From a Village in Java to Glastonbury: How an All-Girl Indonesian Metal Band Rose to the World Stage | Marsya from the Voice Of Baceprot | Tank Talks Asia

MARSYA: 260401

Andrew: From a small town in Indonesia to the world stage Voice of Baceprot are a metal trio who are helping to rewrite the rules of global music, blending heavy riffs with social commentary. The band was still at school when they first rose to international attention, and they've gone on to make history as the first Indonesian band to perform at Glastonbury and have also played to the crowds at the Singapore Grand Prix.

Manisha: Hello, it's Tank Talks Asia, I'm Manisha Tank. From me and the team at the AsiaWorks studio in Singapore, a very warm welcome. Well you were just hearing the voice of Marsya. She is the lead singer of an Indonesian heavy metal rock band that the co-founder of TTA, Andrew Clark, got to catch up with at this table. He’s here right now…

Andrew: And in typical TTA style, you were on holiday so I had to do the interview.

Manisha: What do you mean had to! You are the resident musician, that is absolutely true, so this must have been a lot of fun for you.

Andrew: It was, it was an incredible amount of fun. Voice of Baceprot, they’re an amazing band. They’ve got that amazing look, haven’t they?

Manisha: I think that’s what really caught my eye, if I’m honest. It was a heavy metal rock band and this was women, first of all, which is really unusual and then the girls were wearing their hijabs as well and I thought I absolutely love this because I’m sure, that in their community, this is just something beyond the boundary and outstanding and new.

Andrew: Absolutely and I think that their story is really, really fascinating. They’ve been around for 12 years but they literally come from a really small village in Sunda, which is West Java.

Manisha: Okay.

Andrew: You know, take you about eight hours to drive there from Jakarta. They learnt how to play their instruments in school. There’s always a kind of mentor character in sort of any musician’s career and they all had a teacher at school who became their mentor.

They got the band together and then they’ve just grown into this phenomenon and obviously they’re generationally, they’ve become famous on social media and now they tour the world.

Manisha: I’m not surprised, they absolutely blew me away and I’m sure they’re going to blow everyone else away as well.

Andrew: Shall we have a look?

Manisha: Yeah definitely.

Andrew: Let’s jump in!

On this episode, we're joined by Firda Marsya Kurnia, or Marsya, who's the front woman of Voice of Baceprot to talk music, power, and what it means to challenge expectations on the stage and beyond.

Marsya from Voice of Baceprot, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for making time to come and visit us today. So Voice of Baceprot has been going now for 12 years, is that right?

Marsya: That's right.

Andrew: That's a long time.

Marsya: I know.

Andrew: In metal, right?

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: Maybe you could tell me a little bit about how you got started.

Marsya: Actually Siti and I were already friends since elementary school and then we met Widi in junior high school.

Andrew: So Siti's your drummer?

Marsya: Yes.

Andrew: And Widi..

Marsya: Widi is my bass player. And then we are in the same theater community. And at the time we had very bad acting. So our teacher, his name is Abah Erza, he told us to be a production team.

In that situation, we have to learn musical instrument. At the time, the student who learned musical instrument, actually 15 students.

Andrew: Yeah.

Marsya: But because some of the reason, one of them, is we didn't get our parents’ permissions, so the member became seven, and now it's only the three of us.

Andrew: It's only the three of you. Now you are from a part of Indonesia called Sunda, which is in the western part of Java, and you are from a small town there. What's the name of the town again?

Marsya: Garut.

Andrew: Garut, okay. What I know about West Java and Sunda is obviously the food is amazing.

Marsya: Indeed.

Andrew: But the music, I mean, it's Gamelan music. It's Angklung music. It's very quiet. It's got nothing to do with metal music. So how do seven of you, taking up music, that end up as three in a band. How do you go from, what was presumably music that you might have been made to learn at school, how'd you end up playing in a metal band?

Marsya: Actually it's totally new thing for us. The first time we heard metal music, we found it on Abah Erza’s laptop.

Andrew: This is your teacher's laptop?

Marsya: Yeah. We often write for wall magazines in school. And we borrow his laptop and we found like his playlist is like Rage Against the Machine, Linkin Park, System of a Down and we click one of it and it play, it was played Toxicity.

Andrew: Yeah.

Marsya: From System of a Down.

Andrew: Yeah.

Marsya: And our drummer Siti said like, oh, it's good. It's a good song. Then, she try to cover the songs and then Widi and I followed her and yeah.

Andrew: It's interesting you mentioned Rage Against The Machine. Yeah, I can, I can hear a lot of Rage Against The Machine in your playing, especially in your guitar riffs and also in the lyrics, that kind of very simple way of writing, where you are saying a lot with a very small number of words.

Obviously the three of you get together in this band, and you come up with the name Voice of Baceprot. What does that mean?

Marsya: It's from Sundanese word, it means noisy. Yeah.

Andrew: That kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

Marsya: Noisy. So the one who gave us that name is Abah Erza and he thinks that it match with our personality and also the music that we play.

Andrew: So clearly he has been quite an important mentor in the beginning of your band and maybe helped you understand metal music a bit more and learn how to play it. Is that correct?

Marsya: Yeah. We learned to play guitar, bass and drums from him. And also in our early days, he also helped us to make lyrics.

Andrew: Up next, what are Voice of Baceprot’s influences?

What other influences and what other metal music were you listening to that influenced you?

Marsya: Actually, our biggest influence is System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine because we love their bold lyrics and unique music.

And also our bass player, Widi, loves Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Andrew: Oh, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Is she a Flea fan?

Marsya: Yeah, that's right. And Siti loves Slipknot, Lamb of God.

Andrew: Oh wow, yeah. These are all very heavy bands. It's fantastic.

Marsya: I know.

Andrew: And what about the Indonesian music scene? Were you influenced by bands in Indonesia? Because I know that in Indonesia there is a very sophisticated punk music scene. There's a very sophisticated thrash metal music scene.

Were you influenced by many of the Indonesian bands or also some of the more mainstream Indonesian bands?

Marsya: So there three biggest metal bands in Indonesia. There is Seringai, Burgerkill and DeadSquad. And we listen to their music a lot. Also, they give us a big influence in our music and also their personalities. Especially Seringai, they often speak about humanity issues, freedom of speech, and it gave us a courage to be an honest musicians.

Andrew: Next - it's not just about the music.

There are some very similar themes that I see and I hear in your music, and I think that there are two things which really stick out to me in your music. Two very strong themes that I certainly get from music. One is that idea of joy.

Marsya: Ah yeah.

Andrew: And I've heard you speak about this before and when you see you performing on stage, you find so much joy in what you are doing, and you speak about music being a joyful experience for you.

But also there's a theme of bravery in your music. Brave to stand up and say things. Brave to stand up for what you stand for. Do you think you could tell me a bit about the joy and the bravery in your music?

Marsya: Actually we choose to play music because it gave us happiness. That's why we see the stage as our playground.

The place that we can just be ourself and also be brave to talk about whatever we want to talk and scream.

Because, we cannot do that normally every day.

Andrew: And obviously all of this goes along with the look that you have, you are best known, I would say, for wearing the hijab and you proudly wear it on stage. All of this is very much within the genre of heavy metal and metal music, the black clothing. Why is that important to you?

Marsya: We see hijab as a normal clothes actually because we have wear it since we are kids and we wearing hijab because we feel comfortable. So we don't see any special thing about it.

Andrew: But perhaps some of your audience online do see something special about it because, like many musicians and bands today, you've built an enormous following online.

And as well as the people who adore your music and follow you, you also have haters as well.

Marsya: That's why we are shocked when one of our videos go viral on internet and they start questioning about our appearance, like the hijab, but we understand that because many people misunderstood about the hijab, Muslim, and also the metal music itself. So we choose to describe it through our music and our lyrics.

Andrew: That obviously means that you are a very brave group of girls to be able to do that.

Marsya: I don't know, I just want to be honest, especially in writing lyrics because I'm the one who writes lyrics.

Andrew: There's something else that I hear in your lyrics and your music that speaks to Indonesia today. And where Indonesia exists today with itself and with the world.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: Because you do comment on the social situation in Indonesia.

Marsya: Yeah I know.

Andrew: How much do the social issues in Indonesia and perhaps even the politics of Indonesia influence you as a band?

Marsya: Actually, we talk about political issues because it's give big effects on our life every day. Like we see it on our own eyes, like how the patriarchy and poverty give effects and make many girls have to face underage marriage and they have to also lives in poverty, like their parents. So that's why we talk about social issues in our shows.

Andrew: Do you find as though you sometimes have to censor yourselves or you have to be careful about what you are writing and what you are saying?

Marsya: Siti and Widi often remind me about that. Like, “okay, slow down”, like that because, yeah, we often got the terror. Even it start from our early days, like, the death threats and everything. But it is not a special thing anymore for me. So I just write what I want.

Andrew: We spoke a little bit about social media and your huge following online. How much and what kind of role has social media played in your rise to fame?

Marsya: Oh, it has a big role actually because everything start from there. Like at first we upload our videos, like live videos. The quality is very bad actually, but I dunno why it's become viral and then the big agency and everything will contact us. It start from that video, one of our songs, it's called The Enemy Of Earth Is You. And they’re interested because that song to contact us.

Andrew: Thinking about the songs that you play, there's one song in particular where I was really, really taken by the lyrics because they're so simple, but yet they say a lot. There's this song God, Allow Me (Please).

That's amazing. And for me, that exists on lots of different levels. But to you, what does that all mean?

Marsya: We wrote that song when we are in tired pass, to comfort with people.

Many people say that music is haram and they want us to take off our hijab.

Andrew: So by haram you mean it's forbidden. It's against religion, that sort of thing.

Marsya: We are very frustrated. So we talked to Abah and he said that, okay, just ask God. Don't talk to human. Just ask God. So…

Andrew: Next - on the road with Voice of Baceprot.

So let's talk about wider fame. So you are not just famous in Indonesia and Asia. You've got a very large growing international audience and your music has definitely left Indonesia and traveled around the world, but also you've traveled around the world as well.

I mean, there are some amazing performances on YouTube and we'll put some of these great performances on YouTube in the show notes so that you can have a look at them. But, you know, one in particular that I love is the Metallica cover of Enter Sandman that you do it, it's kind of cliched, but it's note perfect and it's really, really good. And you put your own spin on it as well, which is quite remarkable.

But also in terms of gigs that you've played overseas and you are wearing the T-shirt now. You played at Glastonbury. You've done Glasto..

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: What was that like?

Marsya: It was very amazing, memorable moment and one of our best show ever. Like we love the crowd and also the stage and people in there, they're so kind to us.

Andrew: What's one of the best or one of the most amazing experiences that you've had outside of Indonesia, maybe in Europe or the US. What was one of the memorable moments that you might have had over there?

Marsya: One of best, it's still Wacken, I think, in Germany. Because we dream to play in Wacken since middle school.

Andrew: So that's a dream realized.

Marsya: And when people hear about our dreams to play in Wacken, they always say that we are not metal enough to play in Wacken.

Andrew: Well you proved them wrong.

Marsya: Yeah, totally wrong.

Andrew: That's amazing. Have you met any of your idols whilst you've been on the road? Who have you met, you've just been like, we're not worthy.

Marsya: Alissa White-Gluz, the folk artist of Arch Enemy on that time, and we love her so much and we see her in real life, like, oh my God, she is amazing, kind, very kind, and totally badass.

Andrew: Last year you played at Formula One, and that's the reason why we know about you because our host Manisha was there and she saw you and she said, we have to get them on the show. We have to get Marsya and the girls on the show. But how was that?

Marsya: That was the first time we visited Singapore.

Andrew: Oh, really?

Marsya: Yeah. And I'm so nervous about that, but I love the crowd and also I have a chance to watch the…

Andrew: The racing.

Marsya: The race, yeah.

Andrew: The F1.

Marsya: Wow. I love that.

Andrew: What do your parents think about all of this, all of the success, playing in places like Singapore? What's your parents' reaction?

Marsya: I dunno what they think, but now they always post everything on social media, like where we go. That's why at the first time we went to Singapore, they didn't believe us. They think that we are lying to them because when we went to Singapore we don't have a chance to take a picture in…

Andrew: Oh, with the Merlion?

Andrew: So because you didn't send them a picture of you and the Merlion.

Marsya: So they expect us to post like the water, come to the lion like, aaahh, like that.

Andrew: Because that's what everybody does. Yeah. That's so funny.

Marsya: That's why they think that we are lied go to Singapore.

Andrew: But you could do that today. You could go down to the Merlion a little bit later on.

Marsya: That's our planning.

Andrew: That's brilliant. I want, I'm looking forward to seeing those pictures then.

Marsya: Yeah. So I can prove it to my mama. Like this. I went to Singapore, right?

Andrew: I went to Singapore and I took that picture.

Marsya: Yeah. So she can post it on WhatsApp.

Andrew: But on a more serious note, I've heard you talk before about the fact that you are now internationally famous, and when you become internationally famous, then there's a certain amount of money that comes with that.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: And success that comes with that. But I've heard you speak before about how, with the money and the success, you've been able to give back and you've been able to support your parents. Is that correct?

Marsya: Yeah. That's also become the reason why they give us the full support and also the permission to play music because they already see the proof.

Andrew: Up next, how Marsya and Voice of Baceprot are giving back.

You also told me a little earlier on that you've moved back, you've moved back to your hometown. You lived in Jakarta before. And now you've all moved back to your hometown.

Marsya: We moved to our hometown and become a farmer.

Andrew: You know, that's so rock and roll.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: You moved back to your hometown, you've bought a farm and now you are farmers.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: But does that mean that we're not gonna hear any more music from Voice of Baceprot?

days, we moved to Jakarta in: 2020

Andrew: Innocent sheep?

Marsya: Because we looks like young and dumb girls from the village. They often called us innocent sheep, but I think they forgot to say word before sheep. That's not innocent, but renegade. Yeah we are renegade sheep.

Andrew: Renegade sheep. Again, that's also very rock and roll to end up writing an album, which is themed around animals.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: So now you are back in the kampong, you are also building a studio.

Marsya: Yeah. That's the first studio in the area and also the first room that has air conditioner.

Andrew: No way.

Marsya: Yeah.

Andrew: It's the first room with air conditioning.

Marsya: Yeah. In our village.

Andrew: That's amazing. And obviously you're gonna be recording in the studio yourselves, but is this an opportunity for you to support new bands and for you to support the music scene?

Marsya: That's our goals because we see many potential kids, but they don't have like space to learn or to talk about what they want. So that's why we build a studio in there.

Andrew: There's some very clear themes that I'm picking up in the interview with you that you've done so well, you've got a lot of success, but now it's time for you in a way to go back home, continue with the music, but start to give back and provide opportunities.

Marsya: And also we are very happy about that because we still balancing our musical life and our personal life.

Andrew: So what's next for Voice of Baceprot?

Marsya: So, we plan to release single in a few months, in next few months I think. And also we plan to make another album next year, maybe June, we will go to Europe again, we will play for Copenhell in Denmark and another Europe tour.

Andrew: So there's plenty of stuff coming up to keep you busy.

Do you have any advice for young women like yourself in Asia who want to go out and do a similar thing to you, to challenge things with music and to challenge things in their lives?

Marsya: Maybe from me, just be yourself. Don't be scared to be honest. And also, you have to be noisy. Noisy to everything around you.

Andrew: So as is tradition on Tank Talks Asia, we ask all of our guests for a memento, and I believe you brought something for us, Marsya.

Marsya: Yeah. I have a special gift for you. So this is my pick.

Andrew: Oh, it's a plectrum.

Marsya: Yeah. I use it when I play guitar and it have Voice of Baceprot logos.

Andrew: Oh, so it does, yeah.

Marsya: And also this words Voice of Baceprot. And also my signature behind. So the name Marsya.

Andrew: That is fantastic. Thank you so much. We shall put that on the shelf with pride. Look at that. That's brilliant. Thank you.

Marsya: My pleasure. Hope you like it.

Andrew: Well, that's it for this episode of Tank Talks Asia. We really appreciate you listening all the way through. It means so much to us when you make it through to the end of the show.

And don't forget to check out our show notes where you'll find lots of videos, brilliant stuff of Voice of Baceprot there, and relevant links to everything we've been talking about, in case there's anything you'd like to follow up on.

And please subscribe and follow Tank Talks Asia. That way you'll never miss an episode. I'm Andrew Clark, from me and the team, thanks again for your time.

Tank Talks Asia is an AsiaWorks production and the views and opinions shared by our guests are their own.