Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Pic by Byba Sepit.

​Housed in the cavernous hardwood expanse of New York's Indonesian Consulate, the massive, shimmering army Gamelan Dharma Swara are a 20-plus-member crew that explores and subverts Balinese tradition in lightning-fast blurs. Led by Balin-born musical director I Nyoman Saptanyana and Kansas-bred executive director Andrew McGraw, the crew explores gamelan gong kebyar, a style already marked by high-velocity tempos and violent shifts of mood, but now embellished with a New York avant-jazz ear for propulsion and curious detours. Take McGraw's original piece, "Sikut Sanga," a 13-minute OCD romp inspired by a number of newer Balinese works, Javanese music, bebop, and game-show theme songs, joyously blurring the line between parody, mash-up, and tribute in one gloriously post-modern pastiche. It's the highlight of their self-titled debut (out now via Turis/Arts Indonesia), a double CD that documents the ensemble's tour of Indonesia, a trip that culminated in a performance at the 2009 Bali Arts Festival -- the first time a foreign group has ever been given the honor.

The MP3 below is a seven-minute sampler of the CD's many riches: You can hear an excerpt of "Sikut Sanga" from 4:00 to 5:38. (Or just watch this video. McGraw's genre-bending compositional style on the song leaps across spheres like a Naked City cut-up, rapidly turning on a dime from interpolations of Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night In Tunisia" to self-aware snatches of "New York, New York" to rapid-fire blurs of chiming pyrotechnics. "Yes, this was pretty much Naked City applied to Balinese music," says McGraw. "Contemporary Balinese composers have an incredibly rich palette, but they haven't yet experimented with mash-ups. I wanted to play with it."

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