Kanten, Master of the Windmills

Landing in Indonesia nearly a month ago with (generously put) very loose plans, I started my Watson year with a rather crippling need for day-to-day purpose. Forty-eight hours into my fellowship, a phone call with a musicologist left me possessed to fill this void by learning as much as I possibly could about a type of rare Balinese music-making windmill known as pindekan. On Aug 6th, 2026, I fatefully vowed to find the pindekan masters of Bali, understand their craft, and learn how to make musical windmills myself.

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I love pindekan because they are the original drum machine: a wind turbine spins a shaft which moves blocks up and down in a specific way to generate specific rhythms. If you've ever programmed drum loops in a music software (or you’re a dinosaur who physically programmed drum loops on an analogue drum machine), you already understand this process we call beatmaking. As soon as I learned of pindekan, I was consumed by the idea that the people who make them are also beatmaking, just using wood and wind instead of a laptop.

Thinking of music in terms of mechanically programmed rhythmic loops (something that feels distinctively modern to me) is a practice that has really been around for hundreds (if not thousands?) of years. Pindekan became, to me, a beautiful and counterintuitive way of thinking about music technology.

If you search up pindekan online, they are often compared to Aeolian Harps, a class of wind instruments found all over the world that are played by the wind itself. One of my favorite Aeolian Harps is the Croatian Sea Organ. There's also all sorts of indulgent weird sound-art harps like this. Pindekan are not technically wind instruments in the organological sense, but they are sound-making systems that relegate some control to natural processes (namely, wind). This was a concept I thought about a lot when designing my fellowship, so it seemed like fate that I had encountered an example of it in Indonesia so quickly.

Big Pindekan does not want you to find their operatives.

The fact that pindekan exist somewhere on the island of Bali is really about all the useful information you can find from online searches. I realized early on that my quest would demand a different type of research. Specifically, it demanded the type of research that starts with a tip from a cashier at a sandwich shop in Denpasar, who recommended I wander fields in the Gianyar region of Bali to find these elusive windmills.

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Four days into the Watson, with nothing but this cashier's word, I found a homestay in the heart of the Gianyar and started my search. Deep in a jet-lagged, existential-anxiety-induced haze about what I was doing on my fellowship, I started wandering for hours on end, with no real plan. I took myself to every craftshop I could find, and used my mime skills and Google Translate to ask where pindekan could be found. I got little information, until eventually, I was told to walk down a street (Jl Sri Wendari) outside Ubud. I took the advice, and walked down the street repeating my charade with shopkeepers. A variety of old men I talked (or gestured) with would chuckle, and point north when I brought up the image of pindekan saved on my phone. This happened enough times that I became convinced that by continuing north I was nearing my prize. But as more hours ticked by with no pindekan in sight, I realized that they perhaps meant I had to go very far north, and were chuckling because of how ridiculously long it would take me to get there on foot.

Moments before giving up on my trek, I happened by an instrument store. I stepped inside, and met Tapuik, the shopkeeper. He was roughly my age, and helped run his father's instrument store. Together they make some combination of cheap instruments for tourists and custom-made drums for musicians. He wasn’t sure where I could find pindekan, but I grabbed some photos of his store with my camera before I left, and got his phone number. Soon after, I gave up on my northward search.

A few days later, Tapuik texted me. No words. Just a screenshot of a Google Earth street-view capture of a store that had pindekan outside. This was IT, I thought. I thanked Tapuik immensely, and loaded up the address. It was, oddly, an hour and a half south of me.

I didn't give it a second thought, and hailed a motorbike. I arrived at the store from the photo, and sure enough, there were pindekan everywhere. An old woman sat out front of the store, and she soon called her daughter over who spoke a little English.

Many of the artisan storefronts here, like this one, are attached to traditional Balinese homes. The craft tends to be made in the home, and then brought out to the streetside stand for sale. I assumed this was the case here, and I asked the daughter who in her family makes pindekan. She quickly corrected me that their pindekan are not made here at the house, but all come from one man, who supplied basically the whole region with pindekan. I asked where he could be found. She lifted her finger, and pointed... north.

Ah yes. What luck! I had traveled in the complete wrong direction only to get the exact information I already had. She continued, telling me she had no idea the name of the man who makes them, nor exactly where his shop is. All she could say is that he lived "a stone's throw away from Tegallalang."

This was an incredibly confusing statement to me. Tegallalang is a whole city/village, so I really had no idea what she meant. On the back of the motorbike home, I internally berated myself a little for not asking more follow-up questions about the location, and seriously decided once and for all I was giving up. There was just no way I was going to find this guy. I wilfully resigned myself to a peaceful life of pindekan abstinence.

Days later, after moving on to study Gamelan, I once again found myself with nothing good to do for a day. So, I decided to take myself to Tegallalang to site-see, and take some time away from my project.

The tourist side of Bali is on another level in Tegallalang. There are ornate, themed, made-for-instagram swings over the valley and an industrial holding pen to house tourists while they wait for their turn to walk the rice terraces. It was absolute madness. In my state of initial Watson homesickness, I really couldn't stand being around happy families and couples on vacation, so I despondently stormed out of the complex. Even though I had promised myself this was going to be a day off from my project, I decided I would just spend fifteen minutes or so asking people about pindekan before I returned home. This had strangely become something of a routine for me to fall back on.

I wandered past an old warung (street cafe), where an old woman and a younger man sat out front. I walked up to them and asked them if they knew who made pindekan. They shook their heads, and I left.

But then the man called me back. He motioned for me to sit down, and Wayan, the old woman, gave me coffee. He made a few phone calls in Indonesian, and then motioned emphatically for me to get on the back of his motorbike. He spoke little English and I had no idea what was going on, but I sized the guy up and reckoned best case scenario he was taking me to see pindekan, and worst case scenario I could take him if he tried to kidnap me. He took me 20 minutes north of Tegallalang, to an old streetside woodshop. A sign with the name "Kanten," painted in big red letters hung from the roof. Pindekan hung out front. He explained to me via Google Translate, much to my disbelief, that he had “taken me to the home of Kanten, the man who makes the musical windmills.”

At this point I had spent the better part of two weeks searching for pindekan before giving up. I couldn't believe how suddenly I'd just stumbled into the right place. Kanten was not home that day (he was off doing big pindekan deals, I am told), but his wife told me to come back the following morning.

Thank you, Kanten.

I brought my Indonesian tour-guide turned friend Joe from Ubud to translate for me, and met Kanten at his shop the next morning. Together, we spent hours with Kanten and his wife and granddaughter. Kanten showed us the whole process of making pindekan, and I had a whole list of questions to ask him, which Joe translated for me. It was everything I’d been hoping for.

Kanten told me he thinks very consciously about the rhythms he’s creating, yet he does not think of himself as a musician (he chuckled at me when I suggested he was one). One of my assumptions about this year was that the instrument makers I would meet and work with would also consider themselves musicians. This seemed so obvious to me. But so far, I actually haven’t met a single instrument maker who also refers to themselves as a musician (even a Gamelan maker I spoke with just days earlier did not consider himself a musician). It’s funny how constrained the definition of musician can be sometimes. In my mind, Kanten is a composer with thousands of wind driven compositions deployed across Indonesia (yes, he estimated he’d made thousands of pindekan). He’s literally decimitating drum loops like nobody's business. But Kanten would disagree, considering himself through and through a woodcarver.

This is entirely my own unproven theory, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the definition of musicians is constrained here because the most prominent form of music is quite structured and institutionalized (for lack of a better word). If you are a Gamelan musician in the Gianyar region, you are associated with a temple, a village, and a performing group. You’re part of a “scene,” that you likely grew up being a part of. When this is the primary way of music-ing (especially for older generations in these rural areas), it makes sense that the musician label is not naturally expanded to people composing sounds outside of this world.

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All I wanted was for Kanten to consider himself a beatmaker. Like a hip hop producer; DJ KANTEN. Maybe Yung Kanten. I had many ideas for his underground beatmaker pseudonym, but I lacked the guts to lob this joke over the very real generational and linguistic divide between us. Joe, thought, or at least pretended to think, my joke was funny as we rode his motorbike back to Ubud. I did manage to get a laugh out of Kanten by showing him a video of the Blockenspiel (although, I realized in the moment it may have come off as some strange information-age automation of his craft).

Like many of the other instrument makers I’ve talked to here, Kanten got into making pindekan because his father did it. None of Kanten’s children are interested in taking up the craft. This is a trend I’ve heard from many makers in this part of Indonesia: hard economic times, and the allure of higher wages from tourism industry jobs are making it harder and harder for the young generation in Gianyar to keep traditional crafts like pindkean alive. Kanten told me that he actually doesn’t know a single other person in Bali making pindekan anymore. I’ve been able to find one other person since speaking to Kanten (on the north side of the island) but I think it’s no exaggeration to call it a dying craft.

As Joe and I sat next to Kanten making a windmill for us, I thought for a moment about how lucky I was to be able to witness this craft. I came so close to never finding my way here. The kindness of absolute strangers brought me to this point and I can only hope that the rest of my Watson will succeed on the same kind of serendipitous generosity.

Sometimes I question why I spent so much effort working on this. But one thing I’m learning on this fellowship is how nice it is to be able to follow whatever interesting thing shows up in front of me, without having some sort of huge academic justification from the get-go.

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If you find yourself in need of a rare musical windmill, I’m proud to say I know a guy. In fact I know the guy. Kanten might be able to squeeze in a pindekan or two for you at the right price. Letters to the editor are once again welcome (henrywburkhardt@gmail.com), but only if they include serious business inquiries for my man Kanten.

Until next time,