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LP
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ELE 024LP
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Remastered for vinyl at Abbey Road Studios, London. A straight-up folk record in the mold of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, one that catapults Glomboh onto national spotlight. Most Gen X-ers who grew up in the mid-1980s Indonesia must have seen Soedjarwoto Soemarsono, known by his nom de guerre "Gombloh" performing on a state-run television station, playing some of his biggest hits from that era, pop gems like "Kugadaikan Cintaku (I Pawn Off My Love)" and "Setengah Gila (Half-Crazy)." But of course, it is not fair to judge Gombloh only from these hits. Dig deeper and you will find buried treasure in his early stuff from Indra Records, and there are many of them. Live Gila is a brilliant recording which, despite being recorded live, has sound quality so pristine that many to doubt the claim of being live. One of the best things about Live Gila is its perfect sequencing, beginning with Gombloh's social commentary on the rich's debauched lifestyle of preying on young boys and girls, one of the most popular subjects allowed by the censoring machine of the New Order authoritarian government. The second song "Untuk Persada" is a soaring ode to the nation. For this song, Gombloh could be heard drawing his inspiration from The Police, which was undoubtedly popular in the early 1980s, even in a faraway port city like Surabaya. Not a single composition in this record sound indigenous (the Malay-influenced rock of Panbers or Koes Plus come to mind); they all sound modern and effortlessly catchy, and had it not been for the language, this album could be mistaken for a musical output from someone growing up in Laurel Canyon or Southern France.
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LP
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ELE 026LP
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Gombloh's forgotten masterpiece, Sekar Mayhang, his last record with his band Lemon Trees. No one knew that Gombloh was operating with all his cylinders running and what came out of this Indra Record session, in the waning days of 1980, were some of the best compositions ever committed to magnetic tapes. This is Gombloh at the peak of his creative genius. This record was a flop upon its release in 1981, and Indra Records reportedly only did one pressing on cassette tape. In Sekar Mayang, Gombloh harbors an obsession for a long-lost utopia, Java's distant past, where farmers have their barn full of rice and corn, where blacksmith working around the clock making tools and children singing and dancing in their seminaries. The question for him is should a modern-day Indonesia, rife with poverty, corruption and environmental degradation not be an anathema to that utopia? In the end, you don't need to be someone fluent in Javanese to enjoy this majestic record.
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