PSALM022: Gurnida by Yoga Nugraha Usmad

“Explores ancient, unseen worlds…immersed in mythological recollections…Yoga packs countless ideas into these pieces, but the album flows with an underlying narrative, searching for new living pathways.”
Foxy Digitalis

Solo Indonesian ambient producer Yoga Nugraha Usmad joins Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint for new album Gurnida, an aqueous and archipelagic collection filled with ruminative pathos, ancient mythology, and carefully applied grit.

Yoga Nugraha Usmad began the creative process that yielded new album Gurnida at the once-sacred Boyong River in Yogyakarta, Java. “A river that once carried myths, prayers, and daily rituals,” he writes. Now a centre for aggressive and destructive sand-mining, the river’s beauty is being eroded. “It is slowly losing its flow, drowned out by the roar of machines and the dust of exploitation,” Usmad laments. The music of Gurnida asks: “do the spirits that once dwelled within it disappear, migrate, or linger restlessly among the remnants left behind? Do they seep into the earth, seeking refuge elsewhere, or remain in silent defiance?”

Through looping bamboo flutes, reflective harmonics, undulating drones, and nocturne synthesis, the music of Gurnida speaks not only of physical loss but also of the fading spiritual and ecological bonds between humans and nature. It is an album “composed of soundscapes from geographical and symbolic realities. A place that holds souls and spirits that continue to resonate between existence and memory,” writes Usmad. Field recordings taken on location at such environments haunt his musical spaces like these spirits, their ghostly ephemera lacing Usmad’s arrangements with fragments of ancient stories, sometimes real and sometimes imagined.

Opening track and first single “Old Trees” is at first groaning and low-lit, an eldritch dusk rising over the metallics and machinery of an ecosystem shattered by industrial landstripping. But as a scintillating, wooden flute melody snakes through to its surface, the spirits of the old river begin to find their voice. They call and conjure in a multitude that drowns out the destruction, the place that we have found ourselves revealing a pristine and perfect state of ancient reverence.

Next, “Fluid and Solid” is founded on field recordings from Yogyakarta’s Plunyon River, a landscape traversed by lava from Mount Merapi’s last eruption. “In this track,” writes Usmad, “I imagine the dual nature of lava—its destructive force that devastates natural habitats, topples trees, and disrupts wildlife, as well as its regenerative power. Despite the destruction, lava also creates opportunities for the emergence of a new ecosystem.” Lava is here represented by throbbing synthesis tuned directly into geologic frequencies, sometimes flowing at engulfing speed and sometimes resting and breathing, on the earth, while the birdsong and insect chirp of the Plunyon forestry coagulates around its stream.

sound artist
Dresden,Yogyakarta

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