A sapulidi is a coconut broom, the traditional broom used in Indonesia to sweep the floor or anything that needs to be cleaned such as a bed or a couch. The word sapulidi is composed of two Indonesian words sapu meaning “broom”, and lidi meaning “coconut stalk”. A sapulidi is made of the stalks of coconut leaves. The leaves are removed around the stalks, then the stalks are dried in the sun and bundled together into a broom. Each sapulidi is made up of 200 stalks. Traditionally, the lidis were wrapped with dried banana leaves to make this an all natural cleaning broom.

The sapulidi is quite short and requires its user to bend forward when sweeping. When visiting Indonesia, a lot of Westerners are always surprised to see locals bent in two whilst sweeping the floor, wondering why they don’t use a longer broom. But as in many traditional societies, sweeping is a spiritual practice. It has the function of protection, purification and attracting good energy. It symbolises to cleanse the space on a physical and meta-physical level, to sweep the old and welcome in a new energy.
When bending towards the ground with the left hand behind the back, Indonesian people are actually bowing down towards the Earth as a sign of honour and gratitude. They will always sweep the house from the back towards the front. The back of the house is a symbol of the past so, the old energy that is swept away.

Besides its common use, in Indonesia a sapulidi is also a tool for magic and supra-natural activities. Rain-stoppers in Bali and Java, for instance, will use the coconut broom, among other items, to move the clouds away, or literally in order to prevent the rainfall. Yet brooms have often been associated with magic, even outside of the Indonesian archipelago. In many Western folklores, the broom is associated with the witches. In the Gypsy traditions, jumping over the broomstick is said to have been part of the wedding rites with the broom as the symbol of fertility, abundance and good luck.

When Catur visited Mali in West Africa, he was surprised to discover that the same short coconut broom was also used as well there, and in the exact same way that Indonesian people would use it: Bowing towards the earth, a hand behind the back, cleaning from the back to the front of the house. This common item suddenly represented a bridge between these two ancient cultures, so far from each other yet similar in so many ways.


“Sapulidi” is the musical piece that creates an acoustic bridge between the first three songs of the album, which are influence with Indonesian music, and the rest of the album’s soundscape. From Bali to Borneo to West Africa, “Sapulidi” blends various musical languages and brings distant traditions closer to each other.
In that same spirit of binding and unification, Catur used two scales for “Sapulidi”; a major and a minor pentatonic.