The absence of sound

E FISHPOOL: Sound is the most deep and innate experience of Country, but it is the least spoken about. We prioritise sound less than we used to in terms of our culture being oral. Because of the imposition of the academy, writing has become a priority. It’s been imposed on us, but sound still cuts through everything.

JOEL SPRING: I think you hit the nail on the head. Because sound is immaterial in the Western framework, I think it is often overlooked. Because it’s overlooked in how it is registered, there’s a strength there, too. There’s something interesting about linking back to our cultures as always being passed down orally that builds a muscle within community, and within certain groups, and within certain spaces. In the more Western frameworks, it’s the other parts that represent a culture, be those the objects or the optics, things which can be stolen or learnt and copied or commodified. I think for mob, there’s a really good way of filtering through all of that noise. Culture has always been sound first, optic second.

Whether it’s language or sound that language comes from, the sound of Country, it’s always been that immediate connection. That’s what language is. It’s between the people and Country.

Really listening to it takes time. There’s such a generosity in listening again and again and again. There’s something that reveals itself to you the more time you give to it. For me, from Wiradjuri culture, Wiradjuri country, Wiradjuri language: that is yindyamarra. That is going slowly. That is showing respect. And when you show respect to something through listening, it reveals itself to you.

E FISHPOOL: Repetition is a really important way to really learn about something through and through.

JOEL SPRING: Listening and hearing are operational in Indigenous communities across the country, across the world. If you want to talk about language, you want to talk about connection, you want to talk about family. Hearing is a resource under colonialism and it’s controlled, dealt with in particular ways for particular means. That plays out at many registers for blackfellas because it is that connection that can be heard and felt that results in ‘ontological disturbance’, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call it. I think about repetition a lot in thinking about dub music or DJing in general. Electronic music is an art form created by Black people, whether it’s Black people in Chicago or Black people elsewhere in the world. It’s making stuff out of stuff that already exists. It’s a relationship to existing art forms or existing ideas to make a new thing, to make a new art form.

E FISHPOOL: Whether my music’s 130bpm, electronic or just a synth piece, all of it is a reflection of the relations that I have with my family – the conversations, the fights, the joy I experience – and the walks that I have on Country. A lot of that is embedded through samples. It’s my thought; a reflection of everything that I experience all the time.

Recently, it has everything to do with fire. It has everything to do with how sad and depressed I am after the fires. Day-to-day stuff, like having conversations with local land services, going to federal government reviews on their policies, and just eating scones and having cups of tea and those conversations often going nowhere, or people being pissed off and then going home. Country’s still in this devastatingly vulnerable position. I ask: “How do we actually fix this?” and then I just make some music. A lot of it’s just an outlet because I’m sad.

JOEL SPRING: I think there’s something really interesting about who you’re addressing, who the sound of the thing is addressed to. There’s a quality, especially the most recent release, that feels like it is speaking to someone more aligned with your own subjectivity.

You’re not speaking to white people with the work you’re making. For the whole arts and creative infrastructure, and media more broadly in the West, the invisible audience is heteronormative, male, straight subjectivity. There’s something joyful about understanding the space that you’re creating is not for that. If they want to listen then they can, but it’s not about addressing them.

Sound and listening are so important and became a focal point in the research that I was doing down on Yuin Country. Sound bleeds through a wall. It bleeds across a boundary line. The sound of an ecosystem, the sound of a system in action or in health or in death bleeds through your property boundary, bleeds through your understanding of the damage done to your house. It’s shared, in a sense, through your presence there, whether that’s illegal occupation or a sovereign connection to that Country, you’re all connected to that sound. It is that relationship that you undeniably are in with Country when you’re on it.

Country’s so much more than just the sound, but it’s something that became really easy to talk to people about too, because the absence of something can be a good way to talk about that thing. You understand that you miss the birds. Whether you’ve been visiting this plot of land for 70 years or whether you’ve had an unbroken connection to that Country, that’s the quality that we understand.

That experience of absence and of silence is a large part of how I have navigated my own connection to culture, connection to Country and relationships as well. My grandmother, my mother’s family, my Wiradjuri family, a lot of them aren’t around. There’s a lot of quietness and a lot of silence in relation to stories of what has happened and things that continue, including a relationship to language.

E FISHPOOL: What you’re saying is something that I feel every single day of my life. There are things that I’m finding out about my family that happened when we were kids and the real reasons why people left. The silence is the story, but then people go their whole lives without saying anything. Then that silence gets passed on and it can break people. It breaks families apart.

It’s completely imposed by colonialism. If you don’t have that testimony, then you’re no one, you can’t live, you can’t be. You can’t live fully as who you are. What you’re saying turns that on its head: ‘This is the evidence. I don’t have anything to say, but this is the evidence that this thing happened.’

It has real life-and-death implications for people because so many take their stories to the grave. People go their whole lives and only say something right at the end. The silence of Country now because of the fires speaks volumes, but then that still isn’t enough to prosecute the government or for accountability.

JOEL SPRING: These aren’t symbolic ideas. I’m not talking about the idea of perfect silence. I’m talking about the absence of sound in relationship to a healthy landscape. I’m talking about a smoke cloud as actually containing everything that was in that place. Everything’s in that.

That’s why we sit with the silence. That’s why we acknowledge it. Because we’ve got to hold it. Holding is a labour of care. Just because we can’t hear it and just because we don’t see, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there and doesn’t mean that it’s not there and doesn’t mean that it’s not a part of us.

E FISHPOOL: I think about the potential of grieving through sound. Two days after my friend died, I went and bought a keyboard. I didn’t talk to anyone for months. I just taught myself how to play piano. It was the closest memory I had of them. That’s how I started making music. I’ve never had any training.

Imagine if politicians sang. Imagine if that was the way that we communicated, even having a difficult conversation with a partner, it would be great. And you could join in.

That is what we used to do. This is how we talked about stuff. There are a lot of ways that communication can be expanded on through sound and made more meaningful and memorable.

JOEL SPRING: I’m interested in the sonic world that is created by the West and colonialism, like what sounds qualify as instrumental. What is nice? And what is not nice? Which pretty much, down to the core, was always racial. It was always, that’s them; this is us. This is what we sound like; this is what they sound like, whether it be through language or musicality, all these sort of things.

But also the way in which vocalising, like singing together and other things, really has power. That power can be good; it can be bad. It’s powerful. The songs that people sing in sport games move people to violence. But also, singing in a choir is good for your body. It is powerful. That’s why I enjoyed going to all the rallies that my mum dragged me to, because I got to scream and swear. Doing that with people is powerful. It makes you feel connected.