Groove laden, guitar led brilliance from Indonesia which is dripping in eastern flavours with a straight up rock bite. The whooping vocals and hypnotic passages are what grabs hold and you cannot help but be whipped up with their eastern tinged funk.
LAIR (pronounced “lah-eer,” a local dialect for the Indonesian word of ‘lahir’, meaning ‘birth’ or, roughly ‘being born’) is a 6-piece psych-soul/funk outfit hailing from Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia.
Formed in 2018, LAIR’s music, lyrics, and its presentation are vivid, inherently gaudy (in a good way), and honest, taking a sizeable chunk of inspiration from classical/traditional Panturan Tarling, a form of now-grassroot musical/performance art popular amongst the people of a certain areas in the northern coast of West and Central Java.
Taken outside of the group’s narratives, the music and lyrics speak for themselves, describing in detail, through aural means, how it is to live on the northern shores of the island of Java. The feeling of salt in the humid air; The tiniest drop of sweat as it runs down the neck of truckers zooming down the hectic roads of Pantura; Posters of the coming election candidates plastered throughout the villages; The lingering smell of burnt fuel in the air; The garish set of stickers decorating the windshield of rundown public transports, braving every pothole with their dangerously-rickety wheels; And, most of all, the scorching heat. All lovingly communicated through the charming perspective of the locals.
In Ngélar—the sextet’s sophomore LP—deeper social narratives and more intimate subject matters are more apparent. In which they speak a lot about ‘tanah’ or ‘land/soil,’ owing a lot to the fact that their hometown, Jatiwangi’s history of being the country’s largest producer of clay/terracotta-based products. The people in Jatiwangi’s intertwining relationship with ‘tanah’ is simply unparalleled—even their instruments are mostly made of terracotta.
From the reimagining of their hometown’s past glories, the band, along with singer/songwriter Monica Hapsari (she also co-wrote and co-compose a number of songs in the album), sings about the rituals and traditions of harvest, to sending off prayers towards their once-prospering land and the ruins of what was once a dense forest in Jatiwangi, which they are currently trying to reclaim while racing with the massive wave of industrialisation. It is a contextually-sorrowful album as much as it is a candid, cheery commemoration of the band members’ everyday life in today’s northern shores of Java, Indonesia.
live
https://youtu.be/Bt8-kCEBnHU?si=CraOrf5rQovZK7BQ&t=79
live in the street
https://youtu.be/P59kV-c6ujY?si=J7G7fW9HQueM79tv&t=323
live in Toronto
https://youtu.be/dvAb_USJAcE?si=EnEfY0rARI9lFEG_
Tatalu
https://youtu.be/vKQfmy-KHM8?si=JxWkG0L8lgRNMS9H
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/lairmusik
Record Release
https://lightintheattic.net/products/ngelar
Beginn 17.30 Uhr, Eintritt 10 Euro