308: Les Aborigènes: Chants et Danses de l’Australie du Nord, by Djoli Laiwanga & David Blanasi

Djoli Laiwanga & David Blanasi (Australia)
Les Aborigènes: Chants et Danses de l’Australie du Nord (1980)
20 tracks, 41 minutes
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Of all the music in the world, that of the indigenous Australians is thought to be the oldest living tradition – music performed today is part of an unbroken lineage stretching back 40,000 years. Listening to indigenous Australian music is a special experience that carries with it many millennia of human history.

The music on this album is in that deeply-rooted traditional style performed by songman Djoli Laiwanga and the mago (didgeridoo) player David Blanasi as well as dancers David Gulpilil and Dick Plummer whose stomps, clapsticks and vocal interjects can be heard on the record. The performers are of the Mayali and Mandalbingu people from Arnhem Land in the very north of the country. If you can conjure the sounds of Aborigine music in your head, the chances are it is these musicians that put it there – they were the first group of traditional Australian musicians to perform around the world and on television in the 1960s; for many, this was the first time they’d ever heard this music.

There is really nothing quite like this music. The mago itself is a unique instrument. A long, hollowed-out wooden pipe, it is blown into to produce just one single note, its duration indefinite due to its player’s use of circular breathing. A lot can be made of just one note, however, and the mago’s distinctive sound comes from the player changing the shape of their mouth, altering the pressure within the cheeks and the amount of air being passed through the instrument, and simultaneously vocalising while playing. This creates a rolling, ever-changing tone that creates a bed for the song as well as providing rhythms and mimesis – the imitation of natural sounds. The very first track on this album sees Blanasi imitating the sounds of a dingo with his mago, which would accompany a dance with movements based on the wild dog.

The songs themselves are equally as distinctive in the musical patterns they trace, whether they start at a high pitch before gradually (or dramatically) falling to a low register over the space of a line, or whether they stick to just one or two notes, chanting rhythmically and providing, with the mago, more layers of drones and building up a whole landscape. They sing of profound topics: the beginnings of Earth and of human, the movements of the spirits and the lessons of the ancestors. Famously, many songmen do not credit themselves as composers, as songs are given to them in the Dreamtime and can use them to navigate the world around them.

Listening to this album, it’s hard not to be in awe of this music, which echoes throughout history and still sounds so powerful today. However, it can still bring to mind more contemporary music. The last track, here simply entitled ‘Didjeridu’, is a solo mago piece, but instead of being based on direct natural imitation like the album’s opener, it is a simple pattern of stressed and unstressed ‘syllables’ that cycle across different inherent rhythms. It’s incredibly hypnotic, but what it reminds me of is deep house music. Stick that track on a loop with some heavy bass speakers and a repetitive beat and you could keep a club happy for hours, I’m sure of it. Whether good music is developed yesterday, or in far prehistory, it can always give the listener the same feeling of excitement and pleasure. There’s little better way of experiencing that than by listening to the stuff that came first.