“In The Softness” off Gamelatron Bidadari by Zemi17

Instruments like the gamelan have struggled to get outside the halls of academia and onto your playlists, but the ambient genre might provide an inroad for Zemi17.

The musical moniker is the creation of DJ and producer Aaron Taylor Kuffner. The Zemi17 project has “remained rooted in the ideals of co-opting the music and culture surrounding electronic dance music in an effort to cross it over to a wider mystery.”

Our question is: what are we listening to? Are these gamelan performances live? Original? Or archival cuts of recorded performances, sliced, diced, and repackaged to more closely approximate western music notions of what ambient, experimental, “psychedelic” music should sound like?

Have a listen to our highlight track “In The Softness” and see what you make of it.

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