At the end of the 1980s, thanks to the extensive transnational circulation of audio technologies such as radios and cassette tapes—facilitated by the impending globalisation of media—Indonesia and West Java, in particular, started receiving new records containing increasingly extreme and subversive sounds. From the no-compromise hardcore punk of projects like Minor Threat to the guitar distortions of bands like Sepultura and the broken beats of the Bomb Squad, Bandung was slowly tuning into a new idea of obliquus collective organisation, indicating a growing hostility to capitalism from the lower classes and a strong commitment to form communities both to a local and global level: the underground.

During this era of authoritarian governmental control and dictatorship enforced by the ruler and second President Suharto, state control measures tried to implement the idea of and desire for a new middle class of consumerism loyal to hegemonic power by controlling and censoring cultural production—including music—and instead promoting content that could work as propaganda’s Trojan horse. This meant hindering citizens’ attempts to politicise music production, which aimed at fostering a radical imagination for new ways of living, and instead reducing it solely to innocuous aesthetic trends accessible by the masses, thanks to the newly attainable purchasing power.

Yet, trying to exploit alternative music as a product rather than an assemblage of anarchic ideologies—thus deflecting the potential of unruly sounds—was met by the underground with a series of counter-tactics, such as the circulation of illegal texts and the fostering of conspiratorial communities. The socioeconomic marginality of the underground crowd of Bandung activists, alongside a  “nothing to lose, everything to prove” attitude, led them to develop alternative social knowledge infrastructures—a para-legal industry of cultural artefacts and intense sonic phenomena, which eluded the all-surveilling eyes and ears of the state.

The underground positionality was thus twofold: on one hand, they aimed to tap into a transnational resistance network against all powers, while, on the other, they still believed in locality as necessary to defuse the all-devouring hunger of global neoliberalism.

Such an array of musical genres—including punk, metal, and hip-hop—fostered sonic ecologies in university concert halls, old warehouses, and fields within peri-urban areas, where the enjoyment of oppositional sounds became a call for solidarity. Filling the air with such intensity allowed subversive ideas of upheaval and conspiracy to take root and grow, ultimately becoming a major cultural force that contributed to the fall of Suharto at the end of the 1990s.

While the underground and its plethora of different subcultures have spawned in various parts of the city—Ujungberung, Dago, and so forth—an inestimable nexus is Buahbatu, one of Bandung’s southernmost districts. Buahbatu interestingly brings together different strata of the population, including artists operating at the Institute for Indonesian Arts and Cultures (ISBI), the working class and the white-collar workers of the area’s offices. Moreover, the district has been a fundamental logistic knot near the city’s main highway, Jalan Soekarno-Hatta, connecting Jakarta to Bandung and the rest of Java. These facts overlay an important history of labour and mobility on an ancient heritage left by the area’s original ancestors and their practices, with which the underground has tried to relate at different points in time.

The ominous return of heavy political mobilisation, extensive student protests, increased state militarisation and the reappearance of musical censorship after the reprimanding of indie-punk duo Sukatani for denouncing institutional injustices ultimately mark the dawn of a new era for radical Indonesia. This urgently calls for the need to spotlight once and for all the often-overlooked Bandung activist community as agents of change and forces of social imagination.