Kuda kepang

Kuda kepang is the music of the Javanese hobby-horse trance dance — also staged as jathilan, kuda lumping and, in West Java's Sundanese form, réak — in which dancers riding woven bamboo horses are driven into trance by a small gamelan of gongs, kenong kettles, kendang drum and the reedy tarompet. Performed at weddings and village celebrations across Java and its diaspora, the repertory is a fixed sequence of pieces that summon, possess and finally release the dancers. Field recordings long kept it an ethnographic subject; in the 2020s Indonesian experimental acts such as *Raja Kirik* rebuilt it as electronic ritual music.