Central Sulawesi Sounds: Solo Karambangan

Photo Credit: Greg Ruben

[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.

Central Sulawesi Sounds: Karambangan

[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.

Musical Eavesdropping in Banyuwangi

[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]

Location: Kemiren, Banyuwangi Regency, East Java

Sound: Kenthulitan

From the large metallic slenthem of Javanese gamelan to the bamboo calung of West Java, xylophones are everywhere in Java. Rarely, however, are they played unaccompanied - almost always they play a supporting role in a larger tapestry of sound. In a small village near Banyuwangi, East Java, a mysterious xylophone can be found, it's sound and construction possessing an austere, simple purity: the kenthulitan.

The kenthulitan is an instrument that has only recently emerged from the humble obscurity of the paddy-side huts of Banyuwangi. I heard of it first from Pak Aekanu, a government employee working in the Department of Culture and Tourism in Banyuwangi city. A passionate researcher, Pak Aekanu proudly proclaimed himself as the "discoverer" of kenthulitan - before he stumbled upon the instrument, it was perhaps known only to those farmers who played it in the small villages outside of Banyuwangi, unresearched, undocumented, and unappreciated.

The kenthulitan is remarkably simple in construction: a small, hollowed out log, functioning as a base and resonator, is lined with keys made from slivers of bamboo, nine notes forming the pentatonic salendro scale favored by the Osing people of the area. In form it is very similar to a number of other simple xylophones, from this seemingly extinct instrument found by Randy Raine Reusch in the mountains of Bali, to children's "sarons", small, toy-like instruments constructed of cheap metal and sold in souvenir shops around Java.

According to Pak Aekanu, what sets it apart from other similar instruments is the way in which it is played: rather than using the one handed technique so common amongst other Javanese xylophones (with the other hand used to dampen the resonant metal bars), the kenthulitan is played with two wooden hammers simultaneously. In gamelan ensembles, the manual damping required to reduce a xylophone's resonance has led to a system in which melodies are shared between two instruments in a hocketing pattern, making up for the relative slowness of one-handed playing. With the kenthulitan, the sharp, dry sound of wood on bamboo allows for this shared melody to be played singlehandedly, so to speak, with two hammers - no damping necessary.

Just like the angklung paglak I encountered in the same village, kenthulitan music has its roots in hot, lazy afternoons spent paddy-side. Farmers wile away the hours beating out simple tunes, some drawn from the reportoire of barongan music. Their venue: austere thatched huts called gubug; their audience: the birds, the trees, perhaps their fellow farmers. It is an introverted, unpretentious tradition, music for music's sake.

Kenthulitan, like other under-appreciated folk musics around Indonesia, is in remarkable danger of dying out. Pak Aekanu estimates that there remain only five to ten old men who can play it in all of Banyuwangi. Alarmed by this figure, he has taken measures to ensure its survival: taking the first kenthulitan he encountered, he has had duplicates created, allowing the instrument to be played as a duo (as I encountered it), and opening the doors for young people to encounter the instrument and learn to play from the old generation.

Notes on the Recording: The afternoon of recording, I heard two arrangements for kenthulitan: the original solo configuration, and the more recently invented kenthulitan duo. I'm sharing the solo in order to give a sense of what the music sounded like in its original context. If you listen closely, though, you can hear a drum play along at times - this is the kendang player from the angklung paglak ensemble in the hut above us, who it seems couldn't resist lending a rhythmic hand to the breakneck kenthulitan!




Context:

I had come to Pak Aekanu in search of angklung paglak, but as soon as we sat down in his office in Banyuwangi, his pride and passion was clearly aimed towards kenthulitan, an instrument that I had never heard of until that moment. Pak Aekanu kindly arranged for a private "performance" of both musics in the village of Kemiren, a short drive into the hills outside Banyuwangi.

As I described in my previous post about angklung paglak, we arrive to find four musicians jamming away in a treehouse-like hut called a paglak, nestled amongst trees on the edge of a vibrantly green field of rice. Below them, on a bare platform, sat two more musicians - Pak Sareh and Pak Suradi, two kenthulitans before them, mallets at their bare feet. After I ascended into the paglak and recorded the angklung, I returned to earth and was met by the spare, measured tick-tock of the kenthulitan, played in unison by the old men.

It seemed fitting that they had been playing before their "audience" had arrived from up above, as the unfamiliar context of "performance" thrust upon them by my arrival seemed to hang on the music like a poorly fitting costume. This was not music designed for the ears of others - it was a conversation between musician and instrument, and I was merely evesdropping.




Postscript: Pak Aekanu contacted me in December to let me know that Pak Suradi had passed away. This is a heartbreaking reminder that musical traditions such as these are hanging on by a thread - as soon as the few musicians who play this instrument pass, it is possible that this artform will be lost forever. This post is dedicated to Pak Suradi: thank you for sharing your music with me - I will never forget it.

Songs After Dawn: Drone and Trance in Banyuwangi

[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]

Location: Banyuwangi, East Java

Sound: Jaranan Buto/Gandrung (?)

In a tradition that stretches the length of Java and into Bali, groups of young men straddle hobby horses and ride them deep into trance, galloping upon a wave of propulsive, gong-driven music. This artform, often called jathilan (also known as kuda lumping, especially in West Java) stretches back centuries and has continued into the 21st century largely unchanged.

The music that accompanies the dance is raw and unrestrained compared to the slow, graceful sounds of Javanese music cultivated in the royal palaces of Surakarta and Yogyakarta (a comparison I've made before, but it bears repeating as that music has been planted so firmly in the public imagination as prototypical of Javanese music!). The typical ensemble across Central and East Java features kendang drum together with the gongs known as kempul, kenong, and kethuk; melody is provided by the reedy buzz of the tarompet, a kind of single-reed wind instrument.

The musicians I met in Banyuwangi called their art jaranan buto, as it also features a dance in which men dress up in costume as Buto, a hairy giant famous in Javanese folklore. The music as I encountered it took two forms: in some songs, especially during the trance-dance segment, the tarompet was used, giving the music a character more typical of the jathilan music found throughout Java.

In other songs, however, the instrumentation made it very clear that we were in Osing country: as I mentioned in my previous post on Osingnese bamboo music, this far eastern corner of Java has a unique ethnic group all its own, distinct from the dominant Javanese, with a musical tradition that is likewise very distinct. The artform for which Osing are most well known is the dance and music called gandrung, which uniquely features two Western instruments creatively adapted into the Osing musical lexicon: the violin (here called biola and played in a radically different style from the Western classical tradition), and the triangle.

Here is where things get confusing: when asked what they called their music, they responded with "jaranan buto", and when the tarompet was in full swing it sounded quite like other jathilan music I've heard from other parts of Java. But when the biola came out and the sinden started singing in the idiosyncratic melismatic style typical of the Osing, the music sounded remarkably similar, if not identical to gandrung music. Minor variations could be heard: only one violin played, rather than the two typical of gandrung, but that fascinating drone, played on two strings of the violin in imitation of the rebab that typically accompanies Javanese gamelan, had all the hallmarks of that quintessential Osing ensemble.

With that in mind, I'm tempted to call this music gandrung, but as someone who is very much not an expert on this particular music, I'm going to defer to the musicians! This is definitely something that deserves further research and investigation: are there other groups that merge jathilan and gandrung in this way? In what ways, imperceptible to my amateur ears, is this music different from both of these forms? Is it a previously undocumented hybrid? More research by people more qualified than me is begging to be undertaken!



Context:

It was dawn when the train from Surabaya finally pulled into the station in Banyuwangi, the final stop in the rail system that stretches the length of Java. The sun had not quite risen, but the air was somehow still hot and damp as we walked into the night, becak drivers accosting us from all sides. Nearby, in a small tent, a performance was being pumped through a primitive sound system, sounding like wayang, the traditional puppet theater found throughout Java. Pulled between these sounds and the bed I knew I'd find in a nearby motel, I hesitated, tired but curious. After the long, sleepless train ride, the bed won that contest.

I awoke in the foul, damp motel hours later, light and a bizarre drone pouring in through the small window. The sound was alien and unplaceable: was there an ensemble of musical bees outside? And what was that unfamiliar voice, floating distorted into our room? My girlfriend laid next to me, groggy and confused. What is that sound? I asked her. It sounds Mongolian, she said.

Disoriented but with curiosity piqued, I threw my clothes on, grabbed my sound recorder and camera, and went to investigate. Outside, the sun was already reaching high into the sky, pounding down onto the dusty road outside. I squinted into the light, across the way, and saw the tent from dawn, amplified music persisting from within, that weird drone, that unfamiliar voice.

I reached the tent, walking past the fat stacks of the soundsystem and into the shade of the tarp, taking a seat on dry grass next to curious kids sipping juice from bags, seeming to draw the attention of nearly everyone, including the musicians. They sat on the ground in front of me, a man sawing away at a violin - that was the drone! - , a woman sitting in a chair, caked in makeup and belting out melismatic lines, a man spinning a stick rhythmically along the three sides of a large musical triangle. No doubt about it, I realized, hearing these gandrung-esque sounds: I had arrived in Banyuwangi!

In a break between songs, I shyly approached the musicians, quizzing them on their product: what was this music? As I mentioned earlier, they answered with curious smiles: jaranan buto! Jathilan! Their leader beckoned me into another nearby tent, where boys were sitting scattered on the ground, applying dramatic makeup to their young faces, readying themselves for the dance, for their ride into trance.

Taking a seat once again in the audience, I watched these kids emerge, astride their woven horses. They looked bored as they slowly pranced about in practiced formation, swaying to the sound of the tarompet. But as the music escalated, their looks changed, eyes becoming feverish. Some abandoned their horses to crawl on the ground themselves, possessed, it seemed, by the spirit of some unknown animal. Some boys crawled to a corner to take in whifs of incense and eat raw, unprocessed rice. Another took an elaborate wooden dragon mask and began to gnaw on its wooden face.

As the gong beat on, the boys crawled on hands and knees across the dry grass, eyes bugging and darting left and right. One by one, a man with the look of a shaman would approach them, push them down and with a firm move of his hand, seem to push the spirits out of their bodies, after which they would go limp, sit up, and walk dazed back to the tent with a look of pure bewilderment, as if they had no idea what just happened. As the musicians brought the song to a close, I couldn't help but feel exactly the same way.

Angklung Paglak: Bamboo Sounds High Above the Sunrise of Java

[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]

Location: Kemiren, Banyuwangi, East Java

Sound: Angklung paglak

Extending nearly one thousand kilometers from west to east, Java is an elongated beast of an island. While dwarfed by giants like Kalimantan on the map, a trek across its length reveals its surprising mass (friends are often surprised to discover  that despite the fact that I live on a tropical island, my home in Bandung is nearly six hours from the nearest beach!)

Despite its expansive reach, Java appears, at first glance, to be pretty homogeneous compared to the astounding variety of ethnic groups found in areas like Papua, Sulawesi, and Sumatra. If you were to ask your average Indonesian what ethnic groups live on Java, they would probably respond with only two: Javanese and Sundanese, the two biggest ethnic groups in the whole nation by far, with the Sundanese inhabiting West Java and the Javanese taking up the rest. Indeed, while Java is unique in being largely made up of only two ethnic groups, there are surprises to be found if you know where to look.

What most people forget are those ethnic minorities (technically sub-ethnic groups) living on the fringes: the Baduy of West Java, a subset of Sundanese sequestered in the province of Banten, living intentionally traditional lives, some shunning outside contact altogether; the Tenggerese, Hindu descendents of Majahapit princes living around the lunar landscape of Mount Bromo; and lastly, the Osing of Banyuwangi.

Poetically called the "sunrise of Java" in reference to its location on the easternmost tip of the island, the area of Banyuwangi is famous for being the gateway to Bali, which is just a short ferry ride away. This proximity and a history of resistance to Islam has given the Osing people of this area a culture with a potent blend of Javanese and Balinese influences.


This unique fusion has made for a musical culture that is unlike anything else in Java. The angklung paglak is a perfect example of this cultural anomaly: while it strangely shares a name with the much more well-known Sundanese angklung, it is in form nearly identical to another instrument, the Balinese rindik. Just like the rindik, the angklung paglak is a xylophone made up of a series of bamboo tubes, tuned by length and by skilled shaving of the bamboo on one end.

Nearly always played in pairs, the angklung paglak is played at a mindbogglingly frenetic pace, enabled by a hallmark of Javanese and Balinese music: melodic parts shared between the two instruments through interlocking, hocket-like patterns. Providing a deeper rhythmic foundation are two small kendang drums unlike any other I've ever seen - unlike most drums in Java and Bali, which are beaten by hand, these kendang are beaten with simple wooden sticks with one hand while the other hand strategically dampens the vibrating membrane. Under the percussive barrage of the angklung, these kendang provide a dizzying interlocking accompaniment.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the angklung paglak is the context that surrounds this music: in Banyuwangi, you can't have angklung without paglak. One of the most bizarre and amazing performance spaces I've ever encountered, a paglak is a small thatched hut, raised on stilts nearly ten meters off the ground like some kind of bamboo approximation of a treehouse. Paglaks are designed as a kind of watchtower: situated high over a community's crops, the high vantage point allows farmers to guard their crops from birds and other undesirables.

At some point in the past, farmers began playing music in these paglaks, taking the angklung found in Osing gamelan ensembles and jamming high above their crops. This music serves a variety of purposes: like many other folk musics played by farmers around Indonesia, the music simply provided an amusing diversion during long days of toiling in the fields. In a more spiritual context, the angklung paglak is played by the Osing during harvest ceremonies, blessing the fields and the goddess of rice and fertility, Dewi Sri, with music as the farmers haul in the season's yield. I've even read that in the past, the soundof angklung paglak was meant to be an aural deterrent, not only to pests but to the tigers and ghosts that haunted the area.

Context:

I had seen a handful of low-resolution YouTube videos, but I was still shocked and delighted when I finally encountered the music of angklung paglak firsthand. After a long and discouraging search through the Banyuwangi countryside, my eternal music searching companion Sinta and I had come up empty-handed: we had taken the usual path: driving deep into countryside. from narrow asphalt roads to bumpy mud paths snaking through rice paddies, asking folks about where musicians could be found. At some point we found a paglak, and were told the musician was nearby, only to find him muddy and barefoot, leading a water buffalo to pasture. He didn't even have his instrument with him, he said. Try asking in Kemiren!

Motoring back to the village of Kemiren, we managed to track down the house of an angklung paglak maker and musician, but he was out working in the fields - nonetheless, his grandmotherly wife sat us down and gave us steaming fresh rice crackers and tried to figure out what we were doing there. We were discouraged - the difficulty of looking for music exclusively played by farmers is that these guys are usually far too busy working in the fields to humor a random bule asking questions about their music.

Back in Banyuwangi city, we suddenly remembered a suggestion we'd heard the night before at a village trance ritual: "If you're looking for music," a friendly local had said, "go to the Department of Tourism and Culture - surely they can help." At the time it had seemed laughable - Indonesian government offices are notorious for their inefficiency and unreliability - just a bunch of uniforms shuffling papers. How could they possibly help?

We were out of options - it was an unlikely lead, but it couldn't hurt. Showing up to the office, we were referred to a Pak Aekanu, who turned out to be an angel in disguise as a government official. To our surprise, Pak Aekanu was just the man we were looking for: an expert on Osing music who had friends in all the right places. Within minutes he had made some calls and commissioned a performance for us in Kemiren later that day.

Thus we found ourselves in Kemiren once again, paddy-side, the rapidly bubbling sound of angklung churning from a paglak high above our heads. After chatting with Pak Aekano's contact, who was surprised to meet not a tour group but an eager American and his girlfriend, I was invited into the musical watchtower with a gesture and smiling "go on up!"

I climbed up a narrow bamboo ladder and perched myself on the hut's edge, realizing that this was no expansive Swiss Family Robinson treehouse: four musicians (Pak Dalah, Pak Rayis, Pak Muni, and Pak Ribut) were crammed into the small space, shredding away on angklung and kendang. I set up my recorder and settled in, taking in the view of verdant green rice paddies from above while trying to follow along to the relentlessly interlocking rhythms these amazing musicians produced.

I was astounded - farmer's music I've heard in the past, such as the calong and gongga lawe of Mandar in West Sulawesi, is simple and unhurried, unsurprising for music meant to while away a hot day. Yet here in Banyuwangi there was this remarkable music, non-performative tunes played for this same purpose, yet brimming with virtuosity and complexity. And even more remarkably, very few if any researchers beyond Pak Aekanu have expressed any interest in this music whatsoever.

Pak Aekanu was pleased, as were the musicians who played for us, that interest was being expressed in this obscure, unheralded artform. Humble yet complex, this music deserves to have its day, to extend beyond the rice paddies in the sunrise of Java and into the ears of those who never knew such a place even existed.


A big thanks/terima kasih banyak to Pak Aekanu, without whom this documentation would not be possible. Matur nuwun to the musicians Pak Dalah, Pak Rayis, Pak Muni, and Pak Ribut, as well as to Ms. Sinta Dwi Mustikawati, my constant travel companion/translator/notetaker extraordinaire.

Tarawangsa: Sacred Strings in the Hills of Sumedang

[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]

Location: Ciwindu, North Sumedang, West Java

Sound: Tarawangsa

In distinct contrast to the gamelan Sunda, with its elaborate array of gongs and xylophones, tarawangsa music is a shockingly spare art form, pure and minimal. The music is played on just two instruments: the tarawangsa, a two stringed fiddle played upright like a rebab or small cello, and the jentreng, a seven-stringed zither (confusingly, the names of both instruments can be used to signify the musical genre as well.) These instruments are unique and inseparable - unlike other Sundanese instruments like suling or kecapi, the tarawangsa and jentreng are only played together, and only in a small handful of villages scattered throughout West Java, most famously in villages on the outskirts of Sumedang, a city to the west of Bandung in the heart of the highlands of Sunda.

Tarawangsa is often described as sacred music, and rightfully so - it is not the kind of Sundanese music that one might hear in a hotel lobby or a wedding party. The music is inextricably wrapped in elaborate ritual, and is almost always paired with an upacara adat, or traditional ceremony, usually connected to ancient animistic rituals related to spirits, fertility, and agriculture.

An integral part of this ritual is the trance dance which accompanies the tarawangsa music - men and women take turns getting swept up in the web of melody and rhythm that the two musicians weave, swaying and bobbing with long colorful scarves in a beautiful freeform dance which often results in the dancers becoming possessed. This possession takes many forms - I've seen old women stagger and sway as if drunk or having a seizure, and I've seen men transmit messages from the spirits within to the audience of friends and family members, sometimes through wailing and tears.

Tarawangsa compositions unfold as a captivating ten-to-twenty minute crescendo, beginning slow and melodic, the simple plucked strings of the jentreng providing a rhythmic and harmonic base for the soaring melodies, built on the typical Sundanese pentatonic scales of pelog, salendro, and madenda and played on one steel string of the tarawangsa. As the dancers fall into trance, the music becomes droning and percussive as the tarawangsa player begins simultaneously drawing his bow in harsh strokes across one string while plucking the drone string with his free hand. Just as the music and possession reach their peak, the musicians suddenly cut the trance short with a pluck of the jentreng, and the dancers awaken from their altered state.

Context:

It was nearing midnight when Kang Krisna stopped his motorcycle on the dirt road ahead of me, the sound of the motor and the glare of his headlight abruptly cut off. "Listen," he said in Indonesian. "You can hear it already."

We were only half an hour or bumpy driving from the main road with its truck convoys plowing through the night, but it already felt like we were in another world. I peered through the moonlit hills, searching for the source of the sound: an amplified keening of steel string pierced the cool air, floating over rice paddies and frogs croaking in the dark.

"Everyone is very excited that you are coming. The ceremony is over, but the music is just beginning."

The ceremony Kang Krisna had invited me to that night was called bubur suro, a ritual of thanksgiving for the rice harvest. Village women had spent the day preparing bubur, a kind of rice porridge steamed in a packet of leaves, the food representing both an offering to Dewi Sri, the goddess of rice fertility, and a symbol of past and future prosperity for the village. Now the midnight dance session would begin.

We drove on into the village, pulling up at a sparely lit wooden pavilion with village elders lining the outer edges. At the far end of the pavilion sat the two tarawangsa musicians, nearly invisible behind a massive display of offerings, from effigies and bamboo trays of vegetables to clusters of plastic water bottles (the energy of the music and ritual throughout the night would, I was told, supercharge the contents into holy water.) A cloud of thick, sweet smoke drifted from a bowl of incense, smelling of lavender.

After offering a humble two-handed handshake and greetings to every man in the room, I was asked with smiles and beckoning hands to sit on the bamboo mat surrounding the "dance floor" while being plied with coffee, snacks, and questions.

Meanwhile, the musicians played on, the sounds drifting amplified through the air as slow and sweet as the incense. As the piece continued, men would rise from conversation and drift from the perimeter, prostrating before the offerings, saying a prayer, and wrapping long, colorful scarves around their necks. Some men merely swayed in place, grasping at the ends of their scarf, while others moved about the room in the firm, aggressive yet graceful dance so particular to Sundanese men. Women watched and waited on their side of the pavilion, folded scarves rhythmically bobbing in their outstretched hands.

As the night wore on, the music worked its way through my ears and into something deep inside me. After numerous calls to join the dance, I found myself unable to refuse - suddenly I was scarf-wrapped and swaying with the others. While no spirit possessed me, the music somehow seemed to, my feet following the slow tempo of the jentreng's plucking, my arms, scarf in hand, rising and falling to the sound of the tarawangsa. I felt both self conscious and delighted as kneeling grannies giggled at me from the sidelines and men approached me again and again, draping me in more and more brightly colored scarves (a gesture, I can only hope, of welcoming, not ridicule.)

While the spirits may have felt reluctant to enter this bule's body, they seemed to readily enter others. My friend Kang Krisna spent hours in a glacial orbit around the room, eyes closed, as if some far off place. Other men had dramatically different reactions - at one point, an older man approached the pile of offerings and grabbed a kris, a kind of twisted dagger thought throughout Java to be loaded with mystical spirits. Shaking and grunting with wide eyes, the man pranced about the room, shaking the sheathed dagger over the heads of prostrated women as if squeezing a fruit of its juice. The women, clearly flustered, beckoned other men to sit between their side of the room and the dancing space, buffering them from the intensity of his possession.

Suddenly, one of these men, having taken a puff from a cigar from the pile of offerings, broke into a wailing sob, flinging his feet forward while women prayed over his body, holding his head in their arms. As powerful energies seemed to swirl through the room, the women took a batik sarong and held it over their heads as if cowering under a torrential downpour. The women too began to cry, palefaced and shaking. I hesitantly perched on the small stage's edge a safe distance away, confused, disturbed, and entranced all at once.

As the music reached its percussive crescendo, the man who had been parading with the kris collapsed as well, his friends hovering above him, holding his hands as his legs trembled before him. Suddenly, the music stopped, the silence somehow louder than the frogs outside. The men slowly sat up, as if from a dream, or a nightmare.

After Kang Krisna had awoken from his trance, I approached him and asked him about what I had seen that night. "Honestly, I'm not usually the type to fall into trance, but recently I've been feeling it's power more and more." He explained that when in trance, he feels as if something his moving his arms and legs for him, puppetlike. When asked to explain the crying, he suggested that perhaps the people were possessed by spirits of their ancestors, and that it was also possible that they were expressing regret for failing to obey adat, or traditional law and custom, in their daily lives.

While Krisna tried his best to help me make sense of that evening, I left feeling bewildered, as if I had stumbled upon something beyond my capability to understand. Maybe I wasn't meant to understand at all, and maybe I never will.

Notes on the recording: This recording isn't as "perfect" as I'd instinctively like it to be - the tarawangsa and jentreng are amplified through a primitive sound system, and more obviously, there is the sound of conversation throughout - you can clearly hear one of the village elders quizzing me on my life in Indonesia and my experience in Sumedang behind the sound of the tarawangsa. But I have to remind myself, and I'd like to remind you too, that the reason I don't record in the studio is because I want to record the sounds of Indonesian music as they exist in their natural habitat, in an aural environment as "natural" as possible. For much Indonesian music that is performative, the audience does not sit enraptured and silent as in a Western opera house - they chat, joke, and come and go as they please. Even for music as powerful and sacred as tarawangsa, the villagers in attendance can verge from chatty inattention to dancing entranced themselves, sometimes within the space of minutes. Something to keep in mind as you hear voices dance around the sound of fiddle and zither...

Sounds of Sundanese Street Musicians, Pt. 1: Busking on the Fringes of Bandung

[Aural Archipelago has moved - why not read this article there? Lots more material at www.AuralArchipelago.com]

Location: Taman Hutan Raya, Bandung, West Java

Sound: Pop Sunda/Musik Jalanan (lit. Street music)

In Indonesia, sometimes you follow the music, and sometimes the music follows you. As I've previously discussed in my post detailing siter music in Central Java, the practice of busking takes quite a different form here as compared to the West - while Western buskers pick a spot in a well-trafficked public area and hope to catch the attention of passersby, Indonesian buskers make money on the move. These musicians usually work by roaming from warung to warung, playing a snippet of a song and then offering around a hat a plastic cup to the discretely disgruntled diners, who usually cough up a few hundred rupiah just to get the riff raff out of their hair.

Because of this technique, street musicians (or pengamen in Indonesian) have no particular imperative to be good - in fact, as I mentioned in my previous post, their technique is often to be so bad as to make their audience bribe them to go away. This leads to countless punks half-heartedly strumming Oasis songs on painfully untuned guitars and old beggar men walking from car to car at red lights, repeating the same sad, flat suling riff to each window.

Nonetheless, there are gems in the world of Indonesian street music. While cities like Jogja are more famous for the variety and nostalgia of their street music (keroncong groups and traditional instruments like siter are more likely to be found there), Bandung still has its occasional diamond in the rough, from surprisingly virtuosic violin and guitar players playing weirdly countrified duets to roving dangdut duos with electric guitar and handmade portable kendang, sometimes made from PVC pipe and tire rubber.

Wherever a crowd is to be found, undoubtedly pengamen will follow, whether it's a warung, a traditional market, or a volcano. This recording was made in a large, forested park on the northern fringes of Bandung, which shows that this street music needn't be on the street at all - the only requirement is large crowds of people willing to be pleased or annoyed enough into letting go of some coins.

While street music can vary from Western ballads to dangdut, this particular musician opted to play something with some local flavor - a song from the pop Sunda repertoire. Pop Sunda is a form of popular music, sung in the Sundanese language, usually heavy on synthesizers and other Western instruments but maintaining Sundanese melodies and often featuring Sundanese kendang and synthesized versions of traditional instruments.

In this stripped down acoustic cover of a song by pop Sunda artist Doel Sumbang, the musician transforms the upbeat, synth-driven track (extolling the virtues of Sumedang, a small but well-known city to Bandung's east) into a slow, almost mournful piece. It's interesting to note how in it's acoustic setting, the guitar performs its own emulation of other musical forms -  in the short melodic runs, the guitar sounds distinctly like a kecapi, the Sundanese zither, while in it's syncopated strumming, the nostalgic acoustic strumming of old time keroncong comes to mind. This clever street musician is clearly hitting his audience with something he knows they will respond to - nostalgia and ethnic pride.

Context:

Living on the northern outskirts of Bandung, it's comforting to know that peaceful, green respite is just a few minutes drive at any moment. One weekend a few months back, some friends and I decided to escape the traffic-clogged streets and head for the hills, hiking through the nearby pine forest and into the tourist favorite Taman Hutan Raya, a protected natural area popular with likeminded city folk looking for some fresh air and natural vibes.

As I wrote before, where there are crowds, buskers will follow, and on this day a few scrappy young men with even scrappier acoustic guitars were walking along the green paths of the park, approaching strolling groups and trying their luck. I'd wanted to start recording street music in Bandung for quite some time, but had always felt that the deafening environs and "play until they pay" technique of the musicians I usually encountered in the city never leant themselves towards an attempt. When I heard a musician playing this haunting, distinctively Sundanese song, I worked up the resolve to ask him to play it for me in full. After a short bemused conversation ("Where are you from? You like Sundanese music??"), he happily agreed.

Note: I regretfully forgot this guy's name after asking him, as I so often do. If any local musicians know him, please let me know!