Biography

hara is Indonesian singer-songwriter Rara Sekar 's solo project, a new home for her to experiment with various media. After Banda Neira, Daramuda, and other collaborative projects that took place between and after, Rara Sekar finally decided to release her solo music project: hara. She has been working on this music project since 2017 and her first single was finally released on October 22, 2020. Unlike her previous music projects, hara’s music is a musical fusion inspired by folk, ambient, pop, neo-classical, and post-rock. In hara’s first single, "Ati Bolong", hara performs and rearranges a Javanese song by the well-known Tegal-born grass puppeteer (wayang suket), the late Ki Slamet Gundono. Ati Bolong is a song that tells about the purity of a child's perspective of the world and how it connects one’s microcosmic with one’s macrocosmic awareness. hara's debut EP, Kenduri, was released on June 7, 2021. The songs in this EP are inspired by hara’s effort to look for hope amidst the pandemic in which she found it through her garden. Kenduri, in Indonesian or Javanese, is usually known as ‘selametan’ or a communal blessing ceremony to celebrate life, death, or other important milestones in life. Specifically, this album is hara’s personal interpretation of kenduri–an invitation for listeners to visit her garden and witness the journey of how she rekindles her relationship with nature through gardening.