Gabber Modus Operandi Fused Gabber With Balinese Gamelan, and Björk Put Kasimyn on Fossora

Four tracks on Björk's 2022 album Fossora credit Kasimyn, an Indonesian DJ who spent his early years working wedding receptions around Denpasar, as co-composer and beatmaker. Original pressings credited the beat to Gabber Modus Operandi, the duo Kasimyn built with partner Ican Harem; streaming versions and the 2023 repress moved the credit to Kasimyn alone. One of the four tracks is called "Trölla-Gabba," a title that points straight at the sound the duo had already spent four years building: gabber, the 150-to-190bpm hardcore techno strain born in Rotterdam in the early '90s, collided head-on with the gamelan, jathilan trance drumming and dangdut koplo that surrounded their studio in Bali's capital.

A Punk Band's Missing Member

Gabber Modus Operandi started as an accident. In 2018, Kasimyn filled in last minute for an absent member of a punk band fronted by Ican Harem, who had come up through Yogyakarta's experimental punk and metal scene, playing in a "black metal karaoke boy band" called Cangkang Serigala. Kasimyn, meanwhile, had been paying rent as a wedding DJ, the job that puts a working musician in front of more dangdut and koplo in a year than most crate-diggers hear in a lifetime. Neither background screams "Berghain." The duo built their sound from what was actually playing around them in Bali, not from a record collection curated for a European dancefloor.

Sacred and Banal, on Purpose

Kasimyn described the method to Bandcamp Daily in 2019: "Our key influence is definitely traditional music surrounding us." That means jathilan, the Javanese and Balinese trance dance where a performer is understood to be possessed by a spirit; dangdut koplo, the raucous, bass-heavy street-party strain of Indonesian pop; and funkot, a local hybrid that already splits the difference between dangdut and European happy hardcore. Gabber Modus Operandi don't sample these genres as texture. They run them through the same pressure gabber applies to a kick drum, then let the vocals snap between ritual and absurdity. "We always put our attitude between sacred and banal, and celebrate 4G internet access," Kasimyn said. Ican Harem's performances lean into that tension physically: masks, thrashing hair, outfits stitched from Indonesian streetwear and secondhand metal merch, played completely straight.

PUXXXIMAXXX to Berghain

The duo's 2018 debut album, PUXXXIMAXXX, came out on the Yogyakarta label Yes No Wave Music and leaned hard into Balinese folklore and black magic references. HOXXXYA followed in August 2019 on the Shanghai label SVBKVLT, eight tracks built around what Kasimyn called "digging through our identity as millennial Indonesians in transition to digital culture." That same year, the duo made their European debut at CTM Festival in Berlin, playing a night at Berghain, a venue that doesn't typically book artists whose reference points include wedding-circuit dangdut. It worked because the tempo and the aggression translate instantly, even where the scales and the rhythmic logic underneath owe nothing to Western club music. "We can stop anywhere when it's too Western or too Eastern, we are in the middle of it," Kasimyn said. "We just want to make the music that feels like home."

Kasimyn and Björk

The Fossora credits, on "Atopos," "Fungal City," "Trölla-Gabba" and the title track, put a Denpasar-trained wedding DJ in the same production chain as one of the most meticulous artists in pop music. The relationship continued on stage: in March 2023, Kasimyn joined Björk's Cornucopia tour for a show in Tokyo. A week later he announced a solo album under a new name, Hulubalang, released that June 26 on the Jordan-based label Drowned by Locals. The record, Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal ("Synthetic Feeling for Anonymous Sacrifice"), grew out of years spent reading Indonesian war archives. Kasimyn has described it as a personal release of anger rather than a political statement, a distinction that matters given how directly the Gabber Modus Operandi catalog already handles Indonesian history and ritual without turning either into a lecture.

Still Playing From Bali

Gabber Modus Operandi has company. Jakarta producer Logic Lost recently pulled Yogyakarta's Senyawa into one of the city's darkest techno records, and Surabaya's ANTI.TRUST Records is running the same trick on dangdut koplo and breakcore. Gabber Modus Operandi got there first and went further: the duo have since played Uganda's Nyege Nyege Festival, Tasmania's Dark Mofo, and are part of Nusasonic, a Goethe-Institut network linking Bali and Yogyakarta's underground to WSK in Manila, Playfreely/Black Kaji in Singapore and CTM in Berlin, real infrastructure connecting Southeast Asia's experimental scenes to each other instead of routing everything through a Western booking agent first. Kasimyn turned up on CTM's 2025 bill as a solo artist, back at the festival that hosted the duo's Berghain debut six years earlier. The studio hasn't moved. It's still in Denpasar, still next door to a community center where you can hear gamelan rehearsal through the wall.

Cover and figures: Vloek, Johnny Terror and Ihsan Rafdianto, via Sabukaru.