Yirinda on combining ancient Aboriginal language with classical music

Helloooooo my Wandering Journo tribe!

I’ve got a band with a unique sound for your listening ears on this week’s Streets of Your Town podcast!

Try and catch them if you can on their tour up the east coast of Australia at the moment. They are well worth seeing and letting that ancient language song and classical music fusion wash over you and take you somewhere past and present combined. It’s really quite incredible!

Hope you enjoy hearing their story of how Yirinda was created.

Meanjin/Brisbane band Yirinda members Samuel Pankhurst (left) and Fred Leone. Credit: Thomas Charles Calder

New Meanjin/Brisbane band Yirinda is widening the scope of musical genres with a unique take blending Aboriginal language and song and classical music.

The band combines ancient Aboriginal language performed by Butchulla songman Fred Leone with dramatic soundscapes from Samuel Pankhurst, along with a string quartet, which when combined invokes thousands of generations of story and culture.

Yirinda has just released its self-titled debut album on vinyl, CD and digital following on from their debut performance at last year’s Brisbane Festival and other performances such as at the Woodford Folk Festival where I caught up with them backstage.

Fred Leone is a song and language custodian for the Butchulla people from the Fraser Coast region of Queensland.

“My name’s Fred Leone. I’m one of the Butchulla Songmen,” he says.

“I’m an initiated Garrwa man on my grandfather’s side in the Territory, and then I’m the senior Butchulla Songman over here for K’Gari, for Fraser Island.”

He’s one of only three Butchulla Songmen who sing in the endangered language—now spoken by just a handful of people.

He tells us on Streets of Your Town—in his wonderful evocative manner—how Yirinda’s unique musical style developed, and their excitement taking their music on the road with a tour up Australia’s east coast, finishing in Cairns on May 31.

“It’s just so great to be able to get these stories out and take people on the journey,” he says.

“Going from recording the songs in the original way or the traditional way, and then the process of working, we recorded it, it was done. Many, many, many hours went into the album and it’s been, it’s so cathartic to be able to perform it.

“Seeing our show, I go into in depth about the tiers of meanings behind each song and the stories go back, those stories are a minimum of 65,000 years old, I’ll tell you the story. Minimum of 65,000 years old, but also how it then relates to the here and now.

“What’s different about it compared to anything else that’s out there, is that ability that it has to just show you a different way of thinking. It’s like it’s out of the norm of regular, what you’d regularly listen to or classify it. It’s almost, I wouldn’t—I don’t want to say beyond classification, but it defies it a bit.”

Fred says Yirinda continues to grow and change, with the music shaped partly by his and Samuel’s shared experiences of synaesthesia, a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting colours or feeling sounds.

“We take people on the journey across, even though the whole album’s in Butchulla, when we play live, we do a couple, one or two songs in my grandfather’s language as well, from up the Territory side,” he says.

“Sam’s amazing. He’s a multi-instrumentalist who plays everything. So it was easy.

“And then being able to bring these stories to life in a way that’s very—well for us it’s that synesthesia. Singing, I see the shapes and stuff, but I also see colours. And so when I hear music, I am always closing my eyes and just rocking away.”

Samuel is an internationally acclaimed contrabassist and music producer known for his kaleidoscopic harmonies and polyrhythmic mastery.

He says while many people think their music is mostly improvised, it is in fact all notated to enable the classical musicians to take part. He’s been defying musical genres and boundaries in his musical expression for a while now.

“Music’s a kind of sound, to me, it’s a thing that is below something bigger, which is sound,” Sam says.

“I have synaesthesia, so when I hear sounds, depending what they are, I get a kind of visual experience that’s involuntary from that. It’s not different colours, for me, it’s like little geometric shapes. So all the things on the album are things that give that feeling to me, that experience, and Fred’s the same. We’re just thinking in visual terms.

“A lot of the stuff Yirinda is trying to do, rather than musical forms in a Western or classical European or American sense, they’re more like—because Fred’s songs, the culture songs, ancient songs, they don’t have the same stuff going on. They don’t repeat in a metronomic way. There’s not like 16 bars and then it goes back to the top again.

“It’s like a sequence of things happen. And how they happen is often dictated by breath or how you’re feeling or what’s going on. So they’re very elliptical. So it makes it very difficult to put stuff around it. You have to sort of reach a little bit deeper to try to find sounds that are right rather than forms that fit around it.

“We did it in a strange way where I just said, ‘look, we’ll record your voice first and then I’ll arrange everything around it’. So even those string arrangements—they are all very much secondary to—he’s done his voice first. Then I’ve plotted out what’s going on with it.”

Fred hopes to meet many people who may have never heard Yirinda’s music at their concerts while on tour.

He wants to share his stories with a Q&A after each show, and show people the beautiful artwork on their debut album, which Fred’s niece and renowned contemporary Indigenous artist Mia Boe created.

“I got all the ochre colours from Butchulla Country, from Rainbow Beach all the way up to Burrum Heads and sand from the island from K’Gari,” Fred says.

“She used all those colours as the palette. I took bags, loads of colours to Naarm down to Melbourne to her. And then she said, after going back and forth with us for a while, ‘this is what I’ve come up with’. I said, ‘What? You’re kidding!’ That album is in itself, is a piece of art.”

You can find more details on the band’s tour dates and where to get their album and listen to some of their music here: https://linktr.ee/yirinda

Follow them on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/yirinda

Thanks for all your support my Wandering Journo tribe! I hope to speak to you soon as I stumble across more stories in my wanderings across this vast land. If you have any ideas for stories don’t hesitate to just hit reply to this email and tell me all about it!

Nance—The Wandering Journo