CTM 2019: Becoming a ten feet giant with Rully Shabara

Every year Berlin’s foremost “petri dish” of contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music takes place at the CTM festival. This year CTM celebrated its 20th anniversary, exploring the theme of “Persistence” with a jam-packed 10-day program of concerts, club nights and performances. One of the artist at this year’s festival was the Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara, who has become one of South Asia’s most recognisable voices in the underground and experimental music scene. Although he’s most known as one half of the duo Senyawa, this year at CTM he presented three of his other extravagant projects: the experimental punk band Zoo, modern tribal trance in Setabuhan, and the free improvisation project Kombo, which invites various performers from across the globe to improvise together in different constellations. All of these projects threaded through by his incessant personal exploration of the possibilities of his voice.