Nursalim Yadi Anugerah is a musician and composer whose works are shaped by deep engagement with the cultural and ecological realities of Kalimantan, Borneo. His works have been performed at festivals including CTM Festival (2026), transmediale (2026), Time:Spans Festival (2025), and Holland Festival (2025, 2021).
“How do you feel? You should write down what you’re feeling, everything you’ve experienced; there’s so much of it,” Laura Cocks – a very good friend – said to me after watching my last performance for Abasement, at an artist space on Cortland Alley, New York, in January 2026. A year ago, I spent some time in New York for a fellowship that carried me, drifting from one extraordinary encounter into the next, and it was then that I remembered my conversation with Laura. I never really sat with that, because ever since, time has been so fast but with little room to pause, to reflect on, and digest those meetings. Perhaps, I need to negate “time.” Then, I remembered Catherine Hennix’s formula, where she states “Being = Space × Action” — time conspicuously absent.
While finishing this playlist, I was sitting on the grass in front of a 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy, where I’ve been staying for a residency. As Hennix stated, being equals awareness, and as an act of being in the space I’m in, it occurred to me to reflect on and spotlight the music, musicians, and musical moments from one particular period I experienced last year — through a playlist. This playlist will feel like a diary, a personal experience, with long-duration tracks or works, as the absence of “time” itself. Inspired by the text and track by Hanne Lippard, together with Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall, I’ve given this playlist the title “A Space of Transit” — a space for awareness and reflection on how the sounds and music I’ve encountered during a specific period have shaped my being.
Riparian by Eyvind Kang
Every encounter unfolds another encounter. That, at least, is what I’ve always believed on my journeys. Miriam Elhaji, after her performance with the cosmic band Lazyhorse with the Living Earth Show project, introduced me to Eyvind Kang and Whitney Johnson, who would be performing Sarah Davachi’s new work in Troy, New York. A chance conversation led me to meet Jessika Kenney, who speaks fluent Indonesian, through a spontaneous phone call between Eyvind, Jessika, and me, as we ate pizza together with Raven Chacon, Candice Hopkins, and a few others.
Through Riparian, (released by Kou Record in 2025), Eyvind lets the sound of his viola d’amore form itself. Like a riverbank, it opens this playlist by sparking my memory of how the boundaries between land and river meet and grow fertile — dynamic, finding their own shape in the encounter between those two spaces, and reflect to me and my encounters that night
Rose Dialogues I & II by Sarah Davachi
What I look forward to most in life is slowing down — sorting speed from clarity within that slowness. I found exactly that in the moment I witnessed Rose Dialogues & Interludes. I saw this new work by Sarah Davachi, together with Lucy Railton, Eyvind Kang, and Whitney Johnson, at the first iteration of Topos Festival 2025 in Troy, NY. Ninety minutes built from a canon that echoes itself simultaneously, taking shape within the room, assembling a paradoxical density — the time refusing to finish, growing slower and clearer at once. For me, that moment allowed and invited me to see clarity only once I stopped rushing toward it.
Tiguex by Raven Chacon
Armed with a map of Albuquerque and a graphic score of 20 overlapping movements stretching across the Rio Grande Valley, I witnessed the performance of Raven Chacon’s super-composition Tiguex and its sonic events unfold across nearly every part of the city. “Hey, I’m happy you’re here!” I remember Raven greeting me, as we met during the second movement of his piece while we waited for a hot air balloon to lift a trombonist for a two-hour circuit around Albuquerque, trailing the trombone’s long tones.
Witnessing Tiguex live in Albuquerque — spending more than t12 hours inside a work that stretched across the city’s landscape — was the experience of hearing a city tell its own story: its land, its history, its wounds. Raven shows how music can become the most honest way to remember what is so often deliberately forgotten. As I was witnessing the moment, a community’s resilience feels more real when it’s experienced directly from the place where it grew, not read about from a distance.
Surface Image by Tristan Perich, Performed by Vicky Chow
Like a flâneur, I ended my walk by lying down on the grass. Opening the Fall 2025 season for Roulette Intermedium, that afternoon in Bryant Park, I watched Vicky Chow perform Tristan Perich’s Surface Image after a whole day spent dissolving myself into the subway, the city’s noise, its people.
Forty channels of 1-bit electronics merged with the virtuosity of Vicky’s piano playing, producing a strange, transcendent sublimity between machine and human body across one long hour of sonic passage — accompanying me as I sank into the fading gradients of afternoon light, as if into an ocean of sound that submerged and struck me over and over that day.
The Dream House by La Monte Young and Maria Zazeela
I’ve always imagined living inside sound (quite literally, even) and Dream House is the space that offers that experience, at least for me. I spent time, more than once, navigating myself through La Monte Young’s microcosmic ocean of sound, through a cyclical composition of 108 sine waves generated by the Rayna synthesizer, its microtonality precise in opening up a variety of shifting relationships between frequencies, changing as I moved through the room, swimming through that vast expanse of sound.
This sequence of experiences closed with my visit for La Monte Young’s 90th birthday, which felt like watching time itself being celebrated — seeing him and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble perform Raga Darbari. I remember, after the concert, in the small room of Dream House, sitting shoulder to shoulder, catching the eye of my companion Olivier Cong. Where to after this? He sighed, “Home, it was intense.”
(Out of respect to Dream House, I have not included any videos or recordings. You can view their website here).
Mundanas VII-XI by John McCowen, Performed by McCowen and Madison Greenstone
Together with Charmaine Lee (Kou Records) at Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn), I watched Mundanas by John McCowen and Madison — two contrabass clarinets merging into waves of frequency felt in the body before the mind could grasp them. I drifted along with the circular breathing passed between John and Madison, but just as much with the rich spectral collisions between the two contrabass clarinets. Mundanas brought back long conversations I’d had with Madison.
Earlier, we’d opened up many conversations about drones that left us both mesmerized, including my admiration for Catherine Christer Hennix, which was met with a long discussion about Poësy Matters and Other Matters, the book published by Blank Forms. Madison guided me slowly into Hennix’s works — but through Mundanas, Madison carried me further into a transcendent dimension: both the one they conjured through music, and the one held in my body and mind’s memory of those precious conversations.
Timing by Ellen Arkbro, Hanne Lippard, and Hampus Lindwall
I sat on the floor, right in front of Hanne at Dia Chelsea (NY) that night. “Change now” — with that phrase, she guided the “timing” decisions between Hampus and Ellen, who executed harmonic choices that solemnly opened up a new field of feelings about time, unfolded within the room.
In truth, this choice arose from a reflective conversation Ellen and I had in Berlin at the end of January 2026. Spending nearly two hours in a coffee shop, we navigated our conversation through its own dynamics and timing. For me, that conversation sparked many personal reflections, much like listening to “Timing” itself invites us to hear the subtle and thoughtful changes — changes navigated by mutual, human will, never forced. A conversation that warmed us, certainly against the cold of Berlin that time.
“Blues Alif Lam Mim” by Catherine Hennix, Performed by Hennix and Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage
I’ve already mentioned Catherine Hennix several times in earlier track choices, and of course I have to close with my pick of one of her works, “Blues Alif Lam Mim” with Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. Someone introduced me to Catherine Hennix quite by chance in Istanbul in 2022, but that understanding only truly deepened when I read extensively through Blank Forms’ online publications, the two volumes of Poësy Matters and Other Matters they released, and through conversations across non-linear time with Madison, Ellen, and of course Lawrence Kumpf, one afternoon at Blank Forms — which also marked the close of my stay in New York, in January 2026.
Alif Lam Mim — the mysterious letters in the Qur’an whose meaning is known only to God — over 80 minutes dissolved me into the infinitesimal, contemplating wahdat al-wujud within the proximity offered by a universe of merging frequencies, with an intensity both calming and contemplative. Thank you, Hennix. As I listened, I reflected on these encounters melting together into a moment that truly left me surrendering to sound as a transcendental, transformative ocean — just as my own journey has been.
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