Random Brothers Turned a Protest Track About Modern Slavery Into a Place on Indonesia's First Techno Compilation

Two guys are stretched out on a tiled floor, eyes half shut, lighters out, a screen behind them glitching their own name into static. In front of them: a modular rig, a 16-channel mixer, two bottles of water, a stray record and enough patch cables to wire a radio station. That's Randi Danishta and Nara Anindyaguna, the Indonesian brothers behind Random Brothers, and the mess on the floor is basically their whole aesthetic. They don't do minimal.

What they do, going back to 2020, is make a point with it.

A Protest Track Nobody Expected From a Modular Rig

In December 2020, Random Brothers put out a track called "BUDAKKICK," part of a compilation called Moda Ekuator, a joint release between Pepaya Records and Dead Records. The title is a pun: "budak" is Indonesian and Malay for slave. The brothers weren't being cute about it. Asked about the track, they told the Malaysian outlet The Vibes they were going after "modern slavery that keeps on spreading subtly because of the capitalism," and summed up the mood in one line: "This situation is brutal, hence we want to kick it back."

The accompanying visual matched the tone: red-black, submerged, two faces half underwater. Not the kind of thing you'd put on a flyer for a pool party. Most Indonesian dance music at that point was still chasing festival-size room-fillers. A modular duo built a track around forced labor and ran it through a compilation most people outside Jakarta never heard of.

From a Bedroom Statement to Indonesia's First Techno Compilation

Three years later, Random Brothers turned up somewhere much bigger. On January 31, 2024, three Indonesian imprints, Underradar Records, Koronna Collective and Bordel Ensemble Records, released REVOLT, billed flatly as "the first techno compilation in Indonesia." Twenty-three producers from across the archipelago contributed a track each, spanning dub techno, hypnotic grooves, minimal and straight-up industrial. Random Brothers' contribution, "Mono Stereo," sat alongside names like Ecilo (who'd go on to sign to Jeff Mills' Axis Records and build his own label, a story Loopliner has covered separately), Andra of the Batalion movement, and STEF., one of the few women on the bill.

The compilation got what Mixmag Asia called "early support from heavyweights such as Charlotte de Witte, Takaaki Itoh, Arjun Vagale and Joseph Capriati," a short list of names that don't usually have reason to look at a Jakarta Bandcamp page. The whole thing launched properly on February 2, 2024, with a release party at Wonderbar in Jakarta, Random Brothers included on the lineup.

What You Won't Find

The honest part: there's no current tour date, no label bio, no verified social account to point you to. Random Brothers don't seem to run a public rollout the way bigger acts do, which tracks for two guys whose idea of a press photo is passing out next to their own gear. What's on the record is what's on the record: a 2020 single that named forced labor as its subject when nobody was asking the local scene to get political, and a spot on the compilation that got international techno names to notice Indonesia had one. For a duo with no obvious interest in being easy to find, that's not a bad pair of marks to leave.

Cover photo: Random Brothers performing live, via The Vibes.