It’s been years since I went cassette hunting in Sumba, the southernmost Indonesian island, slightly west of Timor. At that point in time there were a relatively small handful of musicians making copies of cassettes to sell. The vast majority of these were locally produced, recorded in one take on a ghetto-blaster, and either dubbed, or simply re-recorded before making it’s way to vegetable and plastics markets in Waingapu and Waikabubak. There were also a couple ‘Sumbanese’ cassettes floating around, recorded in Jakarta with drum machines, keyboards, and all of the flimsy karaoke production values one would come to expect from some of those recordings. After a week of exhaustive searching all over Waingapu, I was able to obtain a dozen or so cassettes of Eastern Sumbanese Jungga music created for commercial sale… an industry in it’s infancy. I am unaware of any publications, or previously released or accessible recordings of music of this nature from East Sumba, so I feel very fortunate to have some of these recordings in my humble little collection.
