Sanjonas Made a Vow to Keep Making Music. RAMPAK G Releases the Proof on October 15.

Sanjonas made himself a promise a while back: whatever happened, he would keep making music. He calls it a nadzar, a vow you don't break just because the year gets hard. On October 15, that promise becomes Ngelmu Tirakat, a nine-track album on his own Yogyakarta label RAMPAK G, and according to the album's own liner notes on Bandcamp, it's the most personal record he's made.

What Tirakat Actually Means

Tirakat, per the album's Bandcamp description, is a Javanese spiritual practice of self-discipline, restraint and intentional endurance, rooted in Islamic mysticism and older animist, Hindu and Buddhist traditions on the island. It isn't really about suffering or fasting for its own sake, the notes say, it's about inner clarity and a sense of deeper purpose. Sanjonas, real name Yonaz Kristy according to his own Bandcamp artist page, has built a career on that kind of layering: he's a graphic designer, DJ and producer in Yogyakarta who also co-founded the collectives Post Party Syndroma, sa/ve studio, Bast Cultura, Wicker Basket and 555_S.E.A, a loose ASEAN-wide network reimagining club culture after the platform era, according to Mixmag Asia's September 2026 artist roundup.

Marawis, Lion Dance and a Gqom Bassline

The album deconstructs gqom, UK funky, marawis and lion dance music into what the credits call "muted FM synthesis of regional instruments." Marawis is the Arabic-influenced hand-drum ensemble heard at Indonesian Islamic celebrations; lion dance, or barongsai, is the Chinese percussion tradition Sanjonas grew up around. Putting them in the same nine tracks is the point. The Bandcamp notes describe the record as a reckoning with "what it means to inherit as half Indo-Chinese identity" in Java's club scene, and the cover art, a spiked metal sculpture with a bagua trigram buried at its center, designed by CM BAGASKARA, carries that tension without spelling it out.

None of the nine tracks get individual titles. They're numbered Ngelmu Tirakat 1 through 9, MAHAMBORO plays saxophone on four of them and co-produced the record, and Khæmr adds guitar, bass and synth bass to track four. Sanjonas mixed and mastered the whole thing through his own sa/ve studio.

Listen Before It Drops

Track three, a slow-building five minute, fifty-five second cut, is streaming now as the pre-order teaser on RAMPAK G's Bandcamp and SoundCloud. It's a good preview of the record's pace: patient, low in the mix, built more for headphones at 3am than a packed floor.

For a longer sense of where his head's at, Sanjonas guested on Blaq Lyte Ultra Violet's Electronic Breakbeats radio show earlier this year, running through the acid, trance, disco and heavy-bass sides of his catalogue in one set.

The Second Album, Not the First

This is Sanjonas' second full-length, following his debut Incunabula Heroes, also on RAMPAK G. The label itself has had a busy year: Loopliner covered RAMPAK G's mission to give Durban gqom an Indonesian accent back in August, and it's one of the names on our running list of Southeast Asian record labels worth knowing. Ngelmu Tirakat is the label putting its own co-founder's name on the line rather than a compilation of outside producers, which makes it a real test of whether the gqom-meets-Java pitch holds up over a full album instead of a single track.

The album streams and downloads in full on October 15. Track three is up now if you want to hear where he's starting from.

Cover art: official artwork for Sanjonas' "Ngelmu Tirakat," designed by CM BAGASKARA, via RAMPAK G's Bandcamp.