The Spirit of Things: Day 1

'The Spirit of Things - Sound of Objects' is a research, history, arts and cultural project that explores residual and embedded stories and songs retained in Aboriginal cultural material. The projects creators (known as The Spirit of This Collective) will sit with objects held in the Australian Museum and listen as they tell their story. They will then interpret those sounds into song and image and release them into the world where again they can breathe and speak.

Nardi Simpson, Kaleena Briggs and I arrive at the Australian Museum in Sydney to begin the first phase of connecting with and releasing embedded songs contained in cultural objects that are held at the museum.

We’ve been talking about this project, ‘The Spirit of Things – Sound of Objects’, for some time so it’s an exhilarating feeling to know that it’s finally coming to fruition. It’s not going TO happen…it IS happening!

When we arrived in the room where the artefacts are housed we split into different directions in order to have individual time with the objects and interpret our responses through written and spoken words, photographs and visual imagery.

I think some common feelings among the three of us was a deep sense of reverence and respect for the objects and their original makers combined with a curious anticipation as to what the sonic expression would manifest as.

After a couple of hours with the objects we headed off to a separate space to debrief, share some lunch and discuss our experiences and thoughts. Based on our interactions with the objects, the afternoon was spent song writing and workshopping musical ideas for the audio component of the project.

It went really well, we had a flow on, and we sketched out the bones of three new songs with rhythm and melody. Thank you, Day One!

~ Syd Green