ABSTRACT
The Cikapundung river is among Bandung’s most significant geographical features. It bisects the city as it flows from the high, mountainous areas at the northern end, through the city center, all the way past the southern city limits. For GSA, the path to renewing and reviving their connections to human groups and to the landscapes that nurtured them, even in contemporary Bandung, is paved with bamboo. GSA’s use of idiosyncratic, homemade bamboo musical instruments is the linchpin of the group’s profoundly local sensibility. At its most basic, a celempung in West Java is a bamboo log from which two or three “strings” have been incised from the bamboo’s skin and raised on bridges. Akim maintains a thriving business making celempung and celempung renteng for other musicians, but celempung per se is not part of GSA’s typical instrumentation. Akim started with large hollow bamboo culms, which he covered with inner-tube rubber.
