This article explores the musical performances, aesthetics, and multi-situated reception of Indonesian electronic dance music in Europe and Indonesia, focusing on the duo Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO). Since their first international tour titled “Trance Against the Machine” in 2019, the duo has gained significant attention, especially in Europe, because they are seen as part of a seismic shift in the electronic dance continuum. The article critically analyzes this perceived shift in relation to GMO’s music. It advocates for a mode of analysis that simultaneously traces the situated and the multi-situated nature of aesthetics in electronic music. This analysis is inspired by an ethnographic theory developed in collaboration with the artists we study. We propose the term “transposition” as a translation of the Indonesian term alay, used by the members of GMO to describe their aesthetic vision, in order to pay attention to what might be called aesthetic globalization as both situated and multi-situated. We do so as part of an aesthetic-anthropological approach that seeks to bring aesthetic analysis into anthropology and anthropology into aesthetic analysis.
Trance Against the Machine: Transpositions of Aesthetics in Indonesian Electronic Music and Beyond Available to Purchase
Sanne Krogh Groth is senior lecturer and manager of research and research education in musicology at Lund University and is editor of Seismograf Peer. Her research concerns historiographic, aesthetic, and political issues within the fields of contemporary music, electronic music, and sound art. Publications include Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (Kehrer Verlag, 2014); The Bloomsbury Handbook Sound Art, coedited with Holger Schulze (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Negotiating Noise, with James G. Mansell (Lund University, 2021). She is PI of the research project Java-Futurism: Experimental Music and Sonic Activism in Indonesia (https://javafuturism.blogg.lu.se).
Nils Bubandt is professor of anthropology at Aarhus University and coeditor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos. He has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia since 1991. Publications include The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Cornell University Press, 2014); Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, coedited with Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Elaine Gan (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Rubber Boot Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds, coedited with Astrid Andersen and Rachel Cypher (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). He is a researcher in the research project Java-Futurism: Experimental Music and Sonic Activism in Indonesia (https://javafuturism.blogg.lu.se).
Sanne Krogh Groth, Nils Bubandt; Trance Against the Machine: Transpositions of Aesthetics in Indonesian Electronic Music and Beyond. Resonance 1 June 2025; 6 (2): 125–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2025.6.2.125
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