Moa and Arenla Subong have approached Nagaland's music as a living tradition: something to preserve, perform and continue developing. Through the band Abiogenesis, the musicians brought regional influences into folk-fusion performances. Their best-known innovation grew from a familiar material, bamboo, and an equally familiar action, humming.
How the BamHum instrument emerged
Moa experimented with bamboo to create an instrument capable of producing an expressive sound without requiring complicated playing techniques. After unsuccessful attempts, he developed BamHum, a name combining bamboo and humming. A performer hums into its designed structure, changing the sound of the voice through the instrument. The October 2026 issue says it was introduced publicly at the International Bamboo Festival in Shillong in May 2005.
Arenla, a vocalist and musical collaborator, helped bring BamHum into Abiogenesis performances. Their music combines traditional Naga influences with contemporary arrangements, a style the magazine identifies as Howey Music. The result is an example of heritage expressed through new forms rather than held apart from them.
Awards and a wider audience
The profile reports that Moa received a National Grassroots Innovation Award for BamHum in 2017 and the Padma Shri in 2023. Those honours brought attention to the instrument, but the partnership with Arenla and the ongoing performances of Abiogenesis are equally important to its story. An invention becomes part of culture when artists use it, listeners recognise it and the next generation can encounter it.
Their approach also complicates a simple division between traditional and modern music. Bamboo is familiar in Northeast India, but BamHum is an original instrument. Abiogenesis draws on Naga identity without restricting its performances to older arrangements. That combination gives audiences a way to hear regional heritage as an active source of creativity rather than a static exhibit.
Arenla's role as vocalist and collaborator is part of why the instrument travelled beyond the workshop. A sound becomes recognisable through songs and performances. Together, the couple have carried BamHum into stages where new listeners can encounter both an invention and the cultural context that shaped it.
BamHum illustrates the possibility of making something new from a material deeply rooted in regional life. Moa and Arenla's creative collaboration gives that innovation a musical home. See their story in the October edition.