[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Leboni, Poso, Central Sulawesi
Sound: Karambangan
For a description of the history and sound of karambangan music, check out my previous post on karambangan here. As I mentioned in that post, karambangan music began in Central Sulawesi as a solo guitar music played by young men to woo girls (sound familiar?). While through the decades it flourished into an ensemble artform, the stripped-down original sound, just voice and guitar, can still be heard as well.
Context:
The house in Leboni was full of manly, manly men. Pak Adris, the patriarch of the household, wore a policeman's moustache on his lip and a machete on his belt. He regaled me with stories of spearing wild boars in the nearby jungle, carrying them back home over two mountains on his shoulders. His relative, Pak Yordan, seemed equally tough, with a thick body and a tough looking face. He had, his family members boasted, singlehandedly built the house in which we were staying. He had even led the village of Leboni as village head in years past.
He also, it turned out, had the voice of an angel.
I was taken aback when I first heard it. I'd already heard him play countless songs with the group, sitting back and strumming on his comically small homemade kulele, looking like a bear playing a tiny guitar while trying desperately not to break the thing. His voice, then, had blended invisibly into the hymn-like harmonies. Later that night, after the recording session was over, Pak Yordan sat forward with his guitar and began to sing on his own, his voice surprisingly high and sensitive. I was taken aback. What is that song? I asked. It's about a man who has to choose between two girls, he told me. He was singing in the Pamona language, so I didn't catch a word, but his tone had told me so much already.
It was raining too hard that night, the sound of showers on the wooden roof drowning his quiet voice out, so we arranged to record his song the next day. The following afternoon, we met in the living room he'd built with his bare hands so many years ago. It was dark and swarming with bees, and cicadas screamed from the jungle outside. While the relentless cicadas could not be stopped, the family - gossiping mamas and rowdy kids, all stopped and were silent as he played his sad song again, the melody looping as he intoned countless poetic refrains about love in a language I'll never know.
[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Leboni, Poso, Central Sulawesi
Sound: Karambangan
Of the twenty albums released as part of Smithsonian Folkways' seminal album series Music of Indonesia (probably the inspiration for my ongoing musical quest), one album has stood out as a popular favorite: Indonesian Guitars. Forsaking the exotic gongs and lutes of other albums in the series, it shines a spotlight on the variety of ways this quintessentially western instrument has been appropriated to brilliant affect by Indonesian musicians, from Batang Hari Sembilan music of South Sumatra to the kroncong-esque Sayang Sayang of Mandar, West Sulawesi. I still remember listening to this album on repeat before my move to Indonesia, transfixed by the simultaneous accessibility and total foreignness of the music heard within.
Driven by a fascination by all things that slip between the cracks, I became obsessed with researching other indigenous guitar styles left off that album. One such genre immediately grabbed my attention: karambangan. While there is little information on the internet about the style (and literally, last time I checked, nothing in English), I found YouTube to be littered with gems like this, little windows into a part of Sulawesi where men fingerpick sweet melodies on guitars to haunting vocal harmonies. I had to go there and find it for myself.
"There", it turns out, was quite a trek away from my home in Java: Poso in Central Sulawesi, that floppy-limbed island that hugs the Philippines as much as it does Borneo. Poso is a name that all Indonesians know for all the wrong reasons: sectarian violence tore the region apart at the turn of the 21st century, with Christian and Muslim militias terrorizing each other for years with dire consequences. Hundreds of people were murdered, with the violence finally ceasing, for the most part, by 2005.
It's hard to imagine something as sweet as karambangan, with its humbly picked guitars and sweet harmonies, coming from a place haunted by such darkness. Perhaps its sweetness comes from simpler times, with its roots being traced back by its current practitioners to the early decades of the 20th century. It started simply enough, with locals picking up guitars brought by Portuguese traders and using them to woo girls with heartfelt love songs.
From there, the history (as usual, it seems) gets sticky - the chords and melodies are undoubtedly Western in origin, but from what direction it seems hard to prove. The Western tonality is probably Portuguese in origin, but whether that came straight from the traders in Central Sulawesi or from the Javanese-Portuguese hybrid kroncong music that swept the nation starting in the 20s and 30s is not entirely clear.
Similarly tangled is the origins of the karambangan's homemade ukeleles (the group I met in Leboni played two, one they called juk and one they called kulele, both of which were fretless, with the kulele being constructed ingenously out of the bottom of a tin can with a hand-carved wooden neck nailed to it's side!) While it's likely that these, too, were inspired by the nation's keroncong craze, it's also possible that they were inspired by the later Hawaiian music boom of the 60s and 70s.
In the 70s, three part harmonies, almost unheard of in most Indonesian music, came to dominate the sound, likely brought in from the hymns sung in the area's hundreds of churches (the Poso area is Christian by a large majority.) Later developments include the adaption of local folk instruments like the geso-geso, a one-stringed bowed instrument played by the local Pamona people, and the seruling, a bamboo flute.
While it is this thick instrumental tapestry that first catches outsiders' ears, those who play and enjoy karambangan music in Central Sulawesi see this instrumentation as a plate on which to serve the main course, the kayori poetic verses which sometimes stretch the songs, three chords repeating cyclically, into the 10-minute territory. The topic, I was told, can be anything from love to faith to fate. For those of us who don't speak the local Pamona and Rampi languages, we're simply left to soak in the harmonies.
(This video was shot by myself and my good friend Greg Ruben, who skillfully edited it with some footage of the surrounding area.) Context:
In one of my long, late night treks through YouTube in search of musical gold, I came upon this video of a karambangan group sitting around a table playing and singing their hearts out. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to meet them, and after dropping a YouTube comment and getting an enthusiastic reply, I had been invited to do just that. The uploader of the video got me in touch with the group and told me that they were making plans for our arrival (I was travelling with my friend, Greg, who was visiting from the states) - all we had to do was choose where we wanted to stay - in the village or next to the waterfall? It wasn't a hard choice.
After a drive from Palu to Poso made tense by news of a recent presence of ISIS in the mountains nearby, Greg and I arrived safe in sound in Leboni, a small, scrappy village stuck to the edge of the massive Lake Poso. After we met our new hosts, we were sped on motorbikes to our new home for the next few days, a charming, stilted wooden house situated in a cacao farm within spitting distance of the area's famous Saluopo waterfall.
Leboni, our hosts told us, was made up almost entirely of transmigrants from a nearby regency, members of the tiny Rampi ethnic group who were nearly all literally one big family, cousins marrying cousins and all. The karambangan group, unsurprisingly, was itself a family band, with two generations of fathers, sons, uncles and nephews playing together.
After serving us up some hearty babi hutan (wild boar) and squash stew, the family almost immediately broke out their instruments and, settling along the porch that stretched the length of the house, broke out in song. Palm wine flowed and those three chords cycled endlessly into the night as my dreams of karambangan were finally realized.
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Outside Tinambung, Mandar Regency, West Sulawesi
Sound: Sayang sayang
When it comes to traditional music here in Indonesia, it can often be hard to get the facts straight, even if you ask the musicians themselves. There is little information about the origins of sayang sayang, a style based around the uniquely fingerpicked guitar played by the Mandar people of West Sulawesi. The name itself comes from the typical refrain of a sayang sayang song - "sayange, sayange!" (Darling, darling! in the Mandar language.)
Other than that, things get sketchy. The musicians I met said it all started when the Spanish brought guitars to Sulawesi more than a hundred years ago. But wait a second, the Spanish? The Portuguese all well-known to have spread the guitar around the archipelago, while the Spanish mostly stayed away from the colonies. Nonetheless, the musicians were adamant- it was the Spanish.
Next, how did such a style emerge? All it takes is an open ear and a decent knowledge of Indonesian music to hear similarities to the hybrid Portuguese-Indonesian kroncong music of Java, with it's rhythmic string instruments and syncopated basslines. Did sayang sayang come from kroncong, I asked? No, no...no connection, they said. The style, they said, started spontaneously in the beginning of the 20th century. But one of the main songs/picking styles of the sayang sayang reportoire (and the song I share with you here) is called "Kemayoran", also the title of a well known kroncong song, named after a neighborhood of Jakarta! It must be a coincidence, they said. After some confused queries, the group leader was willing to concede that their bass player may have individually been influenced by kroncong basslines, but no more than that!
These days, I was told, all sayang sayang groups have gone electric to better accommodate the large wedding parties and other gigs - gone are the days of acoustic guitar (what they call gitar angin - literally wind guitar.) A typical group consists of two electric guitars - one strumming rhythmic cords, while the other melodically fingerpicks - one bass and at least two singers, preferably a man and a woman. The fingerpicked guitar is the true heart and soul of the music - sayang sayang music is even categorised not by song, per se, but by picking style or pattern - there are, according to the group we met, around eight picking styles/patterns in all, each requiring a unique tuning.
While the intricate picking style may be my favorite aspect of sayang sayang, surely the most unique ingredient is the singing - the male and female vocalists trade off improvising lyrics about the audience in a stream of consciousness designed to get folks to come up to the stage and throw down some bills for the musicians. This back and forth, because of its improvised nature, can stretch sayang sayang songs into all-night affairs - the group I met bragged that sayang sayang music features the longest songs in the world -sometimes hours and hours of endlessly looping instrumental parts and refrains.
Context:
Just like Batang Hari Sembilan, I first heard the Mandar guitar music of sayang sayang on the amazing Indonesian Guitars album from the legendary Music of Indonesia series recorded and curated by my ethnomusicological hero, Philip Yampolsky. Yampolsky and his crew had headed out to Mandar in the nineties and laid down some great tracks (acoustic, interestingly enough!), but as far as I know, no other foreigners had bothered to head out to those parts and look for more. The Mandar regency is an obscure corner of a massive island more famous for the death-obsessed Torajans of the south and the world class diving of Bunaken in the Nortth - few people make the trek to experience a hot, steamy coastal fishing area with no tourist attractions other than sailboats.
What Mandar is missing in concrete tourist destinations, it more than makes up for in rich cultural heritage. The Mandar are a proud people, and they've stuck to their culture and music more than most ethnic groups that I've met in Indonesia. It was surprisingly easy to meet a sayang sayang group - my friend Asep (who later introduced me to Cigawiran music in Garut) introduced me to the group Siasayangngi, said to be one of the best in the area.
After stopping by unannounced at the leader's wooden stilted house, the group's leader kindly invited us to record them a few days later in his living room. Coming on schedule at the appointed time, we felt the disorienting affects of what Indonesians call jam karet - rubber time, the flexible approach to time found all across the archipelago. After a few hours sitting on the wooden slats of the living room floor, munching on cookies and listening to chickens fight down below, the group had been assembled.
As the band played, sound booming through the too-large soundsystem in the cramped living room, the mic was passed back and forth between the singers while the singers traded off improvising lyrics about Asep and me. As they were singing in the Mandar language, I didn't catch much more than "Amerika" and the Indonesian phrase kaca mata (glasses), but it was later translated roughly for me as something along the lines of "Hey there, American guy, hey guy in the glasses! Welcome to Mandar, we hope you enjoy it! Please marry a Mandar woman and settle down here!" It was a moment I'll never forget - sitting in that living room, listening to this delightful music that just so happened to be all about me!
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]
Location: Tinambung, West Sulawesi
Sound: Gongga lawe (also called gongga labe or jarumbing)
As part of my work in collaboration with the Indonesian Mouth Harp Association (Asosiasi Harpa Mulut Indonesia), I've tried to seek out as much mouth harp music as I can throughout this great archipelago. For an enthusiast of the buzzing, earthy sound of the mouth harp, Indonesia is a wonderland: there are dozens of varieties scattered across the islands, taking myriad forms and connected to varying traditions.
After seeking out the karombi of Tanah Toraja, I headed towards the sunbaked coastal area called Mandar, home to the only other mouth harp tradition in South or West Sulawesi that I'm aware of. In form and function, the gongga lawe is almost identical to the Torajan karombi and a number of other string-pulled mouth harps around Indonesia. For a description of the form and playing technique, you can check out my description in the karombi post linked above.
Gongga lawe has not reached the level of revitalization of other Mandar folk instruments like calong, nor does it have the mystical, socially significant role of the Mandar kecaping. Like many other Indonesian mouth harps, gongga lawe is as much as simple diversion as it is a musical instrument: it was traditionally played, like the calong, as a way for Mandar farmers to amuse themselves while taking a break from the heat and toil of labor in the crops.
These days, very few people can still play gongga lawe, largely because such traditions have been left by the wayside in the face of a progressively modernising society. As usual, I was delighted to meet a craftsman and player of this instrument, as its future, like so many traditional musics, is in jeopardy.
Context:
The main inspiration for my trip to Mandar was this YouTube video highlighting a variety of Mandar musical instruments, including the gongga lawe. Excited by the find, I shared the video with my friends in the Indonesian Mouth Harp Association, who despite their meticulous cataloguing, knew nothing of the instrument. It seemed to me like a challenge: I had to go there.
A few months later, I found myself in Mandar, meeting with Muhammad Ridwan, the uploader of the YouTube video. An expert in traditional Mandar culture, Mas Ridwan hooked me up with some friendly local artists who helped me get in contact with Ka Musa, the gongga lawe player in the video.
When we first stopped by the wooden stilted home of Ka Musa, we found that he was not home at all, as he was out working in the fields. Ah, I thought, my narrative of crushing modernity in Mandar is being complicated!
We came back the next day and I was happy to find Ka Musa greeting us at the tiny portal. Wrapping a sarong below his red t-shirt and peci cap, Ka Musa proudly showed us his assortment of instruments, from the calong to gongga lawe and the related gongga lima. He proceeded to sit humbly on the planks of the wooden floor and share them with me. The gongga lawe he had made himself - later he showed me his method, carving the thin instrument from a long piece of bamboo. Just as Ka Musa was proud, I too was honored to meet and help document the work of this craftsman who is playing a vital role in keeping this endangered tradition alive.
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Tinambung, Polewali Mandar, West Sulawesi
Sound: Calong
Indonesia is a nation full of beautiful and unique percussion instruments, but calong deserves special mention for its simplicity and design. The instrument, unique to the Mandar people of West Sulawesi, consists of a large coconut, hollowed out and with the top quarter sliced off to make something like a deep bowl. The coconut functions as the perfect resonator for four bamboo xylophone "keys", arranged from front to back, not left to right as you might see on a typical xylophone.
The instrument was traditionally played by farmers to take a break from the backbreaking labor in the heat of the Mandar sun. As such, it is in that special class of instruments that is played not for performance or ritual, but for the simple joy of making sound.
One thing I was happy to see when spending time in Mandar is that the instrument is being revitalized in a big way, blossoming from its humble roots as an obscure farmer's instrument to a unique symbol of Mandar arts and culture. Elementary schools and arts groups have begun to embrace the instrument for its simplicity and ease of playing, producing identically tuned instruments in mass numbers for schoolchildren to bang away on in synchronized rhythm. Some clever instrument makers have even created diatonic double-coconut calong, allowing Western and Indonesian national songs to be played. Context:
After spending countless hours in Toraja and Enrekang sitting around living rooms and bamboo huts waiting for something to happen, I was pleasantly surprised by the speediness of my first experience in Mandar. Minutes after meeting my brief host and "fixer", the author and expert on Mandar culture Muhammad Ridwan Alimuddin, I was immediately shuttled off on the back of a motorbike to the house of Tombo Padhua, a local musician.
We sat down with Pak Tombo in the living room of his home, a wooden stilted house like many I had seen so far in South Sulawesi. After sitting down for a chat, Pak Tombo disappeared into the dark inner rooms of his home and returned moments later wearing a traditional Mandar headband (ikat kepala) and carrying his calong, festooned with puffballs of red fabric and a miniature Indonesian flag.
Pak Tombo sat down in a green plastic patio chair and placed the calong on a small table in front of him. Illuminated by the sunlight shining in through the woven bamboo walls of his home, he beat out a simple rhythmic pattern with drumstick-like beaters, the dry sound surprisingly loud with the help of the coconut resonator. As I watched, I couldn't stop smiling - barely thirty minutes in Tinambung, and already I was enjoying the humble sounds of Mandar folk music, beaming from the inside of a coconut.
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location:Bentang Alla Utara, Enrekang, South Sulawesi Sound: Suling Dendang Dendang The traditional flute of the Duri people of the neighboring Enrekang regency, the suling dendang dendang is essentially identical in construction and sound to the suling lembang of Toraja (see my previous post here.) However, the suling tradition in Enrekang is different in a number of interesting ways - for one, I was told that suling dendang dendang is never played for funerals, only for weddings and other "upacara adat", or traditional ceremonies (which is unusual considering the wailing, creepy sound of the Enrekang suling seems quite fit for a funeral.)
The other main difference is that while Torajan suling is, as far as I know, always played as a solo instrument, suling dendang dendang requires a group of four men for performance. At the time of recording, however, only two men could be rounded up - the other two were in far-flung areas of South Sulawesi. I hope that the suling duo can give a sense of the difference this arrangement makes - playing in a pair, long drones are able to be sustained, with one player often maintaining the drone while the other adds ornaments and small melodic variations. At other times, the musicians play in unison, allowing for a fuller sound.
As with many other musics around Indonesia, information about suling dendang dendang is scarce. Actually, in this case, I seem to have found a first: there is literally no recorded information about this music that I am aware of, at least on the internet and searchable archives. As usual, I ask anyone with more information to please contact me.
Context:
Accompanied by my friends from Baraka, I arrived soon after sunset in the small coffee-growing village of Bentang Alla Utara, close to the border with Tana Toraja. We headed directly to the house of the kepala desa (village head), who was surprised and curious to see me there, telling me that the only other foreigner who he had seen in the village was an Australian researching coffee production (I was surprised to find this well-produced YouTube video about the village and its coffee production, starring Patola, the village head, and this mysterious Australian.)
Armed with headlamps, Patola led us through the quiet dark of the village to a nearby home, where we were eventually met, after a long awkward wait in the small sitting room, by two suling dendang dendang players, as well as another old man who had seem to come just to watch. One of the musicians was quite old, in his eighties, and seemed a bit grumpy - he had just been sleeping, he told us, when he got the call to come play for this foreigner. He hadn't played his suling in six years, he told us. I began to feel guilty and a bit ashamed - why was I bothering this poor old guy, just to get a recording and a photo or two? I tried not to let the thought distract me from the moment.
The men unpacked their suling, water buffalo horns and all, from a bamboo case and began to play, angling towards each other on the floral sitting room couch. After playing for a number of minutes, the old man who had come to watch motioned that he would like to dance. Rising from his couch, he performed a short, graceful dance, with emphasis on hand movements, as you often see in dances throughout Indonesia. It was a redeeming moment for me - while I still felt bad for waking the old suling player, at least our visit had allowed for a moment of inspiration.
Later, the previously grumpy suling player mentioned that if it wasn't for our visit, he wouldn't have played that night - his suling would have remained in its dusty case, unplayed for who knows how many years later. On that night, the slumbering tradition of suling dendang dendang was reawakened, if only for a short while.
Photo and video credits for this post go to my friend and incredibly helpful guide Salam Konzelink - I was too busy holding the recorder to do anything else! Special thanks also to Tamar Jaya and Unding Kaharuddin for being my friendly guides around Enrekang.
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Wai Wai, Enrekang, South Sulawesi Sound: Musik Bambu (Bamboo Music), also known as Musik Bas (Bass Music)
Unique to Sulawesi, Musik Bambu is played by an orchestra consisting wholly of bamboo instruments, with a large number of trumpet-like horns being led by six or more transverse bamboo flutes. The orchestra plays songs in the Western diatonic scale, in a style that is a bizarre fusion of local aesthetics, national songs, and imported European brass band music.
The backing instruments require some explanation, as they are unlike anything I have ever seen or heard in any other part of the world. Ranging from massive versions that produce booming bass to tiny ones that produce high pitched 'toots', each instrument (the instruments themselves, I was told by the local instrument maker, do not even have a proper name!) has the same general form and playing technique. The musician blows into a small bamboo "tubing" similar in concept to that of a trumpet or tuba, with the tubing twisting at ninety-degree angles until it meets the large resonating tube, a hollow cylinder of bamboo. This main cylinder can range in size from less than ten centimeters for the smallest instruments to more than a meter for the massive "bass" instruments. The tone of the instrument is based off of the length of the cylinder, with one instrument playing generally only one tone. However, some instruments have one hole in the cylinder, which, when covered or uncovered, allows the player to produce two tones.
Because each of these backing instruments produces only one or two notes, the entire group, from twenty to thirty players, must work together to produce the foundation of harmony and rhythm over which the flutes can play the main melody.
Finding reliable information about this bizarre music is nearly impossible. From what I can tell, it started in Manado, a city in North Sulawesi, but multiple sources tell different stories. One source suggests that it was invented by a homesick Dutch Catholic missionary in Manado in the early 20th century, while another source traces its roots back to the colonial Dutch marching bands of the 1800s. In Manado, the Musik Bambu sounds more firmly European, with an oompah rhythm that did not quite make it's way down to the Musik Bambu groups of Enrekang in South Sulawesi.
Despite the clearly European inspiration (from the Do-Re-Mi scale to the use of a conductor), multiple provinces and ethnic groups throughout Sulawesi, from the Minahasans of North Sulawesi to the Torajans of Mamasa and the Duri of Enrekang, claim the music to be wholly "traditional," with various origin stories of their own. The legend in Enrekang, where I made this recording, is that it all began with a water buffalo shephard who improvised a wind instrument out of a branch of the rice plant.
The reality of Musik Bambu 's history and the sound is likely far more complicated and impossible to trace - anyone who can help me figure this out, beyond my wild speculations, please let me know.
A note on the song: The tune featured here is a Musik Bambu cover of a famous song by Koes Plus, a Beatles-esque rock band that was hugely famous beginning in the 1960s. Musik Bambu groups do not really play "folk" songs - most of the songs I heard were covers of nationally popular pop music.
Context:
After a few days of hunting flutes and mouth harps in Toraja, I headed to Baraka, a city in the rarely-visited province of Enrekang, two hours or so south of Rantepao. I knew nothing about it's people, the ethnic group called Duri, or about its music. I was willing to guess, however, that I could find Musik Bambu, as I had learned through my reading that it has become something of a Pan-Sulawesi genre, found throughout the twisting peninsulas of the massive island.
Luckily, my host and incredibly helpful guide, Tamar Jaya, knew of dozens of Musik Bambu groups in the area, but he insisted on taking me to what he called the best group in Enrekang, a Musik Bambu ensemble at the top of a nearby mountain, a place he called "negeri di atas awan", or "the land above the clouds. "It's far," he warned me, "and the road is really bad. Are you sure you want to go?"
The next day I found myself clinging for dear life to the back of a motorbike as we strained up and over rocks and slick mud along the worst mountain road I have ever experienced (if you can even really call it a road at that point. ) Maybe it was the lack of a helmet (when I asked why we were not bringing any, my friend cheerfully shrugged and said "there are no police here!"), but the way up to the village was perhaps the most terrifying and uncomfortable ride of my life. The sun set as we ascended, leaving us chugging our way up slippery slopes in the eerie dark, the headlamps of the bikes bouncing off of the clouds clinging to the chilly mountainside.
Finally reaching the tiny village of Wai Wai, we stopped in for some coffee, dinner, and about an hour of listening to my hosts chat away in the local language (Bahasa Duri) as I began to wonder whether the music would really make the trip worthwhile . Finally I heard the bizarre bass toot of bamboo in the distance, and we headed towards the practice space.
We arrived to a traditional wooden, stilted house to find villagers of all types - tiny old ladies in jilbabs, rugged saronged men, and sweatshirt-wearing teenagers - tooting away under the dim light of a single bulb. In the middle of them all a man paced back and forth enthusiastically, signaling the musicians with grand and joyous gestures and shouts. His enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself enjoying the bizarre and sometimes harsh sound of the group far more than I imagined. The booming bass of the largest instruments shook the wooden planks of the floor for more than an hour as the group cycled through local and national songs, some that sounded like dangdut , others that sounded like some mutant strains of European marching music. I sat and listened quietly the whole time, trying to figure it out, to get to the bottom of its sound. I never really did.
Sound: Suling Lembang Suling lembang is a long, six-holed bamboo flute of the Toraja people of South Sulawesi. What sets it apart from other suling (Indonesian for flute) throughout the archipelago is the addition of a conical piece of water buffalo horn at the flute's end, which acts as a resonator similar to a trumpet's horn. Also interesting is that playing suling lembang requires circular breathing, a playing technique that allows the musician to create a steady stream of sound without requiring breathing breaks (the musician in this recording uses this technique, but perhaps because he is getting old, he occasionally takes a break to breathe as well.)
Torajan culture is largely based around massive and extravagant funerals, so it comes as no surprise that suling lembang is usually used to accompany these ceremonies, playing songs of grief and mourning.
Context:
With the help of a new generation suling player I had befriended, I was able to meet Nek Amir, an old suling lembang player who lives in a small hamlet about twenty five minutes from Rantepao, the center of tourism in Tana Toraja. Driving up a narrow dirt track, I arrived with my friends in a cluster of beautiful, massive tongkonan , the unique traditional houses which are ubiquitous in Tana Toraja. Young children scattered from the dirt courtyard at the center of the cluster, staring in curiosity and giggling at the strange foreigner.
My friend introduced me and my plan to Nek Amir, who, upon realizing I would be taking photos, insisted on putting on a sarong and his military camouflage jacket, as I was told he was a proud military man. We settled on a bamboo platform under a small rice barn and Nek Amir played away, stopping only a few times to take a breath or make a joke. For more than half an hour, the only sounds in the air were the lonely sound of the flute and farmyard animals - grunting pigs, crowing roosters, and barking dogs. Maybe I should have been bothered by the intrusion of these other noises, but I just sat back and smiled, enjoying the privilege of listening to the rare tapestry of Torajan sounds.
Ma'Tumbuk Torajan is the name given to the ritual of pounding rice in a large rice-mortar, made from a hollowed out tree trunk, using long wooden pestles. As a way of making the Strenuous work more enjoyable, the pounding is made into polyrhythmic music, with some players pounding on the outside of the mortar as well in interlocking beats. The "song" continues until the players tire from tough work and stop for a break.
Context:
Driving between popular tourist sites in Tana Toraja featuring bizarre casket-filled graves and the unique tongkonan traditional houses, I felt a kind of shameful boredom. I had already spent a few days traveling around the area, and had seen enough of traditional houses and weird grave sites to last a lifetime. So pulling past the souvenir shops and into the parking area of Lemo, one of the most popular destinations in Tana Toraja, I was not bursting with curiosity and desire to see more strange burial practices.
Upon getting off my motorbike and strolling around some nearby tongkonan , however, I Heard the alluring rhythm of percussion music in the distance. I SAW a tour guide leading some French tourists and asked him "Where's the music?" He pointed up the hill, and Began to lead his clients in that direction.
Seeing a steep muddy path leading up a nearby hill, I forged my way ahead of the guide and the French folks, blindly following the rhythmic pulse as I climbed higher. Occasionally I passed barefoot men struggling up the hill carrying a heavy-looking logs on their shoulders. Were they following the music, too?
Eventually I reached a clearing, and found a house-building rituals in process - men worked on the skeleton of a new house while a group of women Stood off to the side, rhythmically pounding rice in a huge wooden mortar.
After watching for a bit and recording the sound, the women (plus one man, inexplicably - this kind of music / work is almost always performed EXCLUSIVELY by women) invited me to have a go, so I Gave it a try, pounding the long wooden pestle against the side of the mortar. Feeling embarrassed, I said thank you, handed the pestle back to an old lady, and continued to watch. I watched for quite a long time, soaking in the rhythm of work and the delight of stumbling upon new sounds.
[Aural Archipelago has moved to a new site - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com] Location: Batutamonga, Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi Sound: Karombi (also called Pa'karombi)
Karombi is the bamboo mouth harp of the Toraja people of Tana Toraja, in the highlands of South Sulawesi. Similar to many other mouth harps found throughout Indonesia such as the the genggong of Bali and Lombok, the kuriding of South Kalimantan, and the rinding of Central Java, the karombi consists of a small length of carved bamboo - the bamboo is placed to the player's lips, and an attached string is pulled, setting a "tongue" in the center of the instrument to vibrate. The pitch of the buzzing vibration is then manipulated using the mouth as a resonator - tongue, throat, and breathe working together.
The karombi seems to be nearly extinct, with only a few instrument makers capable of producing the instrument, and what seems to be an equally small number of people who are able to play it. Like most jew's harps, it is not an instrument that is used for performance or ritual, merely for personal entertainment. I've found one source, however, that suggests that in times past, the karombi was played by parents of children sick with smallpox, its sound soothing the children to sleep and recovery.
Context:
As I travelled around the area of Tana Toraja on motorbike, I would occasionally ask locals if they know anyone who could play karombi. Most people had heard of the instrument, especially if I mimicked the playing style with my hands, but none knew anyone around their village who played - as one man said, "everyone who played karombi is already dead."
However, my previous research on the internet had turned up a promising lead - a man nicknamed Ne'Karombi, living in the village of Batutamonga in the hills above Rantepao, had already been featured in an extremely low-quality YouTube video, and I'd found one single web page, created by the uploader of the YouTube video, containing some photos and a sketchy biography of sorts. When I showed the video to my friend Frans, a local artist who kindly hosted me in Rantepao, he laughed, pointing at the screen, and told me if I looked behind the musician in the video, I could see Frans himself sitting in the background. Go to Batutamonga, Frans told me, and Ne'Karombi will surely play for you.
The next afternoon I headed to Batutamonga, a village popular with tourists for it's panoramic views of the valley below and its proximity to treks and cultural sites such as graves carved into massive boulders. Upon finding a simple homestay, I asked Mama Yos, the owner, about Ne'Karombi - she seemed confused, but one of her kids piped up and said he knew the place. She insisted I walk to his home escorted by her small child, who shyly practiced English with me along the way.
When we got to his house, Ne'Karombi was outside picking coffee berries from a nearby tree. His house was a typical rumah panggung, a kind of raised, wooden house found all throughout that part of Sulawesi. I'd read that Ne'Karombi had previously had signs outside his home advertising his skills as a musician, perhaps hoping to attract backpackers headed down the small road to Rantepao. At the time of my arrival, he seemed to have given up that scheme.
Upon telling him of my project and politely asking if I could record his music in a quieter area, Ne'Karombi led me up into his simple home, through a room with creaking wooden floorboards and no furniture except a television. We settled in a relatively well-lit corner (one dim lightbulb lit the house) and he proceeded to show me his instruments.
His name, he told me, was Pelipus Randan, but people called him Ne'Karombi, or "Grandpa Karombi." Few people, he lamented, could play his instrument anymore - even a son of his who could make the instrument was unable to play it. Together with his wife, Ludia Sombo allo, he kindly played for me over the sound of passing motorbikes, giggling grandchildren, and roosters.
An informal instrument by nature, the karombi doesn't even have songs, merely certain patterns that can be played. For a few "pieces", Ne'Karombi's wife joined in on a differently pitched karombi, playing patterns that sometimes matched up, and sometimes didn't. I realized that, like other mouth harp music I've encountered here in Indonesia, it is not a serious artform, with structured compositions or deep spiritual meaning. Rather, it is played merely for the joy of playing.
