Krakatau was formed in 1984 in Bandung, West Java, by keyboardist Dwiki Dharmawan (b. August 19, 1966, Bandung), who had begun classical piano lessons at six and started writing songs while still in high school, and bassist Pra Budi Dharma, who had just returned to Indonesia from the United States. The pair recruited guitarist Donny Suhendra and drummer Budhy Haryono to round out the founding quartet, naming the band after the volcanic island of Krakatoa. In its earliest form the group played a straightforward jazz-rock/pop-fusion style built on Fender Rhodes, mini-Moog, and Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers.

That original lineup traveled to Tokyo to compete in the 1985 Light Music Contest, a Yamaha-affiliated competition, performing live at Nakano Sun Plaza on September 23, 1985. Krakatau's appearance that night is independently documented on the Japanese compilation LP Light Music Contest '85 Live (See・Saw Records, catalog C20A0454), where the band is credited on track A8 with Pra Budi Dharma (bass), Budhy Haryono (drums), Donny Suhendra (guitar), and Dwiki Dharmawan (keyboards) — confirming the group's international jazz-contest credential a full two years before its recorded debut.

In 1986 the band expanded to a six-piece, adding vocalist Trie Utami, keyboardist Indra Lesmana (son of pioneering Indonesian jazz pianist Jack Lesmana), and drummer Gilang Ramadhan in place of Haryono. This lineup debuted on record with the self-titled cassette album Krakatau (1987, Bulletin Records), led by the single "Gemilang" ("Dazzling"), composed by Dharmawan with lyrics by filmmaker Mira Lesmana (Indra's sister). The song sold a reported 800,000 copies and was later ranked 62nd on Rolling Stone Indonesia's list of the 150 greatest Indonesian songs. The sextet followed with Second Album (1988), the promotional single Kau Datang (1989), Kembali Satu (1990), and Let There Be Life (1992) — a run of Indonesian jazz-pop/fusion records that made Krakatau one of the country's most commercially prominent bands of the era, before the classic lineup went on hiatus in the early 1990s.

Dharmawan and Budidharma reconvened the band in 1993 with a deliberately different mission: rather than jazz-inflected pop, the reformed group — often billed as Krakatau Ethno and eventually growing to roughly a dozen musicians, including Sundanese traditionalists Ade Rudiana, Yoyon Darsono, and Zainal Arifin, alongside vocalist Nyak Ina Raseuki ("Ubiet") — set out to fuse jazz improvisation directly with Sundanese gamelan. Dharmawan reprogrammed his synthesizers to the Indonesian slendro and pelog scales, and Budidharma adapted a fretless bass to reach the microtonal pitches gamelan music requires. The results were documented on Mystical Mist (1994, Aquarius), Magical Match (2000), the percussion-centered Rhythms of Reformation (2005), and 2 Worlds (2006), the last built around collaborations with international jazz musicians including harmonica player Howard Levy, saxophonist Carlo Actis Dato, and pianist Ron Davis. Following the 1993 Jakarta Jazz Festival, Krakatau Ethno toured extensively — by some accounts more than 40 countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, including residencies at American university music programs — before Dharmawan wound the project down around 2008 to pursue a solo career and found the World Peace Orchestra.

The band reunited again in the mid-2010s, billed as Krakatau Reunion and drawing the classic 1986-92 lineup — Dharmawan, Budidharma, Suhendra, Ramadhan, Utami, and Lesmana — back together for two studio albums, Chapter One (2016) and Chapter Two (2018), both on DSS Records, mixing new songs with re-recorded versions of earlier material such as "Seraut Wajah," "Rain," and "Save the Whale(s)." The archival photograph used for this profile (see media.md) documents a Krakatau Reunion concert at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, at which Indra Lesmana was not present — a reminder that the reunion-era lineup has continued to shift show to show.

Krakatau's catalog splits into two distinct eras that share a common leadership core but pursue very different fusions. The 1984-92 sextet built a commercially successful Indonesian jazz-pop sound around electric keyboards, guitar, and Trie Utami's vocals — closer to Indo-pop with jazz harmony and improvisational elements than to gamelan music. The 1993-2008 "Ethno" incarnation pursued something more radical: rather than layering Western jazz on top of Indonesian material, Dharmawan and Budidharma re-engineered their own instruments — retuned synthesizers, a fretless bass built for microtonal pitch — to meet traditional Sundanese gamelan instruments (bonang, kendang, rebab, tarompet, saron) on genuinely shared harmonic ground, expanding the pentatonic slendro scale into what the band itself described, in liner notes to Mystical Mist, as a 10-microtone system freed from Western 12-tone limitations. This approach drew serious ethnomusicological attention: Krakatau is the subject of a peer-reviewed case study, David Harnish and Jeremy Wallach's "'Dance to Your Roots': Genre Fusions in the Music of Indonesia's Krakatau" (Asian Music 44, no. 2, 2013), which analyzes the band's instrumental compositions as a sustained, historically rooted negotiation between jazz improvisation and Sundanese performance practice rather than a novelty crossover.