BY LILY BRYANT
When you first press “play” on Spinifex Gum’s title track, you’re not sure what you’re hearing. It sounds like a crash cymbal, or maybe a washing machine, but soon morphs into a regular pulsating beat. Suddenly, they come in: the voices of Marliya Choir. A group of young Indigenous women and girls, presenting their punchy, dynamic vocals over the sonically manipulated chug of an iron ore train, straight from a field recording made in the Pilbara by Felix Riebl, The Cat Empire’s former frontman, and now a core collaborator on the Spinifex Gum project.
It quickly becomes clear this is a youth choir sound like you’ve never heard before.
MSO + Spinifex Gum is a collaboration between the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with Felix Riebl, bandmate Ollie McGill, and the Marliya Choir of Gondwana Voices, along with Lyn Williams AM, Emma Donovan, and choreographer Deborah Brown. The result is a totally unique sound that can captivate audiences across Australia with its warmth and power.
The original song cycle, released as a studio album in 2017, encompasses songs of injustice and protest, of community, of friendship, and of Australia’s natural beauty, inspired in particular by the stories of the Yindjibarndi people in Western Australia. Ahead of their third studio album, they present a concert experience with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, bound to add a new musical dimension to work that is confronting in its message, and beautiful in its joy.
Felix’s involvement with Spinifex Gum began in 2015, when he travelled to the Pilbara region to hear a group of young girls and women from Cairns sing under the directorship of Lyn Williams AM.
“I fell in love with this young sound,” Felix recalls.
“The sound of this choir was so unique; they could phrase in a way that was just so interesting. They were just a fantastic young choir.”
Inspired by the beauty and the power of Marliya, Felix (pictured below) and bandmate Ollie McGill worked to create a collection of songs to celebrate and honour the Pilbara and the Yindjibarndi people, incorporating their language and stories. Prominent community member Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation CEO Michael Woodley became a significant collaborator with Spinifex Gum, particularly in supporting the use of the Yindjibarndi language in song.
“I made lifelong friendships within the Yindjibarndi community especially, and Michael who’s been a collaborator from very early days,” Felix says.
“We are singing Yindjibarndi language, and Michael Woodley has been a translator and consultant, and he’s also involved quite heavily as a songwriter. I ask him if things are appropriate or not to be sung, and he’s very, very clear with that.”
It was a new vision for a youth choir that inspired Spinifex Gum’s distinctive sound, enhanced by their original production elements.
“The singers in Marliya can harmonise absolutely exquisitely, and there are beautiful flourishing choral moments in the show. But the first [conversation] was: ‘We’re gonna invert what a choir does’,” Felix says.
“They’ve all got their own microphones. We wanted to get a choir that sounded like an in-your-face pop vocal as much as we could.”
The authenticity of Marliya’s sound emphasises the music’s deep connection to the Pilbara, as well as reflecting Felix’s own experiences with the Yindjibarndi people, and on Yindjibarndi land. The songs themselves utilise field recordings taken by Felix and Ollie on one of many trips to the Pilbara, including the very first sounds on the Spinifex Gum album.
“I went round with a field recorder, and just took sound samples of everything. I went into the mines, I went around the community, around the country there, and we had this whole range of sounds,” Felix says.
“The first album starts with an iron ore train that makes this kind of whistle. And we just tuned it to different notes and made a synthesizer out of a train, and that becomes the melodic electronic hook for the start of that track.
“The bass drum in that song is a basketball hitting a backboard that we just tuned down a lot. So really, the rhythmic tracks came out of the landscape.”
Narrative inspiration was taken from a series of culturally significant texts documented by the Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation, as an effort towards the preservation of the Yindjibarndi language. These texts detail contemporary stories of the community’s experiences since invasion.
“Things like the damming of a river that’s in Yurala, and the significant things that were lost there; that’s a story that I learnt from reading the Juluwarlu text that had been dedicated there.”
For audience members at Hamer Hall, there’s something to look forward to in new track Ganalili. The song details the story of the harrowed Victoria Hotel in Roebourne — a significant site for the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody — which in 2014 was bought by the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Council and rejuvenated for the community.
“The Ganalili song really traces the history, the dark history of the Vic Hotel. ‘Ganalili’ means dawning – the dawning of a new time in that community, which I believe it is.
“The Ganalili song will be performed and I think that’s going to be a very special moment,” Felix says of this upcoming MSO event.
Alongside beautifully woven narratives, Spinifex Gum offers political commentary on issues such as deaths in custody, youth incarceration, and land rights disputes, each of which disproportionately affect Indigenous people across Australia. Songs like Locked Up and Miss Dhu provide searing and confronting commentary on the realities of the ways in which these structural failings directly affect Indigenous Australians.
As a non-Indigenous creator stepping into that space, it was important for Felix to honour Indigenous communities — and to use his position of privilege to urge non-Indigenous Australians to take responsibility for social injustices.
“To be honest, when I first started the project, I wasn’t sure if I was gonna write anything – or if I should,” Felix shares.
“When speaking of disproportionate rates of incarceration, or of deaths in custody and things like that, I felt it was important for my voice to be in there, because I’m speaking for a non-Indigenous Australia that should be taking a lot more responsibility for those things than it does.
“That’s a structural social issue, and that’s something that I feel that non-Indigenous Australians should be talking about a lot more.”
Felix feels his involvement in Spinifex Gum as a prominent Australian musician can be used as an avenue to inspire audiences towards a more equitable future. Cultural celebration – approached with care, research, and respect – is at the heart of the Spinifex Gum project.
“I’ve been fortunate as a musician and as a songwriter to be able to go into that subtle space, go into places I don’t know so much about, to make friendships, and to slowly, slowly listen. To be in and around that space has changed my life.”
However, even amidst its often confronting subject matter, the Spinifex Gum experience aims to spread hope and joy among audiences. The meeting of contemporary pop with full symphonic orchestration, along with the magnetism of the performers, allows for all audiences to engage fully with the music and its message.
“Classical musicians or classical lovers are going to feel something that is justified for their passion for that orchestral music and that choral music, but it is also very important to say that Spinifex Gum is about turning that on its head as well.
“I really feel like Spinifex Gum has managed to find a space where it can perform at a rock festival and absolutely blow people away. It can perform on a bush stage, in community, on country, and all of the kids are always right at the front and they absolutely love it. But it doesn’t speak to one audience or the other – it just speaks to a human reaction.”
Spinifex Gum is an ambitious and important project. Its influence stretches across the nation, from Marliya’s base in Cairns, to the Pilbara, and now to Melbourne. It features Australia’s newest generation of young artists collaborating with industry heavy-hitters. It blazes the trail of a new musical genre, and at once calls for action and spreads joy.
And most importantly, it gives a literal voice to people and communities who are too often relegated to silence.
When it comes to the impact of this project, Felix says it best: “Spinifex Gum is the most special project I’ve ever worked on. The show is going to be something incredibly special and really not to be missed. This is the project of a lifetime for me, and I want as many people to see it as they can.”
Experience MSO + Spinifex Gum in Hamer Hall, 9 July during NAIDOC Week. You can also listen to the team discuss this collaboration in Introducing Spinifex Gum, 7 July.
READ NEXT: How Spinifex Gum gives “Indigenous women and girls a voice, a sense of power and some agency”
Images supplied.
