Burn, Baby, Burn

Participants at U.S. labor rallies tend not to draw inspiration from Indonesian divas — but Kartika Jahja was asked if her jazzy scorcher of a protest song, Mayday (sung in English), could be used by a coalition of writers and journalists at a protest in Detroit. "And we are the ones who work their fields/ And we are the ones who fight their wars," the track goes. "And we are the ones to cut this crap." The passionate defiance is signature Tika (as she's more commonly known), and something that sets the 28-year-old singer-songwriter apart from Indonesia's hyper-conservative entertainment establishment. "Every time I turn on the TV something pisses me off," she says. "I feel like I am witnessing the massacre of people's intelligence."

On her sophomore album, The Headless Songstress, Tika and her band — the aptly named Dissidents — file slow-burning postcards from the Jakartan edge. Recorded in a mix of English and Indonesian, these are songs of cynicism ("My midlife crisis was at its peak that Friday night"), urban ennui ("My dad's religious, my mum's a bore/ Can we talk about something else?") and modern manners ("Harry loves Betty .../ But daddy wants Betty to marry Eddy/ But Eddy loves Larry"). Classic jazz scoring — for piano, acoustic bass and drums — steeps the work in an atmosphere of late nights and darkened rooms. (See "Best of Asia: Best Alternative-Music Scene.")

Style connoisseurs will coo happily over the packaging: copies come with a whimsically designed notebook and fabric pouch, and a dedicated team puts the time-consuming assemblage together by hand. "No label would be crazy enough to package a CD like this and sell it for the price we do," Tika concedes. "That's why we formed our own label, with each band member as a shareholder, so we could do what we wanted." One really can't imagine Tika having it any other way. See suaratika.com for more.

Read "Jakarta: Punk's Last Refuge."

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