Diplo Jammed With Habib Gunjat, Indonesia's Viral One-Man-Band Keyboardist, at a Bali Afterparty

A Grammy Winner Picks Up Someone Else's Keyboard in Bali

On October 8, Diplo posted video from the afterparty of a charity run in Bali, and the most interesting performer in the clip stood just out of frame: a man working a Yamaha keyboard like a full band, laying dangdut syncopation under a set that had already been loose and bright. The run itself, organized by Runhood Running Club, brought ten Bali run crews together for a sunset 5K raising money for communities in East Nusa Tenggara. The sound was booked out to a small outfit from the other end of the archipelago: Alun Butuuni Sound, whose lead keyboardist is Habib Gunjat.

Who Habib Gunjat Is, and Why Indonesia Already Knew the Name

Gunjat, also known online as DJ Habib Gemoy and DJ Bumblebee, is based on the other side of the Indonesian archipelago from Bali, in Kendari, the capital of Southeast Sulawesi, a province that almost never comes up in conversations about Indonesian dance music. His format is organ tunggal, "single organ": one keyboardist on a Yamaha PSR, a bank of sample packs standing in for drums, bass and horns, and a soundsystem doing the rest. It's wedding and street-party music, built for villages rather than clubs, and Indonesian viewers already knew Gunjat well before this clip, through his own videos circulating online. In the footage, a GRAMMY winner watches him play for a while, then asks for a turn at the keys himself.

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Koplo Keeps Swallowing Whatever's Around It

What the two of them landed on blends Diplo's presets with koplo rhythms and the Lulo dance patterns of Southeast Sulawesi. Koplo, also called dangdut koplo, grew out of classic dangdut in the smaller cities of East Java in the early 2000s, when musicians started layering in syncopation and kendang breaks borrowed from Sundanese and East Javanese percussion. In an essay for the Goethe-Institut's Nusasonic project, musician Yennu Ariendra argues it's quietly Southeast Asia's most popular dance music, despite circulating for years mostly on pirated VCDs and being looked down on by plenty of Indonesians who'd never admit to liking it. It's also absorbed pop, metal, house, hip hop and K-pop along the way, which is how a one-man band from Kendari ends up trading keyboard runs with the producer behind Major Lazer. Surabaya's ANTI.TRUST Records is working the genre's harder edge right now, splicing it with breakcore; Gunjat works it straight, for anyone standing near a phone camera.

What Actually Changes Here

Not much, yet. Nobody's announced a release, a tour or even a second video together, and Alun Butuuni Sound is still, as far as anyone can tell, a soundsystem-and-entertainment business booked out of Kendari rather than a global act. What changed is who's watching: a clip that would normally circulate among Indonesians who already knew organ tunggal landed instead on the Instagram feed of one of the most-followed producers in dance music, captioned like any other tour stop. For one week in October, Southeast Sulawesi's biggest musical export was a wedding keyboardist with a day job waiting for him back in Kendari, not a festival headliner.