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Bangpret: Islamic House Jams in Ciater, West Java
Location: Ciater, Subang Regency, West Java
Sound: Bangpret (besides chosen bangpet, gemyung jaipongan, or but gembyung)
Something extraordinary is happening amongst the tea plantations of Ciater in W Java's Subang regency. Hundreds of people are coming together in village courtyards and streets to get down and trip the light fantastic, grannies, kiddies, and hijabis converging ane and all to the sounds of bangpret. "It'due south like at a rock concert" one local told me, and when I finally went to a show, I constitute he wasn't far off. Speaker stacks blasted into a crowd hundreds strong, but the sound washing over the audience wasn't that of electric guitars: it was erstwhile Islamic songs, Arabic language mantras over a gong and pulsate-filled beat.
Bangpret is a relatively new term used but in the tea plantation-rich surface area of Ciater, right at the pes of the famous volcano, Tangkuban Perahu. It'southward an acronym: Bang coming from terbang, a big frame drum, and pret from tarompet, the popular Sundanese double reed wind musical instrument. At it's core though, this music is just a new take on gembyung, a kind of Sundanese Islamic devotional music which featured in one of the first Aural Archipelago posts years back. Gembyung is in the same full general musical family as styles equally widespread as slawatan Jawa in Central Java and kuntulan in East Java's Banyuwangi regency. All of these styles are said to have roots in the use of frame drum for dakwah, the spread of Islam across Java through proselytizing, especially past the venerated Wali Sanga saints. What'south interesting is how this imagined mutual source eventually diverged into wildly different traditions, from the shreddy, Osing style of kuntulan to the wild beluk singing-tinged terbang gebes style of Tasikmalaya.
The gembyung style at the roots of bangpret is found all over West Java, from Subang to Sumedang and even equally far east every bit Cirebon, an area on the border of West and Cardinal Java full of majestic palace rivalries and unique intersections of Sundanese and Javanese arts. These gembyung styles mix interlocking rhythms played on large frame drums with devotional texts sung in Arabic, Sundanese, or a mix of the 2, normally in a Sundanese musical idiom. In Subang, where I've also recorded the former school gembyung style sometimes chosen gembyung buhun or "ancient gembyung", the music is a syncretic fusion of Islamic, Arabic language syair or poetry, and elements of Sunda Wiwitan, the animist Sundanese belief system. Some songs are devoted to Nyi Pohaci, the rice goddess, and the music sets the scene for trance dance wherein dancers are possessed by the spirits of ancestors.
Bangpret yet maintains this core repertoire (lagu pokok) of old school gembyung tunes or "lagu buhun", "aboriginal songs" in Sundanese. Each group may take a slightly unlike repertoire, but for the group in Nagrak that I recorded, it was a setlist of vii songs, ever played in the aforementioned order: "Hu Ya Allah/Hu Ya Mole", "Pinang Kalu", "Ula Ela", "Benjang", "Engko", "Gobyog", and "Ayun Puntang." While the titles are a mix of distorted Arabic and esoteric Sundanese, the songs all characteristic mantra-like refrains sung in Arabic, or at least what is meant to be Arabic. The truth is that, like about Indonesian Muslims, these musicians don't actually speak Arabic, and so the texts end up having the obscure, unknowable feeling of a magic spell. Sometimes, however, the meaning can be surmised: the text of the song "Ula Ela," for example, sounds eerily like the shahada, an Islamic creed first with "lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāh'" or "At that place is no god but god."
Bangpret diverges wildly from archetype gembyung, though, in its presentation. While the cadre repertoire, melodies, even the gembyung drums themselves are nevertheless there, the whole thing is sheathed in the music called bajidoran. Bajidoran is a style of jaipong popular on the northward coast of Java, from Bekasi in Jakarta's urban sprawl all the way to Subang. Named after the solo male dancers or bajidor who flock to these shows, bajidoran takes the frenetic, dynamic rhythm of classic jaipong and smooths it out into a driving, funky beat. In bajidoran, fifty-fifty more so than jaipong, rhythm is king: there's often 2 kendang players, i on each side of the stage, sometimes playing in unison, other times playing interlocking patterns; in addition to these two kendang maestros, there's often a set-upward of three upturned kendang of slightly different sizes playing lxxx's rock-like drum fills on the side. To circular information technology out, 2 or three musicians accentuate the beat with the clang and crash of kecrek, an instrument which in the old days was two cymbal-similar metallic plates. These days, though, it frequently consists of some motorcycle brake discs and flywheels thrown in a broken, upturned gong!
What that all amounts to is a sound which takes much of the complex rhythmic subtlety of jaipong and throws it away in favor of pure groove. Some musicians accept said that bajidoran has roots in the electronic house music folks heard in the suburban discotheques of Bekasi and Karawang. In Henry Spiller's fascinating book "Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in Westward Java," Spiller writes that some bajidoran musicians call this new, continuous groove "triping," "a term derived from the English slang term 'tripping.'" As Spiller succinctly puts it, "in result tepak triping is gamelan with a house beat."
What's remarkable is that these Sundanese musicians didn't take the easy route and only slap a drum machine on jaipong (although that did happen in the 80s: they call it breakpong!") Rather, in kind of the changed of tanji, which takes Western instruments and plays them in a Sundanese idiom, bajidoran maintains the Sundanese instrumentation and uses it to translate the insistent, steady groove of house music. The resultant sound is an uncanny fusion: the kendang'southward upper drumhead is close-miked and turned up to xi to produce a distinctive, near electronic-sounding tone, while the kecreks nail out syncopated rhythms almost similar a howdy-hat. Even the saron, often the lonely melodic instrument in a bajidoran ensemble, plays catchy, looping parts not unlike a firm track'due south chorus synth.
This house music aesthetic equally applied to jaipong had a kind of logic to it: jaipong was already modern, sexy, belatedly-night dance music. Tacking the groovy bajidoran style onto wearisome, spiritual Islamic music? That's a combination that I'one thousand still trying to wrap my caput around. To figure it out, I asked bangpret frontman Bah Caca about it. Explaning that gembyung had only began to morph into the bajidoran-ified bangpret style in the 2000s, Bah Caca reasoned that it was their way of staying current, keeping these one-time school gembyung songs relevant. "If nosotros didn't change the style, this music would be left behind" Bah Caca said. And so, to go on with the times, a handful of groups in Subang (especially around the tea-producing middle of Ciater) started playing what locals at present call bangpret.
What about those "concert-like" bangpret dance parties? In Sundanese civilization, such an egalitarian dance scene is quite an oddity (later I shared some bangpret videos on Instagram, many local friends expressed shock that such a scene existed.) While bajidoran groups often have female sinden or ronggeng vocalizer-dancers up on stage, it's adequately rare to see women in the audience dance. Like then many Sundanese arts, bajidoran and jaipong concerts are generally a man's world. If Sundanese women are to casually trip the light fantastic toe in West Java, its commonly to dangdut or Western popular music. Despite all this, anybody dances at bangpret shows, from your typical middle-aged males to grannies and jilbabed teens. So what is going on hither?
The key, I call back, is in those gembyung songs at bangpret's cadre. A friend in Ciater told me offhand that late night dangdut concerts in the area had been banned for years by local government officials. Such events, and to an extent bajidoran shows, had garnered a somewhat seedy reputation, with many folks drinking and fights sometimes breaking out. And then along came bangpret. The same sexy, modern grooves, but with a pious, Islamic core. There can't be anything seedy most singing devotional songs to Allah, tin there?
And so, I call up, the bangpret craze began. Because of the wholesome religious songs that fabricated up bangpret's cadre repertoire, is must have been that much easier for those who wouldn't ordinarily dance to bring together the fray. Mix that pious image with the seriously danceable bajidoran grooves, and you've got a recipe for dance party success.
In some means, bangpret can feel a lot more bajidoran than gembyung. The gembyung frame drums which are ostensibly at the center of the core repertoire aren't fifty-fifty miked, and they're often put downwards and forgot most halfway through the prepare (the same can exist said for the Subang-fashion tarompet singa Depok, whose uniquely smooth sound can ordinarily just be heard in a handful of songs.) On the other hand, the mystical vibe of gembyung is still quite thick despite the political party atmosphere. Traditional prayers and offerings are given to the ancestors before performances, and dancers often fall into trance, possessed past the spirits of the ancestors who have come up by to mind to their favorite songs.
All in all, I retrieve you tin say that bangpret ends upwards being a special fusion, more than the sum of its parts. It manages to bring in a whole new audition through its danceable bajidoran beats while not necessarily losing the special, heartfelt mysticism that is at the root of its repertoire. Over again, just equally in other styles like tanji and terbang gebes,nosotros accept some other case of Sundanese music which is evolving without giving into the temptation to succumb to global trends. That is, it's modern in a very local, very Sundanese way, and all the ameliorate for information technology.
Context:
I showtime heard almost bangpret from my friend Zezen, a musician from Banceuy, the village in Subang where I first heard and recorded quondam school gembyung years agone. "Have you heard of bangpret?" Zezen asked, and I was very excited to say that I hadn't. What's that?, I think I asked. Tell me more, tell me more than.
I found out that bangpret was booming in Cibeusi, a village in the heart of the jungley mountains of Ciater. I knew the place as the starting point for the hike to Curug Cibareubeuy, a waterfall famously watched over by Pak Ocid, the celempung-playing palm carbohydrate harvester-cum-landscape designer who inspired the first ever Aural Archipelago post. Curious to find out about the side by side show in Cibeusi, I took to social media and discovered a Facebook group for bangpret enthusiasts: 'D'Bangpret Comunity." All it took was a simple query to the members of the group and within minutes I had a date for the adjacent show, a pre-nuptials shindig in the eye of town.
It was perfect timing. My one-time friends Zach, Carina, and Dylan were visiting from California and interested nearly hearing some of this Sundanese music I've spent my years here raving nigh. What a day that would exist: Take them hiking to the waterfall, meet Pak Ocid and his celempung, take a dip in the nearby Sari Ater hot springs, and be dorsum to Cibeusi in time for a rocking bangpret show. Information technology all went almost co-ordinate to programme: the guy who nosotros paid to enter the "Tourist Destination Cibareubeuy Waterfall" not only promised that we'd meet Pak Ocid at the falls, but too that the concert was indeed going on that night, and that it would be huge, "hundreds of people coming!" He was wrong about Pak Ocid, who we didn't end upward meeting that day, merely he was very right nigh the bangpret.
It was a mindblowing party, not only for my green-eared friends but for this veteran hymeneals crasher. The stage was set upwards to the side of Cibeusi's only route, correct in the middle of some stale out rice paddies. The whole village seemed to be there, and the dance party lasted for hours. I was equal parts amazed and perplexed, hearing those former school gembyung songs slathered in these peachy bajidoran beats. I needed more than.
I ended up coming back to Ciater for three more than bangpret shows over the coming months, driving my motorcycle into the hills from Bandung in the night, passing past the darkly looming Tangkuban Perahu volcano and descending through the arctic of the moonlit Ciater tea plantations. The tracks and video shared here are from a few of these nights: a wedding here, a circumcision political party there. While the first ring I'd seen was from Cibeusi, I became a devotee of this other bangpret group, Mitra Wargi from a hamlet called Nagrak. I raved nearly the bangpret experience to my friend Gigi Priadji, a budding documentarian who'due south also been travelling around West Java shooting traditional music for his Trah Dokumenter projection. Gigi'south video skills are mode higher up my own, and so I suggested a collab: Gigi would make a short video, and I'd handle the sound (an incommunicable chore considering the lo-fi soundsystem situation). And so the Trah-Audible Archipelago collab was built-in: the video (lo-fi sound and all) is available for watching in the embedded video to a higher place.
Source: https://www.auralarchipelago.com/auralarchipelago/bangpret
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