Two albums. One archive. Created fifteen years ago, and finally coming into the world.

In the late 2000s, Kai Riedl and musician Suny Lyons made five journeys across Java with recording equipment, documenting an extraordinary range of Indonesian music—from gamelan orchestras and solo string players to children’s songs, street musicians, Balinese ensembles, and recordings made way off the grid.

The recordings became the Javasounds Indonesian Music Series, an ongoing archive of Indonesian music and sound. Among those recorded were celebrated musicians including Euis Komariah, Ujang Suryana, and Idjah Hadijah, alongside countless musicians rarely heard beyond their communities.

Back in Athens, Georgia, Riedl began transforming the recordings and the loops he had worked with musicians in Java on into something new. As a founding member of Macha, he had already been exploring Indonesian music and instruments within an experimental pop context. Now he began cutting the Javasounds recordings into loops, rhythms, fragments, and textures, building songs around them with a remarkable group of Athens musicians including Bill Doss and John Fernandes of The Olivia Tremor Control, Peter Buck of R.E.M., Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink of Azure Ray, Andy LeMaster of Now It’s Overhead, Andrew Rieger of Elf Power, and Kate Pierson of the B-52s

Rather than reproducing Indonesian music, the recordings became raw material for experimentation—a meeting point between Java and Athens, pop and psychedelia, rhythm and abstraction.

The result was two albums.

One is rooted in songs, melody, voices, and collaboration. The other moves deeper into electronics, texture, repetition, and abstraction. Together they represent two very different responses to the same archive.

Then the project disappeared.

For more than fifteen years, the recordings remained a musical time capsule—a document of friendships, experimentation, and a moment in Athens and Java that could never be recreated. The recordings were packed away, becoming a kind of musical time capsule: a “once upon a time in music.” More than fifteen years later, now, 25 songs across two albums are finally being brought into the present.

Under the name Kaibo, Riedl has also continued developing the original idea, transforming elements of the Javasounds archive into new electronic, rhythmic, abstract, and danceable compositions.

These records are ultimately less about Indonesia or Athens than about listening, memory, collaboration, and what happens when music travels.

A conversation that began in Java, continued in Athens, disappeared for fifteen years, and has now returned.