artists and musicians working together to invent robotic musical instruments. She was also the general manager of Gamelan Galak Tika from 2004 through 2013. Her own music incorporates her work with Balinese gamelan and with technology and electronics, as well as reaching beyond these influences with an expanded palette of contemporary classical, jazz and rock, and world music from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
Terraform is the collaborative album by ambient musicians Steve Roach and Loren Nerell, who became friends in 1982 in Los Angeles. After years, they decided to create an organic, surreal and ambient soundscape environments. Mixed and structured at the Timeroom. Originally released on Soleilmoon Recordings in 2006 as a limited edition DVD-sized Digipak with 3 postcards. It was later released in 2009 on Projekt in a traditional jewel case.
Nightbloom is the collaborative album by ambient musicians Steve Roach and Mark Seelig, containing Mark's vocal and Tuva-style overtoning, combining Steve's zones and grooves. The disc features five seamless parts, single-track composition.
Jonathon Grasse is an American composer, ethnomusicologist, and improvising electric guitarist. He is a professor of music at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
