Putu Hiranmayena

Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity), where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Electronic Music, and Noise and Activism. He also is a founding member of Balinese Experimental duo, ghOstMiSt, with dancer-anthropologist, Dewa Ayu Eka Putri; PAK Yeh (free-improvisation trio) from Denver, Colorado; and T.A.T.W.D. (improvised noise-metal trio) from Urbana, Illinois.

Hiranmayena’s academic, performance, and compositional research focuses on the intersections of Cosmology, Indigeneity, Environmental Activism, and Performativity in Balinese Gamelan, Heavy Metal, and Noise. He takes post-colonial, performance studies, and creative ethnographic approaches to looking at the state of sound in the social sciences and humanities. His work constitutes equitable forms of knowledge production in the form of public-facing academic articles and Glocal creative artistic pieces.

As a creative ethnographer, Hiranmayena has written articles, coupled with artistic compositions, that interrogate the state of performance in South-East Asian performing arts. Most notably, his articles, “If a Dragon Dies in the Forest, Do Humans Hear a Sound?” (2022); “Fix Your Face”: Performing Attitudes Between Mathcore and Beleganjur,” (2022); “ghOstMiSt’s Trails of Indigeneity,” (2021), discuss myriad of perspectives on traditional, popular, and experimental Balinese performance idioms. Hiranmayena continues to perform and compose internationally while also maintaining status as board member of Insitu Recordings and Gamelan Tunas Mekar.