Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

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…

In a Queens’ warehouse-turned-gallery space called Refuge, throngs of party-goers sought haven in electronic dance music on a frigid night last November. With floor-to-ceiling speakers throbbing jungle, drum&bass or haus, and pulsating dancers twirling in flamboyant garb until sunrise, this gathering was on all accounts a rave. But, it was a rave with a mission: to raise money for the non-Hodgekins Lymphoma Society, and a young woman afflicted with the disease, Fay Serafica.

In September, 27-year-old Fay Serafica from Queens got a phonecall. It was her doctor who said she must go to the emergency room immediately. She had gone in earlier that day to get tested in an attempt to find out why she why she was always short of breath and her white-blood cell count clocked in as dangerously low. The CAT scan revealed a tumor in her chest that was larger in mass than her heart. She was diagnosed with lymphoma on the same day as the birthday of her boyfriend at the time, she said. The following day was her mother’s birthday and when Fay underwent surgery.

Friends came to her bedside in the hospital and started to plan a way to help Fay. After all, she gave much of herself to planning raves and underground parties. Now it was time for the party to give back, celebrate and raise money for a dear friend.

In a framed photo perched on the piano of her parents house, Fay looks very different in a traditional cap and gown from her trendier look of an angular Cleopatra-styled wig she started to wear, dramatically-lined eyes, and cheetah-spotted tights that peek out of black boots and a skirt. She has always lead a busy life, like when she juggled a job of 35 hours and full-time study at New York University for Arts Administration. She has worked with the gallery Ad-hoc and has she’s been instrumental in organizing artsy events, like raves, for years.

She talks about having cancer in a sarcastic, sardonic tone that her friends love her for. Fay said that she is often the youngest person in the waiting room when she was going in for treatments. But, she has found invaluable support in others afflicted with the same disease around her age.

Fay had her last chemotherapy session in the first week of December. She will start radiation therapy soon. She looks forward to gaining her strength back when it’s all over. So do her friends who miss her presence behind-the-scenes and on the dance floor.