THE DEEP PART
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is Australia's most important voice.
by Samuel J. Fell
Silence. Complete and utter silence. Not for long, maybe only ten seconds or so,
but a silence that threatens to consume the four of us sitting in the control
room at Byron Bay’s Studio 301, if not for what came before it. Music as primal and raw and gritty as can be,
yet as sweet and ethereal as sunshine after a storm, streaks of sound wrought
from the heavens themselves, translated by a man as unassuming as it’s possible
to be. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu,
nodding his head slowly as what he’s just played becomes memory, his hands
finally, after seven and a half minutes, resting in his lap.
Michael Hohnen, Gurrumul’s
accompanist, producer and long-time friend, is smiling. Sound engineer, Anthony Ruotolo and his
assistant are smiling as well, and I’m struck dumb, sitting at the back of the
room, notepad abandoned on the table in front me, wondering to myself where the
music I’ve just heard could possibly have come from, and how I’ll possibly be
able to describe it. The song, played on
an out of tune piano – due to the heat in the studio, Gurrumul needing it to be
as close to the tropical humidity of Darwin as possible – was a rough version
of ‘Ulminda’ which will eventually appear on Rrakala, what will become Gurrumul’s much anticipated second solo
record. He’d finally wandered in, sat
down, and just played this song, virtuosic, his voice on a plain nigh on
improbable, its purity astounding.
“I remember the moment,” muses
Hohnen a few days later, sitting on the grass outside the studio during our
first of many interviews for this story.
“It’s very exciting working with him when he goes into that mode of
‘Nothing else matters and I’m focusing just on the moment and this musical
situation’.
“And that is music in its most
pure form, I think, when you experience what you and I did that afternoon. In some ways it’s kind of why you live or why you are a musician, to go through those sorts of moments… and
there was so much energy around what he did as well which was really
special. It was almost like he pushed
his chest out at the end of it, he knew it was really special.”
“It really is all about the performance,” adds
Ruotolo a few months later from New York where he’s based. “Our job as engineers is to capture as accurately
as possible those critical nuances of that performance. When Gurrumul is in his
zone, it’s something very special.”
As far as Gurrumul himself is concerned, it’s a
lot more simple. “It’s about the head,
you know, it’s the deep part,” he says through Hohnen, tapping his head gently
a few times, just a couple of inches above his forehead, giving that look as if
it is very serious. “’Ulminda’ means the
deep part.”
Earlier that first day, I’d sat with Hohnen and
we’d listened through the entire album as it stood thus far; 12 un-mastered,
unmixed tracks, the bare bones that would eventually come together to make up Rrakala.
Gurrumul himself wasn’t present at that point, preferring instead the
solitude of their apartment, not in the mood to enter the studio, content to
lie on his bed listening to music. I
wondered if I’d get the chance to see him in action, but didn’t press, and
after a few hours of listening and talking, I got in the car to drive back to
Brunswick Heads, 15 minutes up the highway, and before I left I asked Hohnen to
let me know if Gurrumul decided to come into the studio.
It was bright outside, more so because of the
gloom I’d been sitting in for the best part of the morning, and I squinted all
the way home, pulling in, parking, walking up to the house, putting on the
kettle with the intention of sitting down to go through my notes, and then my
phone buzzed, a text message from Hohnen.
“If you want to turn around,” it says, “he’s about to do piano.” I jumped back into the car.
***
The fact Gurrumul will only come into the
studio when he feels like it, interests me somewhat. As both Hohnen and Ruotolo have pointed out,
when he’s on, he’s really on, but as Ruotolo then says, “I think it is a very
delicate place, where he draws his inspiration from, and on the days that he
may feel like maybe he isn’t there emotionally, he leaves it alone.” Hohnen and Skinnyfish co-owner, Mark Grose,
have learnt to roll with these situations, it’s part of working with an artist
like Gurrumul.
The flip-side however, is
worth the wait. “Yeah, when he’s on,
he’s totally on,” reiterates Hohnen.
“The night before [you were there], he didn’t want to go to bed. The others were exhausted, but he was going,
‘Maybe you and I can do something’, so he just wanted to keep going. So when he’s in that mode, he’s really
focused. And he’s so connected to back
home, he’s always on the phone back home, it’s almost like he’s there more than
here a lot of the time. But when he
walks through that door and the phone’s not on, he knows that, essentially,
this is his voice for the next few years, he knows that this is representing
him, so he’s really conscious about that.”
***
In 2008, Gurrumul released, through Skinnyfish
Music, his eponymous solo debut, a record which took the planet by storm,
shaking its very foundation. It wasn’t
the first time he’d been exposed to the world – Gurrumul has a songwriting
credit and an ARIA for ‘Treaty’ (amongst other songs), performed by Yothu Yindi
with whom he played for many years (guitar, keys and vocal), and is a part of
the Saltwater Band – but it was the first time he’d been laid bare on his
own. His rise, which is well documented,
was swift, and as such there’s a lot of anticipation as to whether this new
record will match the first.
“He’d never say this, but I would think he
would hope, or probably expect, it to be popular, because it’s really strong,”
says Hohnen. “He’s put some very strong
songs forward. One of the songs, ‘Baru’,
is about the crocodile, it’s all about him, and I think he would expect people
would like it, because it’s like him singing totally about himself and his
identity. But if I ask him if he thinks
this record will go well, he’ll ask me that back, it’s one of the questions he
won’t answer.”
Indeed, when asked, Gurrumul merely says, “Just
doing more songs. Like the first album
but different. With piano. I just like these songs too. Maybe people will like it.”
***
The base difference between Gurrumul and Rrakala, is that Gurrumul plays drums and piano in addition to the
guitar on this record. “Gurrumul is a
multi-instrumentalist,” Ruotolo tells me. “I spent a few days with him where he wasn’t
near a piano, then all of a sudden he sits down and it sounded like he had been
playing every day, perfect fluid playing.
I watched him lay down a drum groove at Avatar in NYC (where the bulk of
Rrakala was recorded, early last
year) in, like, one or two takes! And it was solid! That’s what struck me most
about him, his ability to pick up an instrument and go.”
Then there are the subtle differences, the ones
that are set to elevate this record, guiding Gurrumul’s star even higher. Watching him in the studio, it’s his
confidence which strikes me, his ability to really push what he’s doing now, like he’s no longer afraid of anything,
although again, according to Gurrumul it’s not like that.
“Michael and I knew people liked the first CD,” he
says. “This is a
bit the same for this one. People like it, you know. I want something that
people like.” Hohnen expands. “He and I are sort of reaching into that well of his,
which is so deep and the only way he wants to really expose that well, is
through his music. There’s a lot of
stuff in there, in his head, that never comes out, from the light stuff you’ve
seen, the banter, the humour, but also all the cultural stuff. And this is his balance he’s found between
the deeper cultural sides of himself.
“We’ve been trying to work out
how we’d actually present the second album, and I think presenting it as him
and his identity is probably the strongest way we can do it.” It’s a way which has seen Gurrumul rise to
the occasion, and as such, the music itself benefits – Rrakala booms with confidence, it radiates power and at its core is
Gurrumul himself, still the same as he was when portrayed on Gurrumul, but bigger and stronger.
***
“When I watch him sing, it’s not like watching
an opera singer,” Hohnen says of Gurrumul a few months after the time spent in
301. “With an opera singer, you can
almost see what they’re doing, it’s this learned process…that’s the first thing
I think about when I compare him singing, how you’ve seen watching him up
close; they’re doing something that’s learned and formalised and I find it’s
almost less inspiring…they’re still acting, most singers are acting.
“So when you’re confronted like you were up
close with Gurrumul, it’s like you’re presented with something that is not
following the path of all those other people,” he adds, searching for the right
words. “I’m sure there are singers out
there who are actually not acting that much, like some of the punk singers, you
know? Some of them are acting, but some
of them are just singing so much about what they believe in, and that’s what
he’s doing; he’s singing totally, totally what he believes in, he’s not trying
to be someone else, he hasn’t watched anyone else, so he doesn’t have
to look a certain way, he’s just
going, ‘I’ve listened to the great singers all my life, and the great
traditional singers all my life, and I need to project like that to get
recognised’, I think that’s how he works.
I think that’s why it’s so refreshing.”
As I leave the studio on one of the three days
and nights I spend there, I say goodnight to Gurrumul, accidentally
mispronouncing his name – more of a ‘Garrumul’ instead of ‘Goorrumul’ – which
Hohnen later tells me Gurrumul found very funny. He still finds it funny, three months after
the fact. During those sessions too, he
laughed a lot and made jokes with Hohnen, interspersing takes with yips and
howls, then he’d turn around and play an amazing piece of music. Of all the musicians I’ve interviewed, at all
stages and ages and levels of popularity, not one of them has been as humble
and naïve and truly free of hang-ups as Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. This is a man with his feet firmly on the
ground, purely because he knows of no other way.
“That’s right,” agrees Hohnen. “He’s just being himself because that’s all
he can be.”
***
During the writing of this piece, Gurrumul and
Hohnen fly down to Sydney to do the accompanying photo shoot. I speak to Hohnen the night before and he’s
excited because Gurrumul is “excited about the photo shoot”, the reason being
he actually understands the gravity of appearing on the cover of a magazine
such as this one. “For years I have had to put up with Gurrumul's taste
in music being different from mine,” Hohnen then wrote to me via email whilst
the pair of them waited in the airline lounge in Darwin on their way to Sydney
the next day.
“Sure we both like lots of the same music too, but
Dr. Hook is never a band I bought CDs of…years ago I remember he says,
"Michael, you like this one?" and plays me a scratched CD he is carrying
around. It is the Dr. Hook song ‘Jungle To The Zoo’. Gurrumul loves it, and I
do too. I never remember hearing it back
in the ‘70s.
“So we go to the airline club and have some lunch
waiting for the plane. I get out my phone and play a YouTube link to him. He
starts laughing from the first few bars of the music – the funny and clever and
entertaining Dr. Hook song, ‘The Cover Of The Rolling Stone’ comes blaring out
of my phone, in the no-phone area of our lounge and a man looks over sternly at
me. I don't stop it because the pleasure
of the moment is too great. Gurrumul,
who ironically will never see it, is totally excited to be getting what
one of his favourite bands sang about.
It's a great clip on YouTube too. It's a Powerpoint presentation of lots of
jpegs of famous Rolling Stone covers
and I flick between watching it and Gurrumul's grin, whilst he listens to the
familiar recording, rocking, funking and clunking away.”
***
I ask Gurrumul who he writes these songs for. “It’s just a meaning, that song, it is just
about that part of the mind,” he says, meaning ‘Ulminda’. I ask about songs in general. “Some for family, or other Yolngu (the
collective noun for all north east Arnhem people who speak this language). Some
for my father or uncle. Or kids to hear in the future. They’re stories, like everyone writes songs.”
I ask where these songs come from, how much he
draws on his cultural past, his cultural identity (the saltwater crocodile),
his people. “This one is what we know,
Yolngu, what we know about how we know things,” he tells, still referencing the
‘Ulminda’ song, before expanding. “From
our stories, and our life. Then I change
them into songs. Like Balanda (white
people) do too, you know? We have a lot of knowledge, so when me or other
family write things, it is just describing things that happen…it comes from
spirit. I am just singing from spirit.”
I then ask about Gurrumul’s family and how they
impact upon his music, how it’s relevant to them, despite the fact it’s been
thrust into the western spotlight. “They
are everything. All family,” he
says. “I sing some song they write too.
Like ‘Bayini’ on this new album, and a funeral song and another one by my
brother Johnno Yunupingu, and another song by Saltwater lead singer Manuel (Dhurrkay).
“My family encourage me,” he goes on. “They want this to be happening. They want
people to know about Yolngu. Family and people just say this is what they
want, to show what we know to the rest of the world. To educate people about our world and our
lives, and how we think and live. It’s
different. It’s different.
My family is everywhere.”
***
I’d asked Hohnen at some point how it made him
feel to watch Gurrumul really nail something.
When he came in to play ‘Ulminda’ in particular – here he was, making
the most of an imperfect situation, what with the piano being out of tune. Hohnen talked about Gurrumul’s strength, and
it occurred to me that that performance was true of Gurrumul’s whole life. Here is a man in an imperfect situation,
being blind from birth, making the most of it, and then some, which is
something Hohnen attributes to all indigenous people. “Yeah, that’s part of their survival
technique in a way,” he explains.
“But I see that everyday,” he goes on regarding
Gurrumul’s strength as a person, as a musician and artist. “When there’s something he doesn’t want to
do, there’s nothing that will change him.
But when there’s something he does
want to do, he really makes it happen.
And that’s probably what’s happened more with this second record, there
was no hesitation about anything to do with it; the New York trip, the Byron
trip, the photo shoot…it’s just part of what happens.”
What has
happened here, what I witnessed and what I’ve been told is almost
mythical. Watching him play in the
studio, smoking a cigarette with him outside, having him remember who I was and
what I was doing, being able to communicate with him, albeit through Hohnen for
the most part, this is all a surreal experience because of how he is. Gurrumul isn’t a ‘normal’ musician, and this
has little to do with the fact he’s blind.
Yes, his blindness does colour how he acts and portrays himself, because
he can’t emulate other people, other performers.
But it’s all so real. And from that, comes
this music. Rrakala. In an industry
sense, an incredibly anticipated release, but in a musical sense, to Gurrumul,
a collection of songs that tell a story and serve no other purpose than to
educate and enlighten and to be enjoyed.
As Hohnen mentioned more than a few times, it’s refreshing, Gurrumul
himself is refreshing. In the ten
seconds of silence that followed his off-the-cuff performance of ‘Ulminda’ when
I first saw him in the studio, it’s like I’m transported into Gurrumul’s head
where nothing else matters, everything is free and it’s all about that one,
single moment. And that is refreshing.
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