(b Jakarta, 16 Feb 1955). Indonesian composer and performer. Moving to Yogyakarta at the age of five, he played Javanese gamelan and performed in a band. Self-taught as a composer, in 1973 Raharjo began creating music for instruments made out of tin cans, and in the following years experimented with synthesizers. He presented the resulting works as Yogyaharmonik between 1977 and 1980 in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. In 1975 he enrolled at the Academy of Film and Dramatic Arts in Yogyakarta. He subsequently became increasingly interested in music for the theatre and worked on projects involving opera and wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet theatre). As well as creating music for computers which use sampled gamelan sounds, Raharjo has worked on multimedia representational forms; his most sensational multimedia work is Win (1992), performed as a solo non-stop for three days. He has also made regular appearances at the Jakarta International Percussion Festival. In the late 1990s he worked with a number of French folk and jazz musicians to produce recordings including Borobodur Suite, Merapi and Java. He occupies a unique position in the generation of Indonesian musicians that emerged during the 1970s.
FRANKI RADEN