Biography
Detty Kurnia’s vocals fuse longstanding Indonesian musical customs with the electronic textures and pulses of Western production. Already a familiar presence across Indonesia from the late 1970s onward, she began reaching international listeners after Japanese producer Makoto Kubota reworked her album Rayungan and issued the new version in Japan in 1990. Their partnership extended to the follow-up release Dari Sunda, which appeared in 1991 and continues to hold the record as Japan’s highest-selling Asian album ever. When Riverboat reissued Dari Sunda in 1995 within its Women of the World series, Q Magazine placed the record among its five strongest albums of the year, while Folk Roots praised it as “an imaginative, inventive gem throughout with Kurnia’s mellow smile of a voice effortlessly binding everything together.”
Born to a musician father, Kurnia first performed at traditional festivals at age six. Three years later she was appearing regularly at weddings and other ceremonies, and by eleven she had issued her first cassette. Although she began in the kulningen style—the vocal counterpart to Indonesia’s gamelan traditions—she moved in the mid-1970s to pop-sunda, which merges Western pop elements with Sundanese music. That change elevated her to one of the country’s leading singers. In 1981 the Java-based label Dian Records signed her, after which she completed forty cassettes in nine years.
Born to a musician father, Kurnia first performed at traditional festivals at age six. Three years later she was appearing regularly at weddings and other ceremonies, and by eleven she had issued her first cassette. Although she began in the kulningen style—the vocal counterpart to Indonesia’s gamelan traditions—she moved in the mid-1970s to pop-sunda, which merges Western pop elements with Sundanese music. That change elevated her to one of the country’s leading singers. In 1981 the Java-based label Dian Records signed her, after which she completed forty cassettes in nine years.
Albums
Singles
