The Music
Rhythmic rebellion, resistance in another register.
The music is the integration of the mahi, the outlet for my creative voice, the mist speaks. Join the journey on Ko-fi.
The music is the integration of the mahi, the outlet for my creative voice, the mist speaks. Join the journey on Ko-fi.
A G Minor 9, crafted by Tim Tom at Celestial Sounds, loaded into a bus with no clear idea how any of it would unfold. Leaving the city for a small town that already carried its own deep mythology.
The first documentary, "The Unseen," came not long after, with Geoff Reid co-producing. The handpan came too, quiet company while the activism found its voice.
In a fury of synchronicities, I'd woven relationships around the hearth with friends and local musicians who all felt a call to join me on stage. Which led to me playing at most of the major festivals in the region and beyond — Oasis, Yatra, Coalesce, Dimension. Every set carried the same intention underneath it. Uphold the mana of this land and its waters. The dance floor and the campaign were never really separate.
BOTM Hybrid Live DJ Set · Closing performance, Golden Bay Arts Festival, Pohara Hall · Photography: Tamara Josephine
A separate gig, full live set, remastered.
Drums, reverence, the turning of the month. At Pikikirunga, on Canaan Downs, it grew into days. We lived as tribe. Music, workshops, kai, the hearth at the centre of all of it. Trance-state drumming until dawn. Psychic time-traveling with a band of wild magicians and sirens. Off-time, odd-time, rhythms I didn't choose so much as absorb into the body.
On Mokai's land. Just the three of us. Handpan, guitar, a tiny amp, a cajón. KŌHATU began here, before it had a name.
Mokai Parmenter on lead guitar, Anton Borlase on drums, and I, first. Then our mermaid songstress, Amba Ma. Felix Harrison joined on sax. Dash Dandy landed in Golden Bay after Melbourne, picked up the bass, and stayed. Three became four became six. The fire became a stage, the same hearth just larger, the same circle dissolving the line between performer and crowd.
Performed live at one of the first cozy KŌHATU nest sessions, before the band had even fully found its shape.
Felix had already joined the band when we landed in Ōtautahi to finish the principle filming of the bottom trawling documentary. Ambitious, and short on time. We found studio space at his kura. What followed was the most compressed creative sprint of my life.
Ōtautahi · Felix Harrison · Bornofthemist · behind the sessions
Thrown together in those same ten days. Performed once. Recorded once. The room held it the way only a chapel can.
This is what Ko-fi is funding. The EP is still taking shape — the studio time, the mastering, getting it across the line. This chapter is the first thing you witness when you join.
Home studio · Raw take · The idea, half-formed
An idea half-formed, the mistakes still in it, the RAW take before I know if it'll work. I'd rather show you the edge than hide it, as there is often some of the most dynamic free-flow magic in this zone.
They come from somewhere ancient, timeless — the aether, whatever you want to call the place ideas arrive from. I just try to remember to listen, and the music is an invitation to do the same.
A deep cinematic landscape. Wild and untamed frequencies coming through, deeply inspired by the whenua o Mohua. A raw single take, some loose idea of where I was headed, then letting it move. Recorded the night before the Sams Creek occupation, steel holding what the body already knew.
"Each being is born carrying an Orooro, a sacred frequency, a unique vibration gifted by the Atua, the divine breath that moves through all things. It is the song of your soul, the sound of your truth before the world taught you otherwise." As you grow, the tones of others layer over that original sound, the fears of parents, the judgments of teachers, the pain of ancestors who forgot their own. To free the sacred frequency is to remember, listening inward until the true Orooro resonates through every breath. "To free your sacred frequency so that the universe may hear its own sound reflected through you." Umutakarangi Timothy Pahi, Rongomaumau practitioner
Played on a Celestial Sound Handpans G2 Minor "Evaki" 16.
Tim Tom has invited me back. This time with Matthew Reeves to help craft the next handpan and compose a piece on it. A short documentary will follow his process, his philosophy, a lifetime of making. What comes next is already calling.
The raw take. The studio and the mastering. The performance it becomes. Support here funds the music and the film both, moving the work through all three stages. Always underneath it, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet, the same love for this whenua and its water.
See where it goes, and join →
