Gamelan Alligator Joy Releases Penumbra, Its First Album In Fifteen Years

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It's been 15 years since Vancouver’s new music / Javanese gamelan group released its last record, Hive. In the meantime, the ensemble took a new name. Traditionally, gamelans are named after the poetic honorific title bestowed on the large gong: Madu Sari translates as “the essence of honey.”

But times change, and Alligator Joy was named after the rumored-to-be-gun-running freighter that brought this newly created, chamber-sized gamelan gadhon to Vancouver in 1990. The pieces on Penumbra were workshopped and premiered on Alligator Joy between 2014 and 2018.

By then a complete set of bonangs (small racked pots covering 2 ½ octaves) had been added, but there were still no hanging gongs—its large gong is a pair of closely tuned, beating plates. A beautiful-sounding and versatile orchestra of high-quality bronze, it lacks only Madu Sari’s majestic power.

As for the music, three of the five composers here (Michael O’Neill, Mark Parlett, and Sutrisno Hartana) were featured on Hive, and the other two have also been associated with the group for three or more decades. So, these works represent the seasoned thoughts of composers with a long history of intercultural music-making. And they all have something fresh to offer.

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