Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how composers use music to transform our relationship with water near the Murray Mouth. Involving interactions across ethno-and anthropocentric boundaries, music sustains new languages of awareness and care which (re)compose space through polyrhythms of ontological significance.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the work of philosophers Henri Lefebvre, Édouard Glissant and Gaston Bachelard on rhythm, relation and water, this presentation explores how several composers, sound artists and performers use music to reimagine and transform our relationships with watery areas near the Murray Mouth. By engaging in composition processes which require exchanges and interactions across and beyond ethno- and anthropocentric boundaries, these artists redefine musical creation as a form of recuperative and restorative collaboration. Sounds become memories, and musicians are historians tasked with retrieving residues and shards of acoustic meanings in profoundly disfigured (arrhythmic) areas. Saltwaters are at the centre of these composition processes: stagnant or lapping, they reverberate and speak through the music by simultaneously contracting and unfolding the space-time continuum. Their sonic viscosity enables the artists to hear (recover) resonances and echoes, and to consequently reveal and expose polyrhythms with which to compose beyond the exploitative shadows of areas devastated by salinity. Infused with saltwaters, these repetitive acoustic layers craft an acoustic experience which generates transformative encounters by stimulating emphatic and visceral communions between listeners and place. Such music thus shifts and reconfigures how listeners perceive these areas. As such, it (re)invents and sustains new languages of awareness and care which are cognisant (rather than defiant) of salinity. These languages do not occupy space, but (re)compose and nurture it through rhythmic accumulations and proliferations of ontological significance, as both the environment and its traditional custodians, the Ngarrindjeri Nation, contribute to their formation.