Basajan close their Live on KEXP session with “Waas”, the three-minute instrumental that also ends their debut album Béwara. KEXP, the Seattle radio station, filmed the six-song set on 28 August at Locca Sea House, on the cliffs above Jimbaran in Bali, and put it online on 29 October. The session comes from the station’s first project in Asia, a partnership with AXEAN Festival, the Bali showcase and conference for Southeast Asia’s music industry, which put twelve acts from across the region in front of KEXP’s cameras.
Basajan are four musicians from Kabupaten Bandung, the regency surrounding the city of Bandung in West Java, who now live in Jakarta: Adhitama Putra Prakarsa on guitar, Reyhan Gyanie on guitar and synthesizer, Dinan Indrayana on bass and Dandy Rizkiawan on drums. They call their instrumental music Priangan Psychedelic Groove, after the old name for the Sundanese highlands of West Java. Psychedelic guitar and synthesizer carry Sundanese melodies over bass and drum grooves made for dancing, with the pieces drawing on local myth, folklore and spiritual practice.
The last two singles before Béwara both made the album. The first, “1971”, came out in December 2025 with an arrangement written in daminatilada, the five-note system of Sundanese music, following a young man from out of town who walks into a night-market ghost house and comes out stuck in that year. The second, “Nadoman”, followed in February 2026 and wraps the sung verses of religious advice that Sundanese children learn in neighbourhood prayer houses in coarse fuzz guitar and echoing reverb.
Béwara came out on 10 April 2026 through Bahasa Ibu Records, the imprint the Jakarta label demajors set up in 2023 for musicians working in Indonesia’s regional languages and traditions. Its ten tracks map Tri Tangtu, the Sundanese philosophy of three realms: a sacred upper world, the world of daily life and a darker realm given over to endings. “Waas” closes the record among its pieces on farewell and loss, under a title that is the Sundanese word for the sweet ache of remembering something now out of reach.
Basajan made their international debut at Wonderfruit in Thailand in December 2025 and toured Japan in April. Today and tomorrow they play Rock in Celebes for the first time, at Fort Rotterdam in Makassar, South Sulawesi.
Stream “Waas” HERE and get your copy of Béwara through THIS LINK