Gabber is back, but you’ve never heard it done this way before. The ultra-fast electronic music genre popularised in Europe in the early 1990s has been given a new lease of life by Bali-based duo Gabber Modus Operandi. Fusing the West and the East, they are crafting Indonesia’s ultimate musical globalisation at a speed well beyond a blistering 180 beats per minute. Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO) is the brainchild of electronic musician Kasimyn and vocalist Ican Harem. The duo have created an abrasive, fast and unique blend of gabber beats, metal wailing, punk attitude, and Indonesian musical folklore. Obnoxious yet rigorous, they borrow from a treasure trove of sounds spanning from black metal to traditional Indonesian gamelan , dangdut and penceng – a domestic genre consisting of endless solos played on cheap keyboards. It all started when Ican and Kasimyn moved to Bali and met at DIY punk and noise gigs. Before that, the duo had already sharpened their musical fangs in metal and punk acts: Ican lived in artsy Yogyakarta, playing in avant-garde black metal band Cangkang Serigala, and was involved with the Jogja Noise Bombing record label. Meanwhile, Kasimyn played in Jakarta punk band United by Haircuts before moving to Denpasar. GMO’s debut album, Puxxximaxxx , was released by Indonesian Yes No Wave Music in 2018, but it’s their latest eight-track album, Hoxxxya , released in August this year by Shanghai-based label SVBKVLT, that really been turning some heads. The duo were signed by SVBKVLT after playing at landmark Berlin’s CTM Festival earlier this year. “The SVBKVLT guy was there watching us,” says Ican. “We made the deal in the toilet. It’s kind of weird, since Kasimyn is a big fan of much of their music and plays it when he’s DJing in Bali, so it’s really a dream come true”. Ican adds that he and Kasimyn are both big fans of the Chinese music scene. “It’s the total opposite of most scenes that I know, where kids have so many references for what they want to do. The Chinese have been pretty closed off for years, but have kept doing whatever s**t they wanted, with or without being guided [by trends]. That’s why they are so fresh”. So aligning with a Chinese label was a perfect choice for GMO, whose music is as genre-bending, puzzling and mind-blowing as their album’s artwork: a pug with a purple wig framed between exhaust pipes, flames, a cut-and-paste motorbike, and fonts that look like a cross between pixel art and 1980s Atari eight-bit video game graphics. Kasimyn and Ican share a fascination with reog ponorogo, a ritual from Java involving repetitive music which leaves dancers in a trancelike state, and incorporate various influences from Indonesia’s vast and varied musical traditions. The Hoxxxya track Padag Galaxxx opens with a vocal crescendo that borrows from Balinese kecak drama’s repetitive male chanting before blasting into relentless gabber beats Calon Arang starts with the hypnotic refrains of punchy gamelan and drums that bring to mind the rhythms of reog ponorogo. So how did GMO decide to mix these disparate influences together, and crank up the speed and the volume? “It wasn’t really a decision,” says Ican. “We were just bored with what was considered cool and were amazed at what we had [in Indonesia] already. If you live juggling between the club scene, metal and noise gigs, hanging out and enjoying the gamelan, it will eventually happen,” he laughs. Ican and Kasimyn live and breathe Bali’s (and Indonesia’s) contemporary life and popular music, borrowing from ancestral local traditions with the same casual, authentically indigenous attitude. “I don’t think that tradition is traditional,” explains Ican, “Do we practice reog ponorogo ? No. Do we love its intensity? Yes. We love its various layers, the tone and the timbre, which are actually more fun than some music I’ve heard, so there is more of a personal connection. We are so lucky that the cure to boredom is actually around us,” he says. And that’s the best part of GMO’s music: it’s as scary, raw, and mind blowing as the tsunami of today’s Global Cultural Flow – a 1990 theory by American-Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. It proposes that globalisation flows from the developed to the developing world by means of five different “scapes”: human migration, media, technology, finance and ideologies. These disjunctures and differences define how new cultural forms build upon pre-existing cultures, blending the global with the local – and creating outfits such as GMO who defies most definitions and scatter genre boxes all over the place. “We don’t think about it that deeply,” says singer Ican. “GMO is a really fun project, and we just like to dance and have fun. If the idea of getting lost is so sexy now, I think we just want the opposite: to have a party that feels like home. Since home in Southeast Asia is so f***ing corrupt in so many ways, we love to go back to the imaginary ones, hoping it will get real eventually.” Casting modesty aside, GMO are yet another clever example of why Indonesian underground music is original and interesting: another is the scene that mixes Islam with metal and punk, defying all rules of global extreme music performance. “I think it’s healthy, better than ever, especially in the [cities’] outskirts,” says Ican. “Mix it with the Tik-Tok generation and you see a lot of kids just enjoying listening to dangdut and engaging with their own traditions without taking the essence of its ideology, but combining it with the kampong [“village” in Indonesian] vibe. It’s completely different from the big city, where everyone wants to copy someone else and just try to be cool.”