After a Decade of Singles, Jakarta's Cyda Finally Gets His Debut Album
Eri Septian has been releasing tracks under the name Cyda since 2016, scattered across half a dozen small labels. It took a Paris imprint called Minitel to finally give him a full album: nine tracks of 90s progressive house dressed up as a fake in-flight announcement.
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A Decade of Singles, One First Album
Eri Septian's mother sang sindhen, the high, ornamented vocal line that rides on top of a gamelan orchestra. Her son found different frequencies. As Cyda, he's spent the last decade sending club tracks out from Jakarta into a scattered handful of labels most people outside Indonesia's dance scene have never heard of: Nothing But Records, Sky Records, Laxity Recordings, 2B Records, Four Peas Recordings. Ten years, dozens of singles, never a full album.
That changed on March 27, when the Paris label Minitel put out Ground Control, nine tracks and 55 minutes, Cyda's first record built to be heard start to finish rather than dropped into a set one track at a time.
The Captain Has a Message
Minitel frames the whole thing as an in-flight announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking," the album blurb opens, before Cyda takes over as pilot for a trip through what the label calls "the outer edges of 90s progressive house" gliding into "2000s trance-infused textures with a proper modern-day twist." It's a gimmick, sure, but it fits the music: tracks like A Romance Crosses the Stars and Last Glance lean on the kind of cosmic synth leads and soul-soaked vocal chops that made progressive house sound like it was reaching for something bigger than the room it was played in. Drop That Bass is blunter, built for people who came to move. Nostalgia, the second-to-last track, is the one worth cueing up first if you only have three minutes: it's the clearest statement of what Cyda's been chasing since 2016, finally given the space to breathe.
The cover art, by François Boulo, does the same trick the music does: something warm and half-familiar, dripping into something stranger underneath.
From Bandung to Jakarta, By Way of a Plant Export Business
Cyda started DJing in 2008 and moved from his hometown of Bandung to Jakarta in 2012 to chase it properly, working the city's clubs and radio slots until the awards started coming: Producer of the Year at Indonesia's Paranoia Awards in 2017, House DJ of the Year the year after. Somewhere in between, during the pandemic, he spent a two-year stretch running an ornamental plant export business alongside the music, which is either a very Jakarta hustle or proof that nobody's career in this scene runs in a straight line.
Minitel first picked him up in 2024 for the EP Can't Stop This Feeling, which is what earned him the call-back for a full length. It's a small, specific kind of validation: a French label with no obligation to look east decided a Jakarta producer's sound was worth a whole record, not just a track on a compilation. That's the story worth noting here, more than the album itself. Jakarta's house scene has spent years exporting DJs to regional festival bills; getting a European label to invest in an actual album cycle is a different, harder win, and one this city's club circuit doesn't get nearly often enough.
Ground Control is out now on Minitel, streaming and on Bandcamp. Jakarta's independent labels have been building toward moments like this too: see House Cartel's own jump from DJ crew to record label earlier this year.
