Ensemble Tikoro / HELL CHAMBER

Ensemble Tikoro (Ensemble Throat in Sundanese) are a choir founded in Bandung (Java, Indonesia) by composer and teacher of music theory Robi Rusdiana in 2012 and composed of extreme metal vocalists belonging to famous outfits of the local underground, West Java, Indonesia, such as Beside, Hunus, Impish, Sethos and Warkvlt. The collective has remained open and flexible, although always represented by a core of performers, executing compositions based on sheet music by Rusdiana.

While started as a project wanting to prove and test the boundaries of extreme metal music’s sound-as-physical-assault through the sheer brutality of the human distorted voice, through the years Ensemble Tikoro has evolved into a more complex entity incorporating and exploring a plethora of extended techniques, both vocal and performative. While each of the compositions work around a precise concept and development, making Rusdiana both the author and the conductor, Ensemble Tikoro draws its strength from the experimental and the grotesque, the improvised and the sudden, the unheard and the affectively overdriving.

Hell Chamber, is a compilation of different archival short-duration works by the project alongside excerpts from long-duration commissions composed between 2013 and 2020 and recorded in the present form in 2021. The tracklist for Hell Chamber was deliberately chosen to only include and showcase vocal compositions without the employment of any effect nor other electronic instruments. The techniques used in this album consist of various forms of extended vocals, extreme metal vocals (screech, growl, grotesque, scream, gurgling, inhale, pig squeal), traditional throat singing, as well as experimental interpretations of several traditional Indonesian, indigenous vocal techniques which are explored in onomatopoeic and other vocal forms.