Ocean Cage is a live recording of Tianzhuo Chen nd Siko Setyanto’s performance Moyang & Seaman – a forking stage work that evolved from the immersive theatre performance project Ocean Cage, sharing the same title.

Directed by Tianzhuo Chen, aka Asiandopeboys, the immersive performance Ocean Cage merges scenography, installation, choreography, and live music into a unified whole. Inspired by the complex whaling traditions in Lamalera, an Indonesian village that preservers ritualised whaling practices and ancestral beliefs, the work unfolds through interconnected trinities – Moyang (ancestor), Lera Wulan (god), and Seaman – all incarnated by Siko Setyanto. It tells a porous story of unlocking the cage of the ocean: receiving ancestral blessing while becoming entangled with misjudgement, misunderstanding, ecological grief, and temporal displacement, until the sacrifice and life cycles move toward equilibrium.

Evolving from this larger narration, Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁 師 shifts into a frontal, meditative dialogues between ancestor and seaman. Inspired by Japanese Noh theatre and deeply rooted in Nusantara traditions, the performance integrates music, dance, and stage art into a mutable and fluid process, continuing to explore ancestral presences, cyclical time, and spiritual transformation.

The album features music by KADAPAT and Nova Ruth, interwoven with Siko Setyanto’s narrations and monologues. KADAPAT’s electronic-gamelan practice moves through interlocking rhythm and cyclical time structures, extending asymmetrical Balinese ancestral yet modern sonic with digital signal. Bamboo and metal, folk and sacred, horizontal and vertical forces collide and co-exist, forming layered pulses that shift and reform in motion.

As Siko beautifully summarises the creative synergy in Ocean Cage/Moyang & Seaman: “Being on stage is like sailing together into the unknown – embracing every mystery that comes our way.” The album of Ocean Cage also records the reciprocal, communal, improvisational, polymetric, and relational collaborations among Nova Ruth, Siko Setyanto, KADAPAT and Tianzhuo Chen. No role is fixed; no expression remains confined to its original context. In this sense, Ocean Cage becomes an assembled living being.

Ocean Cage is a collaborative release between SVBKVLT and Kuboraum Editions. The limited-edition deluxe vinyl edition features a gatefold sleeve with a sewn-in 16-page booklet, including scenario sketches by Tianzhuo Chen, articles by Dr. Freda Fiala and Milia Xin Bi, and performance photography by Nathaniel Brown and Camille Blake.

Born and raised in Java, Nova Ruth’s voice emerges from lived cosmology of oneness, where beings are interdependent
and entangled. After nearly seven years aboard the solar-powered sailing vessel Arka Kinari, life at nautical speed has deepened her sensibility of staying with change and challenge. Singing becomes vibration from her body, carrying ecological awareness through shifting currents of fluxes and forces. Siko Setyanto describes his practice as “bodily musicality” – a choreography in which movement and monologues interweave seamlessly with music, allowing the body listen, respond, and compose in real time. On album, his voice retains that immediacy – a trace of bodily musicality translated into sound.