Buahbatu (Bandung)

Bandung’s underground music scene isn’t just about the music—it’s a living, breathing culture built on community, resistance, and shared memory. The ritual of nongkrong is its lifeblood, a sacred space where history is passed down, alliances are forged, and creativity thrives against all odds.

From street punks on Jalan Sumatera to death metalheads in Ujung Berung, the straight edge youth crew in neighbouring Sumedang, the anarchist crust punks of Rumah Pirata, and the emerging scene in Buahbatu featured in this issue, the history of the underground and its DIY practices reflects the narratives of local neighbourhood scenes, interlinking shifting underground styles, identities, values, and practices with the evolving urban landscapes of Bandung.

Libertad Fest is an annual punk music festival organised by the Bandung-based Pyrate Punx collective, coming to life every year through the assemblage of itinerant locations and various other collectives from around and outside the Indonesian archipelago.

Studio Pancaroba turns a national crisis into an absurd monument to corruption.

From corpse-painted farmers to sonic cartographies of the countryside, West Java’s black metal scene reimagines agrarian life as radical resistance. Bands like Bvrtan, Pure Wrath, and Sufism parody, honor, and weaponize rural imagery to confront inequality, history, and power.
We have follow the vocal project Ensemble Tikoro, in a trip through Bandung’s countryside.

From early on, the meanings and effects of indigeneity and cosmopolitanism have been core themes of Indonesia’s underground scene, which has gradually gained strength both locally and globally in artistic and political spheres.

A speculative fiction by artist Riar Rizaldi, rooted in Bandung’s underground music history, imagines a city where gangs of preman (freeman, gangsters), devoted to punk, metal, emo, and hardcore, rule the neighborhoods on motorcycles.

Réak is a trance ritual which originated in Bandung, a subregional variant of horse trance dances, a group of pan-Indonesian performances known under various names such as jaranan and jathilan.

There is a district on the outskirts of Bandung where traditional arts and heavy metal have collided since the 1990s—giving rise to pioneering bands, an underground zine scene, and DIY festivals that reshaped Indonesia’s music landscape.

The Ujung Berung metal community has become a case study of a chameleon-like and versatile countercultural space, exemplifying the role of underground music myths in creating environments where education, expression, and dissent intertwine, grow, and evolve.

At a time when music censorship is returning, political mobilization is rising, and student protests are spreading, the story of Buahbatu is not only urgent—it is necessary.