Réak is the Bandung subregional variant of the “horse trance dances”: a popular group of animist performances present throughout and outside Indonesia. During theevent, a trance master coordinates a series of spirit possessions with themusical accompaniment of a percussions and shawm ensemble. Like other artforms, including metal, réak is described as ramé(tangled/interesting/noisy) and kasar (coarse) due to its chaotic social ambiance and distorted, fast-paced music. Indeed,due to geographical proximity and the genre’s local relevance, réak is experiencing the influence ofextreme metal. Although most participants avoid hybridity, a conversation istaking place among participants, debating the aesthetic affinities between thegenres, generating a commentary stressing similarity and genealogy. Moreover, while metal bands invite réak troupes to open concerts, réak practitioners, often familiar with the metal community, appropriate the genre’s stylistic elements such as distorted electric guitars and “Metal Distortion” pedals.Despite réak’s and metal’s resistance to assimilation, stylistic musical and extra-musical cross-fertilisation generated a non-synthetic hybridisation that safeguards genre boundaries. The discussion will be useful in laying the foundation to problematise concepts of hybridity that classic analyses of genre do not grasp.

Kasenian réak is a regional variant of the Javanese horse dances from Bandung, Indonesia. Commonly known in the archipelago as jaranan, kuda lumping or jathilan, the Javanese horse dances are a group of ceremonial musical performances during which a group of performers, led by a trance master, undergo voluntary possessions on behalf of spirits of the ancestors and other supernatural beings, under the influence of a musical ensemble. In different possession and trance phenomena around the world recognizing the acting spirit is often the key to communication with the supernatural being and treatment of the possessed. Thus, more or less different and precise taxonomies may be developed in order to do so. In réak, the possessed behaviour is interpreted by the trance master and members of the group in order to meet the spirit’s various demands and act accordingly to manage the possession. The purpose of this article is to examine the spirits’ taxonomies at play in réak as a case study. I do this in order to show in which sense analyses of the phenomenon of possession based on classification often fail to grasp the complexity and thus the significance of the experience. The outcome will underline which benefits can be obtained by a an approach that gives more value to a context-based ethnography of the possessed and its peculiarities than to the development of a general theory of possession with comparative purposes.

The expression «om telolet om» refers to a practice for which teenagers in suburban areas of Indonesia ask bus drivers to play their telolet (special polyphonic horns), which they then record with cellphones and share as YouTube video compilations. In 2016, «om telolet om» went viral, reaching the EDM music community and generating several remixes featuring samples from various videos. In this article, our author analyzes the phenomenon problematizing it in relation to global and local cultures and creative production in contemporary music.

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