Breathing the Delta Blues
Legend has it that the Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson, who died in 1936, sold his soul to the devil on Route 666 in exchange for the ability to create the greatest blues ever known to mankind. Listening to local blues guitarist Adrian Adioetomo’s mastery of the genre, you would be forgiven for wondering if perhaps the 35-year-old musician struck the same deal.
Adrian spent years of his youth in Australia, where his surroundings influenced his musical mind-set.
“Since my university outside Sydney was in a completely desolated and barren area, the blues automatically seemed like the appropriate soundtrack for the landscape,” he said.
“I started listening to rural blues records by people like Muddy Waters, which became a daily soundtrack for me, and I discovered in blues what I’d looked for but didn’t find in punk and metal.”
Adrian, however, was especially smitten by Chris Whitley, who died in 2005 from lung cancer. Whitley had played a manic amalgamation of blues from the poverty-laden Mississippi Delta area, as well as the noisier and more abstract sounds of experimental composers such as Glenn Branca and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
“I learned a lot from Whitley. I guess you could also say I stole a lot from his style of slide playing with the resonator guitar; but more than that, his playing taught me about the unlimited capability of the blues,” Adrian said.
At the beginning of this decade, Adrian played weekly gigs at a small cafe in Kemang, South Jakarta, and at BB’s in Menteng. “Whenever I played ’70s blues songs by artists like Hendrix, [Joni] Mitchell, Cream and The Doors on my slide guitar, the response was fantastic,” he said. So he decided to write songs in such a style and release them independently.
Asked why he based his style on the noisier Delta blues Adrian said: “The original records of the early exponents [of Delta blues] sound like weirdly funky avant-garde recordings.”
To maintain the ghostly distant feeling of many old blues recordings, Adrian deliberately added scratches and crackling to the recordings.
Like Whitley and the Delta blues pioneers, Adrian found freedom in being able to sing about his personal demons without sounding cliched or self-pitying. On his first album, “Delta Indonesia,” which was released on his own label, My Seeds Records, he delivers lyrics describing the bleakest of emotions, repeatedly referring to the devil.
“To me, it is pure expression,” he says. “Totally deep and cathartic. It resonates to some of the deepest feelings of just being alive.”
Although it had the privilege of being Indonesia’s first Delta blues record, sales of “Delta Indonesia” were lackluster. The album did, however, receive praise from music critics and the independent music community, which Adrian was becoming more aligned with.
He started collaborating live with rising independent bands such as Efek Rumah Kaca and Zeke and the Popo, and soon became a constant “guest star” at shows.
His peers in the indie scene seemed to have a better grasp of authentic blues as opposed to commercial blues, although Adrian says this is rare in Indonesia.
“It’s just something that not a lot of people want to embrace for some unknown reason,” he says.
In his music, Adrian says, “I want to tease the cliche of the blues.”
And what exactly is a blues cliche? “Being a powerful and intense music for me, I find it somewhat superficial when people consider it macho music for jeans TV commercials or something. Blues matters when you’re feeling something that you can’t escape.”
It takes a while to get used to hearing Indonesian lyrics on top of blues music, but it’s not long until the anguish of the lyrics comes through.
In “Let the Dogs Go,” Adrian sings: “Let the dogs go/let them chase me/howling at my every move,” seemingly of the country’s hierarchal system of power.
As Adrian became a fixture in the small but tight local blues scene, as well as the local indie scene, invitations to perform piled up. In July last year, he provided the soundtrack for a local independent movie called “The Ribbon,” which was made by young Indonesian director Pandu Birantoro for a film festival in Canada.
As for now, Adrian wants to forget the hype and concentrate on the follow-up to “Delta Blues.”
“I do feel a kind of guilt playing a genre of music that is allegedly un-Indonesian,” he says laughing, “So I’m going to try to incorporate some other influences from different cultures, but I know it won’t be easy.”
He is aiming to get his next album out early this year. But really, Adrian’s goal is simple: “I just want to change the perception that blues is old men’s music.”
Originally published in The Jakarta Globe February 25, 2009
The New Culture akan menjadi kolom khusus dari Marcel Thee, diambil dari tulisan nya di koran Jakarta Globe.
