Loading...
| Sajama Cut is name that is well known to Indonesia’s independent music circles. Their musical endeavors spans over a decade now, purveying their mish-mash of 60 through 70s-esque jangly rock excellence while going through personnel changes. Their latest album, Manimal (Bronze Medal/Demajors), was just released late last year, and their latest set of singles, Twice and Poral Molice was just released today (24 Feb 2011) free to the public via an assortment of websites including Deathrockstar, Kapanlagi, and Jakartabeat. Sajama Cut’s members, Marcel, Randy, Andreas, Hans and Dion, recently stopped by Whiteboard Journal’s office and gave insight into their latest relase, their views on downloading music, and the future of records. Enjoy the interview, and be sure to download their latest release (links provided at the end of the article).
W: About your latest single, Twice, what is this song about? M: Twice… most of our songs lyrically aren’t about anything in particular, the lyrics aren’t metaphorical, they’re more thematic. Some part of this song [Twice] is about… what do you call it… leaving a point of contentment, moving on from a chapter of our lives into the next. A transition of any kind, really. It could be our state of mind, or even physically moving from one place to another, or growing up, it’s more along those lines. W: We can definitely see that through the music video; the images of traveling juxtaposed with still shots of a cafe… M: The video itself was made by our friend [Robby Susanto] independently, when I talked to him about it we didn’t really make a concept for it. Perhaps that is how he interpreted the song. A: The idea was we just give him the song and let him interpret it what ever way he wants to. M: and he made the video fit the theme. W: When you make music, who is usually the primary songwriter? M: For Manimal I wrote the basic parts of the song, then we play it together into completion. W: You begin writing from the lyrics or music first? M: Music first then the lyrics. Usually when I make an album I like to make the titles first, sort of imagine what the track list will look like, because usually thats what we first see before we purchase, since we couldn’t sample CDs, we had to buy the CDs based on looking at the cover art, the track list. W: About Poral Molice, what is the message you would like to convey through the song? M: (laughs) Actually, one of our friends from our promo team said he had this idea about making a song about what’s his name, Tifatul. The next afternoon we played around with the idea. I figured, better than playing video games, lets just make a song and that [Poral Molice] is what came out of it.
|
W: Back to lyricism, who or what influences the writing, the process?
M: Sometimes I just enjoy the sound of a sentence or a word more than its meaning. As a band we don’t constrain ourselves with meanings or metaphors too much, we focus more on making the phrase pleasant to hear. Sometimes the lyrics just spontaneously comes out during the songwriting and it sounds more sincere, then perhaps a couple of weeks or months in retrospect we can reflect on that spontaneity.
W: What about influences? R: We all have different influences, I lean more towards jazz like Incognito, Mario Biondi… BB King is a favorite as well.
W: What about you, Andre? A: There’s a lot, Wavves, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power. W: So it’s a wide variety of music. M: We also… hopefully we don’t sound like our influences though. I mean, if we wanted to make a song that sounds like Broken Social Scene, well an actual Broken Social Scene song will obviously sound better.
|
