Papuan Strings, Pt. 3: Wisisi

Sound: Wisisi (also called iniki one, pesek)

Location: Waena, Jayapura City, Papua

As we reach the end of our Papuan Strings trilogy, I can’t help but marvel at the sheer diversity of expression that has emerged from this format as it spread across the Melanesian world. Outside Indonesia, string bands like Bethela from New Caledonia threw in bluegrass-like fingerpicking, Vanuatu picked up traces of skiffle (see the tea chest bass, which also made it all the way to Halmahera!), and the Solomon Islanders merged strings with their famous bamboo bands (for more, see Michael Webb’s incredible survey, “Melanesian Worlds of Music and Dance.”) Meanwhile, we’ve seen how Biakers embraced the format and helped spread it across the corner of the Melanesian world claimed by Indonesia, from the sweet harmonies of Biak’s yorbo jams to the joyous gospel and thundering bass of Ambai’s songgeri. 

Take a deep dive into any of these traditions and you’ll see how this relatively young format, likely spread only since the mid-20th century, has been embraced, reconfigured, reimagined in each cultural context (as music always does!) However diverse, though, underlying each Melanesian string band variation is music with firm roots in the West: those chord changes, the arrangements, even the song structures all draw heavily from elsewhere. 

There is, however, one remarkable exception: wisisi. Deep in the highlands of Papua, the Lani and Dani people* have taken this format which has spread across the rest of Melanesia - stringed instruments of various sizes, played together - and jettisoned everything else. There are no traces of skiffle here, none of Biak’s boogie-woogie bass. Everything from the shape of instruments to technique, from song form to arrangement is radically indigenous. How did this music come to be? What is its place in highland society now, and what is its future? Incredibly, this tradition has literally never been written about in detail until now, so I feel a certain pressure to get all the details down right. Forgive any shortcomings as I try my best, as a non-expert, to do the story of this incredible music justice. 

I wanted, of course, to go straight to the source. Ideally, I would fly to the town of Wamena in Highland Papua (Papua Pegunungan, one of six newly parceled provinces in the region) and set out to meet string-pickers across the greater Baliem Valley. This particular dream, however, was ill-timed: months before I landed in Papua in the summer of 2024, a pilot from New Zealand named Phillip Mehrtens had been kidnapped from a rural airstrip by members of the West Papua National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (Operasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM.) The Indonesian state apparatus in the highlands, notoriously oppressive, was on high alert, and friends in Papua’s capital of Jayapura dissuaded me from waltzing with my cameras and microphones into a fraught scene. 

Modern Papua is a place of great internal migration, though, and people from nearly every corner of the region congregate in urban hubs like Jayapura, some fleeing state oppression, others simply looking to work or study. Once in Jayapura, my friend, the Papuan composer Markus Rumbino, was able to put me in touch with the Lani diaspora living on the outskirts of town in an area called Waena. Above the town, on a grassy hill very much like those in the highlands, a student of Markus’ named Nataniel Kogoya had built a homestead. If you want to learn about wisisi, Markus told me, you should head up the hill. 

So I did: Kak Natan picked me up at the top of the hill and led me down an earthen red road to his homestead. Muscled and with a big thick beard, Kak Natan spoke with me in a surprisingly soft-spoken Papuan Malay that sometimes took me a moment to decipher (Papua’s lingua franca is mutually intelligable but in many ways quite distrinct from Indonesian.) As we walked down, I told him how all I knew of wisisi was what I’d gleaned from the pixelated YouTube videos I’d been watching for years: I knew something of the form, but nothing of the content, very little of the context, and could only guess at its history. 

The first thing Kak Natan told me, as we sat outside his house by the pigpen, was: ‘Wisisi, that’s a newer name. It comes from the sound we make as we dance: ‘Wss, wss, wss.’ We Lani, we used to know it as iniki one.” As Kak Natan began to fill me in, friends began streaming in, homemade guitars in hand. The betelnut I’d brought as a gift was passed around, and it began to rain. 

Only the eldest, Pak Jami, could really remember life before the guitars came. For thousands of years, highland groups like the Lani and Dani were largely a singing culture: there were mouth harps, single-note flutes, even mouth bows, but the bulk of music-making was vocal. But what variety! In the 80’s and 90’s, French archaeologists researching stone tool-making in the highlands recorded a vast collection of vocal expression, from yodels to beautiful falsetto laments to the world’s most mysterious overtone singing (!!!) There were songs for funerals, for working in the yam gardens, for war.

Iniki one, Pak Jami explained, emerged from courtship song: men and women would gather in a communal space and sing kole ndawi, the men presenting woven bracelets to the women they had their eye on in a ritual called tenggen gokwi. Starting sometime around the 70’s, instruments of the string band began to be incorporated. 

I actually reached out to one of those French archaeologists, Dr. Pierre Pétrequin, to ask something that had been confusing me: they’d been working and recording amongst the Lani since the 80’s, yet no guitars showed up on their otherwise comprehensive collection. Were there no guitars around at that time? 

Dr. Pétrequin thoughtfully replied, sharing how he and his team started seeing guitars some time around the 90’s. They were, however, in some of the most remote parts of the region, purposefully working as far from outside influence as possible so as to study the 10,000 year old stoneworking culture. Writing with a clear suspicion of what he called “rampant acculturation,” Pétrequin explained how it was likely “bapak-bapak guru” (schoolteachers) and Christian missionaries who had introduced the guitar to the region.

For me, this history tracks: unlike coastal regions of Papua like Cenderawasih Bay, which had seen Dutch presence and wide trading for centuries, Papua’s central highlands were famously ignored by the Dutch, largely unexplored and unexploited until being “discovered” by Westerners in the late 1930’s. In the 1950’s, when the wider region was still claimed by the Netherlands as Dutch New Guinea, the area was opened up to missionaries, who soon streamed in even as the new state of Indonesia took over. 

Many of these “bapak-bapak guru,” it should be mentioned, were often Biakers, as there is a long tradition of folks from Biak taking up head roles in both church and the nascent state, and I can speculate that it was from Biak that the string band format was introduced to the Baliem Valley area (even now, Biak-style bands with stembas basses played horizontally, guitars, and ukuleles are sometimes played in towns in the region.) The adoption of Western string instruments was likely pushed along by the Suharto government in the 1970’s, especially with initiatives like the infamous Operasi Koteka which “attempted to rid highland people of their penis gourds and impose conformity with Indonesian standards and ideals.*”

The fascinating thing is that, despite these pressures and “rampant acculturation,” highland folks like the Lani soon took this format, the string band, and made it entirely conform to their culture and aesthetic, not the other way around. 

Take the instrumentation: Lani people still call their instruments guitar (“ejo gitar” is as close to an indigenous name as Kak Natan could get - literally “wooden guitar”), and the string band roots can be seen in the range in size from double bass-size gitar nggok (“big guitar”) to ukulele-like gitar buluk (“small guitar”, sometimes called pesek). However, these instruments have clearly been radically reimagined, both in form and technique. Highlands “guitars” are treated almost like zithers: never fretted, the strings are plucked by both hands with idiosyncratic open tunings that remind me of the overtones of the ubiquitous pikon mouth harp. Since fretting is out, adding notes means adding strings: gitar nggok necks are often super wide to accommodate up to twelve nylon strings. If you take a close look at the playing of the ukulele-like gitar buluk, you’ll see that, though strummed, the technique is like that of a Sudanese lyre or the homespun kecapi I recorded in Aceh, with strings selectively dampened to produce melodies. 

Vocal music in the Baliem region is often beautifully polyphonic, and the picked out patterns on the ejo gitar mirror this: when playing, anywhere from two to a dozen different instruments will overlap interlocking parts to create a cohesive whole. There is likewise none of the rigid harmonic directionality of other string band music: instead, just like Lani vocal music, pieces are often based around alternating drones, with a piece starting whenever someone gets inspired and stopping when the moment has run its course. 

Wisisi is sometimes purely instrumental, but just as often the picking of the ejo gitar is used as a bed for sung pieces which are also polyphonic: singers call and respond, dip high and low, create little variations before converging again. It’s as we dive into the world of these songs and their stories that we can really get a feeling for the heart of this music.

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As Pak Jami and Kak Natan explained to me, the guitar-based format of wisisi first took root when it was still called iniki one and played for the courtship ritual of tenggen gokwi. This context, of young men and women meeting together and flirting, is abundantly clear in the lyrics of wisisi tunes. 

True to their roots, the lyrics and stories at the heart of sung wisisi are often what I would call relational: at their heart, they’re almost always about relationships, about bonds being made and bonds broken. As an example, I’ll share a few variations that Kak Natan broke down with me for the piece called “Sari Wae.” 

Each piece of sung wisisi is strung together on the fly as a medley of stories connected by a repeating refrain. These refrains are meant to bring all of the singers together as somebody thinks of what story to sing next - when nobody can think of what to sing next, the refrain is repeated until the piece dies out. In “Sari Wae,” this refrain harkens back to the relational context of tenggen gokwi, with the repeated “sari wae limuli” and “sari wae bulanbu” roughly translating as greetings: hello sister, hello brother. Sometimes these refrains can also be filled by what Kak Natan calls “kata mati,” literally “dead words” - nonsense words and phrases to fill the space (in “Sari Wae”, the “dead words” are “sewi se are aria” and “sena se are aria.”

Between these refrains are little stories, likely implied: having a hard time translating them word for word, Kak Natan would take a handful of lines (“Hari hari kubi paga bulan bulan/ kubi paga ari kegak naru”) and sketch out the story: “It means, every day, every month, this woman is always like that, always mad! Whenever they talk, whenever they meet, she’s always ranting…so after a month, two months, the [husband] decides, we’re not living together anymore! I’m leaving! Maybe we’ll get together again someday!” Much is implied: the woman, Natan explains, must be mad because she’s jealous of the man’s first wife. 

As Natan and I went through these little lyrical stories, it was as like opening a tiny window into village life: some were about romance (“This one’s about when your girl is off to find her mother in the yam garden, and you’re worried her mom won’t accept you”) or sex (Kak Natan explained one elliptically: “A man and a woman are looking for a place…there aren’t any hotels in the village…maybe a pig pen, maybe an abandoned house…”), while others offered little glimpses of Lani daily life, lots of walking between remote villages in the mountains: “This one’s about when you see rain clouds on the horizon, and you know you’re still far from home;” “This one’s about when you’re walking to your family’s village in the distance, but it’s getting dark, so you have to stop and sleep under the trees.” 

As Kak Natan explained to me, crafting these little lyrical stories is a great pastime of the Lani. On cold nights, Lani men get together in the honai, a thatched hut reserved only for males, and play wisisi together, in the process teaching each other these short narrative verses. There are only a handful of picking patterns (“Wisisi/Iniki One” is the main one which provides the music it’s name, but there’s also “Nakwewa,” “Wiranare,” and “Shogiara”), but the verses are endless, and each village, each region has its own. 

Life is changing rapidly in the Papuan highlands, and though not yet half a century in the making, these honai-spun acoustic wisisi tunes are already being seen as “old school.” “Nobody down here [in the city] knows the old songs, the real iniki one” Pak Jami lamented as I asked him about his youth picking out tunes at courtship rituals. Pétrequin greatest fear, acculturation, marches on: after the guitar, the most significant musical import into the Papuan highlands has been FL Studio.

Starting in the mid-2010’s, young men in the regional capital of Wamena started to make a new type of wisisi: inspired by an electronic music trend sweeping across East Indonesia (often described simply as “musik DJ” or “DJ music”), amateur producers started putting an electronic spin on the “old” style. Sometimes sampling cell phone recordings of acoustic wisisi, sometimes programming the melodies from scratch, these amateur producers upped the tempo, stuck a 4/4 beat on, and uploaded their creations to YouTube. Throughout the 2010s, electronic wisisi took off, especially at community dance parties where whole villages could now dance to amplified music that was very much theirs. In Wisisi Nit Meke, a documentary about electronic wisisi, a musician is quoted: “In Java, their popular music is dangdut. Well, we wanted to find a music that fit our identity.” 

The melodious, trancey sound of wisisi is now catching on with the outside world: YouTube’s most prolific wisisi producer, Asep Nayak, caught the eye of Java-based DIY music label Yes No Wave, who have been key in promoting wisisi on the global stage. In addition to producing the Wisisi Nit Meke doc, Yes No Wave released the first full wisisi album, Asep Nayak’s Etai Wisisi Waga O Wamena Hanorasuok, a series of bangers recorded and mixed “in Jayapura, Denpasar, and Berlin.” The tide of “acculturation” is even turning: Indonesian artists like Gabber Modus Operandi’s Kasimyn (a key collaborator on Björk’s latest album) cites wisisi as an inspiration for some of his latest sounds and, along with Asep, has helped introduce wisisi to clubs from Bali to Berlin. 

No doubt bolstered by the popularity of its electronic offshoot, acoustic wisisi continues to thrive as it’s increasingly endowed with the revered status of “people’s music”: I’ve seen more than one video of Papuan independence fighters sitting in a field with AK-47s playing wisisi. Considering how often Papuan voices have been suppressed and silenced, this music - which is very much played on their terms, with their particular voice - is an incredibly powerful thing.

*The Papuan highlands are a bewildering tapestry of ethnolinguistic groups, and even just in the Baliem Valley things can get confusing - sometimes folks refer themselves by clans (such as Nayak) or by wider groupings (such as Yali.) The Lani were once grouped in with the Dani as simply “Western Dani,” but more recently Lani have used the term to describe themselves/their language, and the name has seen more use by outside researchers. Wisisi is largely a phenomenon amongst both the Lani and Dani, but because I worked with Lani informants, most of what I’ve written is meant to describe the Lani side of things - it’s not yet clear how much the Dani story differs, though the Dani are very much at the heart of the electronic wisisi revolution, being closer to the center of the Baliem valley and the urban hub of Wamena.

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[Written with extensive input from Nataniel Kogoya - Lani-Indonesian translations courtesy Kak Nataniel. Hormat!]

Terima Kasih banyak kepada musisinya: Kak Natan, Kak Horius, Kak Roni, Kak Yupris, Kak Jeki, and Pak Jami Alom. 

Terima kasih juga kepada Markus Rumbino dan keluarganya untuk bantuannya selama saya di Papua.