Rani Jambak Brought a Message of Mourning From Sumatra to Melbourne's Stage

A Water Wheel Learns to Speak

She opened it with a warning. "I did not come here bringing joy," she told the audience at Inter.Sonix 06 in Melbourne. "I came carrying news of mourning from Sumatra."

What followed was forty minutes of sound built around the knock of an instrument she built herself from a Minangkabau water wheel. The set, titled Sounds from Sumatra, was part of Liquid Architecture's Inter.Sonix 06 program. The same evening also featured Chicago footwork originator RP Boo and Australian percussionist Will Guthrie. Twelve days before the show, the death toll from the floods and landslides across Sumatra had reached 435, The Jakarta Post reported, a number that kept climbing for weeks afterward. "If the forest no longer has a voice, let music speak," Rani said.

The Kincia Aia

Jambak was born in Medan and is of Minangkabau descent, the ethnic group whose homeland is West Sumatra. She now lives in the village of Lasi, in Agam regency. She's also a doctoral researcher at Universitas Gadjah Mada, studying sound heritage through Re:Sound, a joint program with the University of Amsterdam. Her academic work and her music feed each other: the instrument at the center of her live shows, the Kincia Aia, takes its name and shape from the traditional Minangkabau water wheel once used across the region to irrigate rice fields and process food, powered by nothing but the river.

Rani's version keeps the wheel but adds wooden pounders, or alu-alu. Each pounder is fitted with a sensor that triggers distinct sounds and electronic samples. It's part sculpture, part sampler, built to argue that a centuries-old irrigation tool and a modern instrument aren't actually two different things.

An Award With Her Name on It

In 2022, Jambak won the international category at the sixth Oram Awards, a prize PRS Foundation runs in partnership with the British Council to recognize women and gender-minority artists innovating in sound and music technology. The panel that judged the 2022 awards included Gazelle Twin's Elizabeth Bernholz and Matthew Herbert. The ceremony ran at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival that November, hosted by BBC Radio 3's Elizabeth Alker. The win came with a talent development bursary and a mentorship programme, modest by festival-headliner standards, but it put a West Sumatran water wheel on the same shortlist as London's experimental scene.

Ten Tracks of Heritage

In March 2025, Jambak released VIBRA GENETIKA on Yes No Wave Music, the Yogyakarta label that has given its catalog away for free since 2007. The seven-track album documents a line of inquiry she's followed since 2013: Minangkabau family history, migration, and what it means to become a wife and mother inside a culture organized around matrilineal inheritance. She produced it, sang on it, recorded its field sounds and mixed it herself; her husband, the artist Hario Efenur, shot the cover photo. Yes No Wave released it as a free download with a voluntary donation option, the same model the label has used since 2007.

From Toronto to Melbourne

Jambak toured Canada with the Kincia Aia in the fall of 2025. Her tour opened at the Guelph Jazz Festival in mid-September. She then stopped at NAISA's SOUNDplay Festival in South River. She also performed at Venus Fest in Toronto. The tour continued with Pop Montreal and Pique in Ottawa. The tour closed at Strangewave Fest in Hamilton, where she shared the stage with Indigenous activist Cody Lookinghorse. In between dates, she guest-lectured at OCAD University. She also spoke to CBC Toronto. None of it reads as a victory lap.