SambaSunda | The Sunda Music |Far Side Music | Indonesia

Surprise is an under-appreciated emotion. Like first love and other high-powered sensations, it is arresting, invigorating, and fleeting. It cannot be cultivated by, but only bestowed upon its recipient; and it is all too rare. The hope of surprise a big part of why I listen to Asian music: it's usually a little easier to find a moment of wide-eye wonder outside your back yard (though I once had an interesting debate with a friend who believed that every exotic experience was available along the underbelly of your own hometown and, in an inversion of Conrad, was writing a novel called Darkness of Heart). As I get a little older and more jaded--er, worldly?--surprise gets even harder to come by; the best you can do is put yourself in its neighborhood, put your ears up and then forget about it. It will come tripping along behind you eventually.

For those following this strategy, Indonesia is a great neighborhood to visit. The rolling, lo-fi trance pop of dangdut--surprise! The physical sensation of the "beating" between two off-tuned metalophones coursing through your body at a live gamelan performance--surprise! From the ears' point of view, Indonesia is not so much a country, but a 17,000 island cultural surprise machine, cranking out the "gotchas" fast and frequent.

Add to that list the moment, a minute and four seconds into The Sunda Music, when a bare timbal-and-conga Latin groove instantly flowers into a rollicking Sundanese carnival of bamboo gamelan, suling (flute), syncopated druming and multitudinous giddy, coversational voices. It's the perfect opener for this terrific compilation of music by SambaSunda, a collective led by Ismet Ruchimat. The Sunda Music includes two songs each from five releases on the Indonesian GNP label. Though bookended by tracks that display obvious Latin influence, the rest of the album is a batik woven from the sounds of the Middle East, the Indonesian archipelago and perhaps (in the vocal of one track) a hint of Indian film music. I lack the expertise to tease out all the strands, but luckily the pleasures of music like this aren't intellectual, but rhythmic and melodic.

Ismet and other SambaSunda members also performed as the Jugula All Stars on Sabah Habas Mustapha's world music hit Jalan Kopo, a CD which, to my ears, typifies the problem with many multi-culti experiments: artists set sail for Interzone but wind up in no man's land. The music seemed at home as a soundtrack for the purchase of teak knickknacks at Cost-Plus World Market, if anywhere. The Sunda Music, on the other hand, is freewheeling, multilayered, exciting and never panders to perceived expectations. It's thrilling to hear these same musicians on a drum and wind jam like "Malongan," loosed from the restraints of pop structure and production, free to travel inward instead of meeting an audience halfway, perhaps surprising even themselves.