5 Questions with Karina Utomo
Karina Utomo is an extreme metal vocalist, composer, and co-founder of Naarm-based metal projects, High Tension, Rinuwat, and Kilat. Her vocal practice explores multiple disciplines of extreme metal and experimental cross-cultural practices.
Utomo has performed at various festivals including Download, Dark Mofo, Soundrenaline (Indonesia), and was one of four soloists in Speechless, an opera by composer Cat Hope. Utomo’s releases with High Tension have been nominated for ARIA and AIR awards and recipient of The Age Music Victoria award for ‘Best Heavy Album’.
No.1
When did you realise you were interested in being an extreme vocalist? Some people may already know of you through the bands Young & Restless and High Tension, but tell us more: how did it happen and how has it evolved through the years?
My first encounter with extreme vocals was from attending hardcore shows on Ngunnawal country close to 20 years ago. The experience compelled me to learn how to distort my own voice, [and] this was a particularly significant moment as it presented me with an alternative method of vocal expression.
Around that time, I also found out about a highly suppressed piece of Indonesian history (the 1965-1966 anti-communist purge) and the effective methods of silencing/exclusion of millions of Indonesians throughout the New Order era. I was explicitly told not to talk about any of this openly. ‘Distorted’ vocals served a pragmatic purpose—being able to express myself through this abstraction (i.e. undecipherable vocals) helped me reconcile the complexities of the revelations associated with this newfound information.
Perhaps like many others, hardcore/punk opened the gates to heavier and more extreme genres, [and] growing up in a small place like Ngunnawal country also exposed me to more sub-genres of metal. I’ve always felt a strong affinity with metal, especially growing up in Indonesia, where the landscape of ancient culture and historical suppression is a perfect environment for metal and extreme music to thrive.
As my listening palette evolved, so did my desire to work more on vocal possibilities: I wanted to have the ability to execute the utmost disintegration, gruesomeness, abrasion—all the extremities that voice can do. I felt another gate open for me when I was invited by composer Cat Hope to be a soloist in her opera Speechless (we had performed together at [weekly improv night] Make It Up Club prior to that). Being introduced to improvisation and experimentation personally felt very freeing and dissolved a lot of the parameters that my [previous] experiences in music had set for me.
Voice has taught me that discipline, patience and experimentation can lead you to enriching spheres and over the years it has affirmed my belief that the voice serves multiple purposes for my practice—it holds symbolism, it is my vessel to travel through multiple realms, and it has been a pragmatic tool for expression.
No.2
Rinuwat is a very specific band. I know that you have made music together before, whether that’s with Mike (Deslandes) in High Tension or Rama (Parwata) through experimental projects. But what first spurred the three of you to come together to work on this as a band?
In 2019, I wrote a manifesto on the next body of work I wanted to make and record. It was fuelled by a myriad of experiences from being in an active metal band. I was reflecting a lot on the term ‘diversity’ (i.e., diverse line-ups on a metal festival) from a deeply personal place, [and] it highlighted something else weighing on my mind, which was sonic diversity. I felt the time had come to interrogate how I was writing music and what sonic ‘diversity’ meant to me; between growing up in Indonesia and being an immigrant in so-called Australia, assimilation was my survival tactic. From ‘losing’ my ESL accent and making music that sonically fits a mould, I guess I was questioning the influence of Western contemporary music and my relationship with my own culture and heritage.
I became fatigued with questioning (or responding to questions on) diversity of ‘identity’ in metal. This was when I started probing my own methods and wrote the manifesto. I wanted to explore gamelan notation and traditional voice, my first language (Bahasa Indonesia) and archaic Javanese (Bahasa Kawi), as well as traditional composition. [They were] essentially all the elements of culture that were already a part of me but became dormant in the assimilation process.
In the quietness of the pandemic, it felt fortuitous to be contacted by Javanese/Australian dancer Juliet Burnett for a project called Kasekten. During the first long lockdown of 2020 I begun composing with gamelan samples and voice and we started collaborating remotely. Although I had never met Juliet, I truly felt that our separate paths led us to collaborate, [and] when we finally met it felt like we were long lost sisters. We had so much in common and while I was contemplating and exploring gamelan and traditional voice on my own, it felt uncanny to be invited to collaborate on a dance theatre project by another Javanese artist. Working with another Indonesian artist felt so natural, enriching and dare I say, efficient.
Separately, Rama and I had spoken of collaborating on something together (not even necessarily music, being Indonesians and naturally food lovers, it was really an excuse to enjoy Indonesian dishes). I invited Rama to work with me on the compositions I had started to write for Kasekten as I knew he is more skilled and experienced at gamelan than I was. [Through this], I found that collaborating with Rama was similar to how it was with Juliet—no ego, humouring all ideas, and tons of patience.
As such Rinuwat feels like an extension of my collaborative processes, including Kasekten. It fulfils the ‘manifesto’ that I had written and it felt natural to collaborate with Rama and Mike, as I trusted that the three of us were very aligned in the intent to dissect the multiple elements of notation, composition and language whilst still indulging the ‘heavy’ genre palette, plus we were all extreme music fans.
Mike is an integral voice/vision to Rinuwat due to our strong collaborative history, friendship, and our mutual artistic trust; he can complete the most complex [musical] puzzles and through our years of collaborating, I would call on Mike for his magic weaving abilities, as well as his innate musical and technical production talent.
So coming together as artists felt very organic for Mike, Rama and I, and I feel grateful in the sense that we each experienced a sense of discovery working on Rinuwat together. The project has offered us the luxury of experimentation, discussion, and pure collaboration.
No.3
The idea of ‘liberation’ courses through Rinuwat, both in the definition of the word (‘to liberate oneself from a curse’) and conceptually, in how you don’t box yourself in sonically or lyrically. Can you speak more to this?
The name Rinuwat encapsulates the process, the intent and the discussions that Rama, Mike and I experienced during the making of this project. We wanted to create our own parameters. From a personal sense, the years of learning, dismantling, and listening informed the spirit of Rinuwat.
I had the privilege of meeting Boon Wurrung senior elder N’arweet Carolyn Briggs through artist Bon Mott in a very intimate Welcome to Country ceremony at my place of work; after the dinner and hearing auntie Carolyn speak and generously share her knowledge, it affirmed my interest in wanting to learn and speak my own ancestral language of Bahasa Kawi (archaic Javanese). My first language is Bahasa Indonesia (which I recently discovered is lingua franca—there is a lot of historical and political aspects to unpack here) and my father speaks fluent Javanese, but I never had the opportunity to learn. I began memorising ancient Javanese mantras and voicing them much like how it was with my first memories of learning Arabic. There is so much knowledge and power held in ancient languages, and this was an affirming discovery.
No.4
I’d love to hear more about the process behind your debut album, Dua Naga. How do you push yourself to incorporate both traditional/ancient and subcultural elements into the music in a way that makes sense to you both as a musician and a person in the world? Based on my observations it can be a very thin line, but Rinuwat manages to bridge the two.
Rama, Mike, and I showed one another a lot of our own ideas, whether they were riffs, rhythmic patterns, and concepts. We had the luxury of throwing everything onto a blank canvas and experimenting to see what made sense to us. It did feel very liberating that there was no brief to adhere to other than our own.
We were very aligned in the ideas and concepts we wanted to explore, and we were very transparent in communicating those references and ideas. There was a lot of ‘show and tell’. One of my favourite parts of making music is that it fuels my desire to learn—I enjoy the researching process, reading papers, immersing myself in folklore, traditional performance, etc. Cher, I remember I asked you earlier in the year what you do to solve ‘writer’s block’ and your response—“If I cannot write, it is because I have not lived enough or read enough.”— really helped me in my own process. That really nailed it for me!
No.5
What musicians or artists inspired you during the process of making Dua Naga?
We collaborated with Rully Shabara from [Yogyakarta experimental outfit] Senyawa on ‘Arawa’, and this was a huge deal for me as I am a big fan of his voice—it is so textural, rich and carries so much resonance and power. I’m inspired by voices that activates the mind’s eye; when I heard Rully’s vocal stems for the tracks it immediately painted an ancient landscape pre-Anthropocene era. I could hear pterodactyls, wild animals, the earth pulsating.
I studied traditional dance when I was younger, and so I found myself revisiting YouTube recordings of the Javanese and Balinese dance I grew up with. I felt like I was seeing these movements and compositions from a fresh lens. Memories of my Javanese grandmother and observing her artistic practice also inspired me to revisit Javanese philosophy and rituals.
Juliet Burnett also showed me the work of mbak Nani Sawitri, a dancer who performs Topeng Losari [a traditional Sundanese mask dance]—the performative and ritualistic aspects (and strength and discipline required to execute these movements) of traditional Indonesian performances provided me with a lot of inspiration. Nani Sawitri’s grandmother was a maestro of Topeng Losari, and Sawitri runs a sanggar (studio) where she is passing on this knowledge of the Topeng Losari dance to a new generation.
Like languages and traditional movements, stories and music holds so much ancestral memory, knowledge and power.
Rinuwat is a substantive conceptual project for collaborators Karina Utomo, Rama Parwata and Mike Deslandes. Firmly steeped in Southeast Asian traditional instrumentation and notation, the trio’s ancient Javanese name translates as “to liberate oneself from a curse”. Given the depth and intensity of their compositions, that malediction does indeed demand to be extricated.
Their debut album Dua Naga carries a weight of musical intellect and amalgamated calibration that is rarely heard in contemporary outfits, let alone in the extreme metal genres that would be a graceless definition of their sound.
Listen to the premiere of ‘Arawa’ (with Rully Shabara) below. The album will be out Nov 10 through Heavy Machinery Records.