Karambangan music in Leboni, Central Sulawesi

Leboni is a small village on the edge of Lake Poso, high in the mountains of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Its inhabitants are almost all one big family, transmigrant Rampis from the district of North Luwu in South Sulawesi. In one humble home, situated within a cacao plantation next to the massive Saluopa Waterfall, live a family of musicians who play a unique style of guitar-based music called karambangan.

This unique family band has taken Portuguese-inspired fingerpicked guitar and Christian hymn-inspired vocal harmonies and added homemade ukeleles, bamboo flutes called seruling, and a one-stringed bowed instrument, borrowed from the local Pamona people, called geso-geso. The simple chords and homespun instrumentation lay the foundation for poetry sung in the local languages of Pamona and Rampi.

-Text by Palmer Keen