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Zemi 17 has created the “the world’s first and only fully robotic Gamelan orchestra.”

Zemi 17, whose real name is Aaron Taylor Kuffner, was a DJ of electronica music in San Francisco in the 90s. With a fascination with east Asian culture, he spent time in Japan and traveled to Indonesia while being overseas, where he came across these beautiful, brass Indonesian gongs. Gamelan, a type of music made on these gongs, has been part of the traditional, music and dance that dates back to hundreds of years ago. The sound the gongs produced was atonal to western musical scales, which appealed to him because he had and continues to have a fascination for orchestrating sound in a way that stretches conventional definitions of music and musicality. In Bali, he began to study the ancient music of Gamelan and managed to get a Fulbright grant to support his training.

Now, he has made the first robotic orchestra, which he named the GamelanTron. He brought hundreds of pounds of brass from Indonesia and has set them up in a studio in Brooklyn with mechanical arms of mallets that play the notes and arpeggios that he controls with a laptop. He is part of a musical collaboration known as the League of Electronic Musical Robots.

Zemi 17 composes a fusion of the ancient Gamelan with experimental minimalist electronica, incorporating organic soundscapes of forests, jungles or even Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
stay tuned for original video of Zemi in his studio…