The Javanese gamelan augmented
This project sounds like a return to his Javanese roots for composer Alex Grillo. If his career is similar to a crossing of many musical genres - jazz, learned music, traditional or innovative -, he has indeed multiplied the creations with Javanese gamelan musicians.

In 1997, during a first stay in Yogjakarta, in central Java, he composed and recorded a disc for acoustic vibraphone and gamelan, this traditional instrumental ensemble in Java and Bali and composed essentially of percussion instruments, most often made of bronze. 

This recording was entitled Katak katak, or Frog Tango, a nod to the batrachians that provide the rhythmic foundation for much of the island's traditional music. This album also represented a first marriage of metals, Alex Grillo having slipped an aluminum vibraphone inside the gamelan "like an uncle from America who would have found his family", in his own words.
Nearly 25 years later, he remains fascinated by the sounds of the Javanese night that keep him awake in a 360° listening and where he finds a spatialized orchestral sensation with tutti, emerging solos, timbre variations, intensities and moving pitches.... and he offers us a "Return of the frogs". 

Wishing to establish a new relationship with the gamelan around five miniatures, he has introduced an augmented vibraphone, that is to say transformed by electronics, and has chosen to distribute the instruments in the space as a kind of acousmonium - this "orchestra" of loudspeakers - where each element solicits listening, like the frogs in the rice fields. He works here with a Soran gamelan composed of instruments playing the fundamental balungan melody (saron and slentem) and punctuation instruments: gong, kempul, bonang, gender and kenong.
Welcome back to the land of the Frogs, then!