Nadeem:
Ancestors and oceans
It always starts with the ocean — moana, solwara, vast blue expanse; unifying link — the Great Ocean. A constellation of lands, seas and peoples that have long known Indigenous being, thinking, and relating through sound, story and collectivity.
Before colonial and evangelical interference, sound had been a paramount and persistent communal system of the archipelagos. In contrast to the elitist western lens, where classically-trained musicians 'master' finely-crafted instruments, island musicking is a little different, with often blurred distinctions — between instrument and object, audience and participant, musician and collective. Communal ingenuity, play and urgency conjure new forms, rhythms and melodies. Sound as celebration, communication, and ceremony.
Throughout time, our ancestors navigated isles and seas in search of more — wayfinding to greater heights in the binding exchanges of known and unknown. We can think of these cultural and genealogical expansions as life brooding amongst coral reefs — spreading out, into and through crevices beyond. These movements — a product of currents, time and distance from the 'source' (here too, forever fluid in its inception point) are echoes — each with its own unique passages, influences and complexities.
Ephemeral sound and media/memory elasticity
Of the listening world, we (as in everything, ever) have always experienced sound as temporary and finite — to be heard, struck, uttered, or projected in an inescapable succession of present moments. In response, there is an intricate tapestry of hyper-specific noise, cultured across this great rock, weaving sacred bonds between present and past.
It’s only quite recently that our sensory experiences have become tangled in physical and digital media environments. With new abilities to record, synthesise and transfigure sound, we can create or suspend any single moment, birthing it across multiple forms, contexts and (com)positions. Media has become elastic, and by extension, so too have our individual and collective memories.
Ripley:
Great Ocean Volumes
Great Ocean Volumes evolved as an exchange between friends sending MP3s back and forth followed by exclamations 'that goes hard' and 'siccck'. Connecting over a yearning to hear echoes of the Pacific in the music of the present. Three weeks of collaboration at Arts House’s CultureLAB led to us devising methods of research, experimentation, making and thinking. We had begun our wayfinding, feeling oceans of sound, history, and culture opening up. As we approached, it felt appropriate to begin with the past.
Voices of the past
Auspiciously, we came across We Carry Their Voices, which led us to Huni Mancini and her work at the Archive of Māori and Pacific Sound. Through Zoom, we met Huni, a Tongan-Italian archivist driven to ‘keep our ancestors warm’ by making the recordings available to community. Huni explained the intentions behind the archive, how it operates and how to access the recordings.
Requesting recordings from across the Pacific, we focused on Sāmoa and Papua New Guinea. We spent the first few days just listening as we began organising the gigabytes of sound.
The first thing we noticed was that it was inherently difficult to access these recordings. They exist in online storage drives with Excel spreadsheets that are not so intuitive to navigate.
What if these recordings were more available, accessible, able to be streamed? How would that change communities’ interactions with, or knowledge of them? We reflected on the way that the recordings were catalogued according to the name of the anthropologist who captured them… How is there agency when there’s a microphone in the room?
The earliest sounds were from Sāmoa, dated 1910–1911, recorded on wax cylinders when Sāmoa was a German colony. Among others, Jaw harp recordings from Papua New Guinea. We were intrigued by how the Jaw harp as an instrument crossed continents, hemispheres, decades and centuries. The raw metallic drive generated by the instrument foreshadowed punk, industrial and club music. One recording we agreed was basically straight up techno.
Meeting the instruments
The following week we met with self-described tutū, Pania Elmsly. We were in her studio, at her family home in the southeast of Naarm. On the walls were images of family members beside sporting trophies and a single Māori doll.
Pania works using clay to make ‘Taonga pūoro’, which translates to ‘singing treasures’ in Te Reo (Māori). Pania spoke to us about how she began making uku tangi (pūoro), how her mutant style grew out of a lack of access to knowledge holders and the methods of instrument creation. Māori historically used both hue (gourds) and clay to make Taonga pūoro. Without access to hue, Pania began to create using the materials sourced from Country. The clay she used to make her first instruments came from a fissure that appeared near a beach. Another batch was waste from a Bunnings construction site. As she told these stories, we looked over the many different shapes and sizes, glazes, etchings and forms of experimental making.
Pania was able to make a sound from nearly every object placed on the table. We were in awe. She spoke to us about breathing; how each breath makes an impact even if it doesn't generate a noise. Gradually, with patience, breath, minor frustrations and shared laughs, Nadeem and I slowly began to catch the air and push it through the instruments. Pania then guided us in creating our own pūoro. With neither of us being Māori, we were grateful for the invitation to share in this practice. We marked our own designs on the pūoro, which were later pit-fired. Through experimentation and Pania’s knowledge of the pūoro, we were able to create flutes of different registers that spoke to us. The goal was to learn about how sound begins and resonates within these instruments, in creating mutant versions of our own.
Nadeem:
Fractured memories
After a series of card swipes, sharp turns and concrete staircases, there’s a door to a temperature-controlled room in a warehouse in Coburg. It’s the storage facility for Museums Victoria’s Moana Wansolwara Collection, and curator-conservator Jade Hadfield (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga, Ngāti Whātua ki Kaipara) leads us through. Under fluorescent lights, thousands of distinct customary objects are confined to the seemingly endless lanes of shelves, crates and drawers — an incredible spectrum of Indigenous specificity. Each item was tagged with a collection number, place of origin, and (assumed) cultural function; many details are missing or omitted. These objects are of obscene colonial circumstance, and there’s a haunting feeling in the air — of deep lineages extracted from their contexts and held in stasis, lying dormant.
We engaged with the collection over two trips, welcomed through ceremonial cleansing of our bodies, and closed with a karakia (a Māori incantation to acknowledge spirit worlds and ancestors). Delicately offered on Tyvek beds were kundu, pātē, ocarina and nose flute. They were intuitively sensed, held, struck and breathed into.
Oceanic transmutations
Together, we have different cultural histories as Sāmoan and Papua New Guinean diaspora raised on foreign lands. Amongst the dispersed, there’s often a recurring awareness — to live between worlds marks a greater distance from any. While our access to and embeddness within our customary landscapes vary, our questions form parallel pursuits. What duties do we have to the genealogical stories we’ve inherited? How can we honour, channel and expand on these memories in our current contexts? And what of the gaps we encounter along the way?
In framing sound as a continuum, auditory practices can present distinct opportunities to collage with the metaphysical; guiding, guarding, and gleaning new evolutions of cultural data. These practices are vessels that place the deep streams of our genealogical pasts into the present and beyond; speculating on Oceanic futurism and the hybridisation of noise, imbued with nuanced, sacred and mutant potential.
we carry the echoes of our ancestors
the meeting points between contexts
tides, ripples and currents cross distance and time
vast worlds of sound and specificity
beyond archival protocols, within customary sensitivities
reverence, curiosity and caution
grace in the unknown processes
unmuting, resounding, awakening
oceanic, indigenous, environmental, elemental
cultural transmissions through mutant praxis
¹An amalgamated concept across the diverse currents of the Pacific. Through it, we unite seas, mountains, animals and plants with Indigenous complexity and relationality.
² Huni Mancini, ‘We Carry Their Voices’, West Space, Melbourne, n.d., https://westspace.org.au/offsite/work/we-carry-their-voices.
³Tutū is a Māori noun. It refers to someone who mucks around and tinkers — pulling things apart, figuring things out, fixing what isn’t broken, or breaking what is whole.