The Artist in Fragments: Music, Memory and Kareem Soenharjo
The act of creation is a tethering, an act of holding disparate worlds in balance: concept and practice, spirit and flesh, image and sound. It’s an attempt to stitch together the profound and the ordinary in pursuit of meaning. For Kareem Soenharjo, this act is habitual. His years of creation have instilled in him a quiet certainty towards his own gaze—that is both contemplative and precise. He doesn’t call himself a polymath, but his practice betrays the rhythms of one: music, illustration, painting, design. Across Instagram and X, Kareem releases fragments—demo clips, sketches, photo edits. They are signals, gestures from a maker not consumed with being seen but driven by a compulsion to seek. His work stands as pictures of a man chasing meaning—not to solve, but to survive.
This is especially true in his music, which has been released under a constellation of aliases: BAP., BAPAK, REEMO, YOSUGI. Each name signals a new terrain, an experiment in voice and in form. Kareem’s ear is drawn to rhythm—it is his compass—and it guides him through genre-less sonic environments. In a previous interview we had, he said that the idea of genre felt limiting, especially in response to the multiplicities of today’s world, for this informs the complexity of the (present or what Kareem refers to the ‘poststructural’) self– as a fractured and hybrid form. His production reflects this form: intuitive, textured, kaleidoscopic.
His seminal album MOMO’S MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2021) marked a crystallization of the BAP. persona. Its Yves Klein blue cover embodies the richness of its symbolism—bold, rhythmic, modernist, and becomes a visual overture that hints into the layers within. The album is cryptic and referential, laced with nods to Fullmetal Alchemist, Sade, Peggy Gou, Agus Suwage, Gerhard Richter, and White Shoes & the Couples Company. In referencing this pantheon, Kareem simultaneously honors his influences and embeds himself among them. The accompanying visuals—looping collages of his own face, interwoven with art—suggest his positioning as both witness and subject. In MOMO, he becomes.
But something shifts with m.album tiga (2024). The idolatry that BAP. has built himself upon has cracked. What emerges is not the image of BAP. the rapper, but Kareem as a visionary in his zenith—shying away from his (read: as BAP.) attachment to hip-hop and explores the multiverse of genres. The new album is intimate, tender, even domestic. Its cover—a childhood drawing by his sister Ula—tells us something immediately: we’re entering a space of memory, not mystique. When asked why he used the drawing, Kareem didn’t feel the need to rationalise nor reason this decision. That response, in itself, becomes the explanation: he creates by feeling, not strategy. “Design holds a utilitarian principle,” he tells me. “It must fulfill a certain purpose.” In his case, visuals are not branding, they are textures that enliven his worlds.
Take “mimimpipi.” The track narrates a quiet devastation: the dissolution of innocence and the shock of recognizing our families’ humanity. Kareem sings “Now I remember crying ever since. All I got is this”, accompanied by a looping sight of neon clouds in perpetual swirl—mirroring the existential freefall that marks an entry into adulthood. There is no point still as the colors clash, bleed, throb; creating a sensory evocation of unraveling. This existential thread winds through “bath song” and “hokben,” where Kareem locates the infinite in the banal. Love, addiction, food, the cosmos—all coalesce. In “bath song,” he sings, “the lightness of being is unbearable. I pull you closer and closer.” against the looping of eyes, mouths, pulses of light. We ascend into a false oblivion, becoming trapped in its motion. “hokben” is colder, lonelier. We follow Kareem on 3AM pilgrimages to Hoka-Hoka Bento. He recounts the details of his trips through spoken word alongside a sequence of flashing glasses, moonlight, hands. Memory fragments accumulate, frame by frame. In trying to remember, he immortalizes.
As the album nears its close, the sound and visuals shift. The sensory storm gives way to stillness, towards devotion. “big sis,” “angee song,” and “tampopo (for my mother)” arrive like morning after rainfall—quiet and clear. “big sis” features the extension of the album cover– forming the other half of the Kareem that we encounter in its beginnings. Kareem sings of wanting to be Ula’s age, to exist alongside (and accompany) her more closely in time. “angee song” recounts a near-death experience during turbulence on a flight. In the moment, Kareem thought only of his partner Angee. Love, he suggests, is the thread that tethers us to life yet it is through the remembrance of death that we truly cherish those we hold dear— flashback to the image of a plane window flickering with sunlight and storm. “tampopo (for my mother),” the final track, is an instrumental, an ode to the ambient and the cinematic. Perhaps we can accept it as a reference to the Japanese word for dandelion or Juzo Itami’s film Tampopo. Either way, the track reads as a closing scene: a quiet testimony to the journey we’ve taken. We return to Yves Klein blue, we return to the beginning.
“I’ve been on my unc sh*t, man,” Kareem jokes. We’re in South Jakarta, sipping water under the afternoon light. He walks me through his new routine: up at 7AM, coffee, painting. As he reflects on his music career, he unravels his intention in creation: “I gravitate toward things that are difficult. I keep my joy to myself and my loved ones.”
Ula’s comic illustration and his mother’s watercolour painting practices have shaped him, gently, over years— Ula’s influence is apparent through the immersive experience that Kareem brings into his albums, where he alchemises textures, sight and landscape into his sound and making music an act of both listening and of seeing. Now, painting has become his own ritual. He’s begun sharing the works online—some finished, others still becoming. “I’ve been doing some soul searching,” he says. Painting has been a medium for his introspection, a journey for his “soul quest.”
Many of his recent paintings are self-portraits, but none are conventional. In disassociating (2025), his profile dissolves into pigment—half-face, half-color, caught in the act of erosion. Pastels blur into darkness: pinks, greys, violets. A haunting metamorphosis. Another canvas, simpler but more eerie, shows a faceless figure standing in a bleak landscape, as he stands both shirtless and exposed. The colors—cold blue, grey, black—form a kind of quiet apocalypse. The subject (presumably Kareem) stares back at us, featureless. He blends materials (i.e. oil, watercolor, pencil) to create a sense of depth in its texture, perhaps an attempt to tend to the tethering across realities. The second portrait, he tells me, disturbed Angee. “She thought it was terrifying. And of course, she was right. She’s always right.” He reworked the painting, not to erase its truth, but to re-encounter it. Kareem embraces revision-particularly by his loved ones- in his process, as they unravel different sides that are unknown to him; becoming exercises to confront himself.
For Kareem, art is a way of anchoring himself (in existence). He finds himself to be reclusive in creation— preferring to sit with his questions in solitude. It is a meditative practice that demands him to deconstruct his grip on material reality and delve into the unknown. What is the meaning of our existence? The answers, he believes, are closer than we think. He tells me: “I do believe that you make meaning- always. And meaning is always personal,” he says. “So your work is always personal.”
When I ask him again what’s been on his mind, he repeats the phrase: “Anything that I make has to ring true… it has to serve the greater good beyond what it is I’m trying to make.” Whether it’d be music or painting, it is apparent that there is a stillness in his gaze. It’s clear: Kareem is no longer building a persona. There are no aliases nor an audience to perform for. He returns to the act of creation itself—not merely as a form of expression, but as a way of being. “Throughout these years, I never considered myself a human being and going forward I want to create in order to live.”
