"I just want to be a story, a persent brought home by everyone who watch me."
Since his early age, the wish of this second child of two siblings was simple, he just wanted to do something that not many people do. He chose to be different. If usually people choose the main character of a cartoon, he would choose the supporting characters that others tend to ignore. He has the habit to look at things from diferent angle, something that has given such an impact to his colorful musicality. He always loves to look at the smallest details that actually spiced his musics up in special way. Since he was small, he could never sit in silence when he saw something unparalleled, asymmetry or not in order. This also affect his composing method.
Thanks to his father who's been into 60's and 70's style of rock progressive from Mahavisnu Orchestra, Gentle Giant, Emerson Lake & Palmer (ELP) all the way to Soft Machine, he became familiar with complex musics which are rich in details. Not only rock progressive, he's also famliar with contemporary musics from mastros such as Debussy, Bela Bartok and Krzysztof Penderecki. These names influenced him to add up some odd melodies in his piece. By absorbing the uncommon musics in such early age, he's shaped to be an artist who doesn't go into harmony in first place. "It'd be better to call it sound than melody", he says.
Tesla started playing guitar at the tender age of 9, then went into classical piano and guitar. After two years, he realized that classical music made him into someone who could interpret others' works to be his own self. From there until the next 10 years Tesla started to concentrate into classical. This music turned him into a perfectionist, a hard worker and 'wild' in creating his piece. He dedicated his life totally, he even left his school just to be able to practice tens of hours everyday. But his efforts didn't stop there. He also did many rearrangements of the classicals into his own style and played it dynamically. But later he found the obstacle, since the patterns and rules of classical made him unable to have freedom in doing his work. At the age of 20 he finally left classical to concentrate in jazz and other music theories.
Realizing that there are so many potential arts from his mainland Indonesia, he pursued his passion in digging his own nation's traditional musics. He then stretched the horizon by blending them with musics that have been inspired him for many years. His masterwork doesn't only describe about the relationship among humans but also bridge the connection between human and God and nature, just like in his album "Tesla Manaf ft Mahagotra Ganesha - It's All Yours". He also started to interpret physical artwork into notes like in his song "Play Dead - 3 Journey (The Runaway Bear - Tangled - Gently Parametric of Batallion).
The peak of his satisfaction in replacing words into notes lies on his song "Raja Ampat" which is nicely picturing the rich, beautiful nature of the tropical Indonesian land. "I just want to convert spoken words into notes".

visit www.teslamanaf.com :)