Senyawa vocalist Rully Shabara in a February interview with Reader contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim for his online music zine Tone Glow. “But is that true?” Shabara, 38, and instrument inventor Wukir Suryadi, 43, founded this Indonesian duo in 2010, and when I first wrote about them in 2014, I said their largely improvised music “combines the ancient gravity of a firelit ritual and the electric futurism of the avant-garde.” Senyawa know they aren’t engaged in a mass-market enterprise, so their artistic practice foregrounds collaboration, decentralization, and mutual support. According to a recent New York Times story by Grayson Haver Currin, they license Senyawa-branded sambal, tobacco, and incense for “community relief” in Yogyakarta—and during the pandemic Shabara has drawn hundreds of portraits of strangers in exchange for a promise that each subject would feed a neighbor. The release strategy for Senyawa’s new fifth album,