- Skilled, sometimes astounding fusions of IDM, drum & bass and club music with Southeast Asian influences.
- Animistic Beliefs are a Rotterdam-based duo whose work is deeply intertwined with the heritages of each member: the Vietnamese-Chinese Linh Luu and Dutch-Moluccan Marvin Lalihatu. Their work is an impressionistic blend of instruments and sounds from their respective heritages, paired with a blow-everything-up approach to dance music that reimagines genres or just violently mashes them together. Their art both highlights difference and collapses it. On new album MERDEKA, for NAAFI, Luu and Lalihatu employ these influences and backgrounds to try and break from what they see as colonial Western dance music. If that sounds like a lot for a club music LP to bite off, well, it is, but the duo's approach—using Southeast Asian instruments, scales and a blend of childhood memories and poetry—is scintillating enough that it feels new, even as it gobbles up familiar genres before chucking them into the growling blades of a garbage disposal.
MERDEKA is a blend of high-octane jungle, techno and experimental club music that often sounds like all of these things at once. It often sounds like the rhythms and genres are bending to their will, adding or subtracting elements from familiar formulas—like how they reinforce Detroit-style electro with hardcore techno kick drums on "It's Called A Dip." Or the hardstyle-infused jungle of "Goblins Caught On Camera." The latter is a great example of the duo's control of chaotic settings, where the breakdown literally sounds like the track is falling apart piece by piece, before everything comes back together.
You can hear the duo incorporate their heritage with the unusual melodic scales on tracks like "Childhood Memories [Totobuang]," stacked with complex drum patterns somewhere between slippery trap and frantic IDM. On "Call Of The Tahuri," they sample the titular instrument as an eerie, distant horn sound whose acoustic provenance stands out amidst everything around it. There's a hyperreal quality to the textures on MERDEKA, but not in the clichéd, everything-is-shiny 3D render way. Rather, it's a dense, almost humid feeling, and it feels like you could reach out and rub your fingers against the ridges of the synths and the breakbeats. This makes MERDEKA unusually inviting, even at its most chaotic.
MERDEKA succeeds because it is both ambitious and careful. The duo aren't reinventing Western dance music, but their anything-goes method and their subtle but noticeable incorporation of Southeast Asian sounds and rhythms, sets it comfortably apart. Somewhere between IDM, drum & bass and techno lies a unique sound that Animistic Beliefs have mastered in just a couple of records—one that's eerie, mournful and celebratory all at once. You might have to read the accompanying notes to fully grasp the duo's post-colonial approach, but you can easily hear the mix of personal history, turmoil and searching for identity and belonging that defines this searching yet confident music.
Tracklist01. Thúc Tinh [Rebirth]
02. Call Of The Tahuri
03. To Dream About Water
04. It's Called A Dip
05. Unspoken Truths
06. Goblins Caught On Camera
07. Childhood Memories (Totobuang)
08. Poetry In Earthly Whispers
09. Kurang Tidor -幻觉
10. Untitled [Khi Minh Gâp Lai]