Herutjokro as Posthuman

Herutjokro as Posthuman is a piece that explores the ideas of Romo Herutjokro Semono (1900 - 1981), the founder of Kapribaden—one of many Javanese kebatinan groups—in relation with the discourse of posthumanism. Conceptually, it is an attempt to deconstruct and build new ideas based on the Javanese idea of rasa; rasa is secularized, reinterpreted, and translated into formal and extra-musical processes. At the technical level, it is an attempt to explore ideas such as orchestration of gamelan extended techniques, gamelan-based improvisation, alternative tuning (the gendèr and suling in this piece is retuned), spectral harmony, and algorithmic processes.



Dion Nataraja is an emerging composer, artist, and scholar from Indonesia. He is currently studying music composition in Bennington College, Vermont. His works have been focusing on the intersection of areas such as spectral music, Javanese gamelan, algorithmic composition, posthumanism, postcolonial studies, and critical theories.