‘Because people want to hear what the stuff sounds like!’ (p. 61) was the answer given to the author at an audio-video product exposition, when he asked why everything was playing at top volume. This statement aptly frames Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001, an ethnographic study of Indonesian popular music. Focusing on dangdut, pop Indonesia and musik underground, Wallach considers how popular music intersects with class, ethnicity, religion and gender to help shape urban, national and transnational spaces and subjectivities.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, entitled ‘Sites’, discusses locations of popular music. Extending Finnegan's notion of ‘pathways’, Wallach discusses Jakarta's spaces of popular music consumption and production that include record stores, recording studios, video shoots, live performance venues, and streets and cafés. While these institutional sites map a sonic city, they are integrated into the dense urban soundscape of Jakarta that includes ‘the omnipresent roar of traffic, the cries of travelling street hawkers, the Islamic call to prayer emanating at regular intervals from loudspeakers over mosques, the high-pitched bleating of cellular phones and the sounds of recorded popular music blaring from warun all create an atmosphere of noisy, boisterous humanity on Jakarta's streets and in its neighborhoods’ (p. 59). Although the discussion of cassette retail outlets emphasises a Bourdieuian reading of genre organisation as representing a prescribed model of social and taste hierarchies, the other chapters undo what the author reads as determinative aspects of these consumer spaces, exploring instead modes of identity formation and social solidarity experienced in places such as recording studios and the side of the road where men ‘hang out’ and play music together.

The second half of the book, ‘Genres in Performance’, considers how ‘performance events can be viewed as occasions for critical reflection on social life’ (p. 173). Incorporating passages from ethnographic field notes to capture the immediacy of performance, Wallach discusses street musicians, dangdut performances, acara events with multiple performance modes and concerts of pop Indonesia and underground music. Wallach posits a metonymic relationship between music and society that allows popular music performance to represent a national utopia of social hybridity and solidarity. Social solidarity is achieved not only through the practices discussed in the first half of the book, but through musical performance events that ‘enact an ethic of inclusiveness, within which musical differences indexing social differences between people and their divergent allegiances are rhetorically transcended’ (p. 175, emphasis in original). The author's musings on possible motivations for a crowd's response speak to the complexities of and need for ethnographic work on performance that considers how multiple and nuanced musical meanings are formulated through practice and discourse, and how these dynamics are themselves situated in complex social and cultural contexts.

Wallach's emphasis on breadth provides an important overview of Indonesian musical and social spaces, laying the ground for subsequent work that explores the richness and texture of select ethnographic cases while considering how a certain idealism of musical sociability might also reflect some of the tensions of a national project of harmony in difference. The accompanying CD, with tracks of dangdut, pop Indonesia and musik underground, complements the richness of the text with the aural experience of ‘what the stuff sounds like!’