Carrying Songlines Across Worlds
by Raquel Pinheiro
We spoke with Australia musician and composer Peter Knight about Hand to Earth, and his solo and other collaborative work.Hand to Earth have released a new album Ŋurru Wäŋa, co-produced by Peter Knight and Lawrence English.
Hand to Earth are coming to Europe from September 12. Peter Knight has an upcoming album For A Moment The Sky Knew My Name, will be released on 21 November, with the first single out 11 September.Hand to Earth are a unique ensemble carrying the living Wägilak songlines through Daniel and David Wilfred, preserving one of the world’s oldest continuously practised music traditions. Hand to Earth music bridges cultures, combining tradition with contemporary exploration, honouring Wägilak oral tradition.
Lineage & Preservation
Hand to Earth carries living Wägilak songlines through Daniel and David Wilfred, connecting directly to the world’s oldest continuously practised music tradition. How do you, as collaborators, approach supporting and honouring that lineage while also creating something new together?
We try to bring what we each have to contribute to the creative table and make sure that all voices have a space to be heard. Daniel said something very instructive once as a reply to a question posed in a masterclass: ‘I sing my song to them and they sing their songs to me.’ It made me realise that for him we each have a song, just as he has his song, and that all of our voices are important in this relationship and this musical setting.
I personally also try to help in practical ways and two years ago started a fundraising project with Jerry Remkes who I worked with at the Australian Art Orchestra. We raised money to buy a vehicle for Daniel so that he can travel to remote places to conduct cultural business, and teach the young kids about culture. This is something Daniel asked us to do to help keep his culture and song strong in the future. Everybody in Hand to Earth has played a role in this campaign, which has now successfully delivered a vehicle called the Ngukurr Culture Car.
Daniel has described being a song keeper as both a responsibility and a joy. Could you share how this role is understood in your ensemble, and what it means for listeners encountering these songs for the first time?
I don’t want to presume too much or to be speaking for Daniel, but my impression is that navigating between the Yolngu world and the non-Aboriginal world is challenging at times for him. The context he works in Hand to Earth is so different to what he is doing as a song-keeper when he works in his community, running funerals, circumcisions, and other cultural business. It’s ritual rather than ‘performance’.
When people going to a concert hear Hand to Earth for the first time and hear the songs Daniel is singing in his Wägilak language, I think they are moved because even though they can’t really understand the import or all the meaning of those songs, they know there’s something very deep happening. I think they are also moved by witnessing people working together across the cultural borders and barriers that normally divide us to create music that speaks to human commonality.
Collaboration & Context
Hand to Earth new album Ŋurru Wäŋa expands the ensemble with additional voices and textures. How did these collaborations shape the music, and what guided the balance between tradition and experiment?
Lawrence English had a big hand in helping to shape the sound of this latest album and also our last album, MOKUY. He is an incredibly perceptive person and often notices things or possibilities that we have not thought of. It’s really special to have somebody outside of the dynamic of our ensemble who we really trust and who can see it all from a slightly different perspective.
We were also lucky to do some touring with the violinist Amalia Umeda from Warsaw. This was part of a project instigated by Piotr Turkiewicz from Jazztopad Festival (Poland) and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival. We played in Europe, the US, Canada and in Australia together with Amalia. When we were in New York, we had the chance to do some recording and recorded a piece called The Crow which is on this new album.
The percussionist on the album on the title track is actually my son Quinn Knight, who is an amazing drummer. I roped him into recording on Ŋurru Wäŋa one afternoon and he made a beautiful contribution. It was all quite spontaneous.
You are about to perform in prestigious venues such as the Barbican and Pierre Boulez Saal, and collaborate with Shabaka. What shifts when these songs and improvisations are carried into such international contexts?
We have done quite a lot of collaborating as a band and so it feels quite natural, as long as people bring a good spirit and openness to the musical meeting. We find a way to make something interesting happen. Shabaka is an incredibly open spirit, as well as a brilliant musician, and we are very much looking forward to playing with him. We are also collaborating in Belgium with the incredible Sami artist, Ánnámáret and I’m looking forward to that too.
It’s worth noting that Hand to Earth actually began at a residency run by the Australian art Orchestra called the Creative Music Intensive in the Southern Highlands of Tasmania. I was the Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra at the time and had invited both Daniel and Sunny Kim to be part of the faculty for the residency.
Hand to Earth began as an informal jam between Sunny, Daniel, and I, and the moment that Sunny and Daniel met there was an instant rapport. During those residencies Daniel and David and the rest of us also regularly collaborated with all the young artists attending and so this musical conversation – this spontaneity – is very much part of the DNA of Hand to Earth.
Ŋurru Wäŋa involves field recordings and atmospheres from Lawrence English. How does place and environment feed into Hand to Earth’s music?
This album is all about place. All about the sense of belonging and a sense of what ‘home’ means. This notion of home and belonging is related to place – to physical place – but is also a kind of meta concept. I think that for Daniel and David place is at the heart of everything. The connection to land, and the connection of land to the stories that relate to particular places are central. But the notion of place also exists as a kind of dreaming. I don’t fully understand all of this, but it is an amazing thing to be around.
Lawrence is very tapped into this notion and is one of the sound artists who has really influenced how field recording and a sense of place exists in contemporary music. He also has a very deep and sensitive relationship with David and Daniel and he listens intently to what they have to say. You can hear the seriousness of his engagement in the work he produces, not just in Hand to earth, but in many other contexts as well.
Ŋurru Wäŋa was co-produced by you and Lawrence English, with Lawrence also handling the mix and mastering. How was the experience of shaping the album together, and what did Lawrence brought into the sound and spirit of Hand to Earth?
I love working with Lawrence. We have really developed a flow between the two of us and we seem to work at a similar pace. When things are moving then they move quickly. I think Lawrence as a producer works like an improviser (which really suits me as that’s my main training). He is flexible and likes things to flow with spontaneity and ease. At the same time there’s a deep rigor in the way he works, and hopefully in the way I work as well.
I have also collaborated with Lawrence on my two recent solo projects, the second of which, For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name, is about to be released on ROOM40 We also produced The Prey and the Ruler together with Senyawa, and there’s another one of those in process at the moment.
Personal & Future Directions
What have you personally learned from working so closely with the Wilfred brothers and the Yolŋu tradition?
I have learnt so much that I honestly barely know where to begin. I think a lot of the learning is about my sense of self and my identity in this place we call Australia.
My family arrived in Australia only in the last 150 years from England and Europe.I’m living in a land that was inhabited and that had so much rich cultural life for 60,000 years previous to that.
The history of invasion and colonialism and everything that followed is a burden we all carry whether we realise it or not, whether we articulate or not. I grew up in an Australia, which had perfected the practice of forgetting and historical erasure.
Witness the nomenclature: Terra nullius. We pretended nobody was here, or that the people who were here had no ownership of, or connection to, the land. This is the very definition of wilful ignorance.
As a nation [Australia], we are all grappling with this legacy, and it will take a long time for that process to play out. One of the amazing things about Hand to Earth is that I feel in music and art we can address this legacy in some way.
The music we make is not didactic though – we’re not trying to directly answer issues or questions. Rather, we are just trying to be together in this moment, and be real about this moment while expressing our relationships and the legacies of our combined histories.
Music is often described as a bridge. How do you understand the act of listening across different worlds – cultural, musical, spiritual?
I guess this question relates to my previous answer quite directly. Music is a bridge because it can express things that we can’t put into words. It can express things that we need to express when language fails.
It can also take us deeper – below intellectual conceits to something more primal, more emotional, more physical.It’s not a direct or simple path though and I wouldn’t want to be thought of as too grandiose in my ambitions for this band.
For me, it’s both deep and profound, and also quite simple: we are five friends, with different backgrounds, we like to hang out and play music together. Sometimes we push the record button as well!
What are your hopes for Hand to Earth in the coming years, and how do you see the ensemble evolving?
My hope for Hand to Earth is that the trust we have for each other continues to deepen and grow. This is the basis of everything in this group.
We’ve done a lot of traveling now – we’ve traveled across North America, Asia, Europe, and we’ve also been to some pretty remote places in northern Australia.
It hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes it’s been unbelievably fun and sometimes it’s been really quite difficult. But these experiences are all valuable in terms of building trust and it is from trust that the music flows.
In terms of my ambition for the band, I think the bigger the better. For David and Daniel playing at places like the Barbican Center in London, Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, and the Lincoln Center in New York, represents something really really special. These venues have a powerful cultural imprimatur in Western culture but they also have power in remote Aboriginal communities like the Wilfreds’ home in Ngukurr.
When we played at the Lincoln Center they were sending home so many videos showing where they were and there was a real excitement in their community. It makes the young people excited and it makes the young people want to sing the songs because they see what Daniel has been able to do – what he’s been able to achieve singing the songs. It makes them want to play the didgeridoo because they see David playing the didgeridoo in these amazing places all around the world.
So, I would like to do more of this. I would like to play beautiful festivals and create spaces where this culture can connect, and where this idea of what contemporary Australia can be heard by as many people as possible
Beyond this ensemble, you have your own concerts and projects — do they feed back into Hand to Earth, or does your own work stand in a different space for you?
I do have quite a few other projects, in particular my new solo album – For A Moment The Sky Knew My Name coming out on ROOM40.
I also have a quartet with my son Quinn, the incredible Australian bassist, Helen Svoboda, and brilliant young guitarist, Theo Carbo. It’s called TL;DR and it’s a band I really love playing in. We just released our debut record and we did a large Australian tour.
I’m hoping to take this one to Europe and beyond as well. All these other projects do feed into Hand to Earth because I continue to develop an idiosyncratic language on my instrument with electronics, and in Hand to Earth I have the space to bring that to bear. It’s a similar thing with Aviva and Sunny.
As I said, at the beginning of this interview, we sing our songs to one another and bring our musical and personal perspectives into this musical conversation we call Hand to Earth.
Hand to Earth are:
Daniel Wilfred – voice, bilma
David Wilfred – yidaki, voice
Sunny Kim – voice, percussion
Peter Knight – trumpet, electronics, synthesisers, bass guitar
Aviva Endean – clarinets, winds, electronics
Hand to Earth in concert:
September:
12th (Friday): Shabaka and Hand to Earth, Barbican Centre, London, England
14th (Sunday): Galerie Boomerang Amsterdam, Netherlands
17th (Wednesday): Ánnámáret and Hand to Earth, De Singel, Antwerp, Belgium
20th (Saturday): Shabaka and Hand to Earth, Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin Germany
Peter Knight in concert and at the Europe Jazz Conference
September:
18th (Thursday): Knight & Buck – Peter Knight (trumpet, delays, laptop), Tony Buck (percussion), Sowieso, Berlin, Germany
21st (Sunday): Knight & Piotrowicz – Peter Knight (trumpet, delays, laptop), Kamil Piotrowicz (piano), Hala Koszyki, Warsaw, Poland
25th-28th: Europe Jazz Conference Bari, Italy
October:
06 th (Monday): Kight & Anastasakis – Peter Knight (trumpet, delays, laptop), Jannis Anastasakis (guitar), TV Control Centre (KTE), Athens, Greece
22nd (Monday): Raki + Infinity – Earshift Music label showcase
Raki (Daniel Wilfred, Paul Grabowsky, Peter Knight) + Infinity (Jeremy Rose, Novak Manojlovic, Ben Carey, Alexander Flood), Melbourne Jazz Festival, Melbourne, Australia
Mondo Bizarre Magazine 