This piece was created from recordings made in June 2014 at Johan's Frames , a small factory in Jatibening.  Once an empty field where people came to deposit their ghosts, Jatibening is now a busy village outside the city of Jakarta, Indonesia.  This is due in large part to Pak Johan who came to Jatibening some 30 years ago and built a small home and frame factory.  Initially the factory was teamed up with an organization providing employment exclusively for war veterans.  As there was no public education in Indonesia at this time, Pak Johan's wife, Ibu Titi taught the wives and children of the employees to read and write.  Pak Johan's home sits across the street from the factory and any day he can be found walking through the factory he built from scratch.  The machines have an “anyhow”, ie “do as you go with what you have” sensibility and were also built by Pak Johan himself and expanded over the past 30 years.  The factory as I saw and recorded had two sections, one for woods and another for plastics, and just this week has expanded again with yet more machines built from scratch.

It is my hopeful intention that to compose these sounds will bring a sense of life to the space of the frame factory, that it can be heard as both a musical composition and a document of the daily life of these incredibly hard working people.  

--Kurt Peterson, January 14, 2015


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