Hand to Earth - the Sound of Place in Australia

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Introduction

Hand to Earth began at the southernmost end of the habitable world, in Tasmania's central highlands, a wilderness of cool rainforest and misty valleys where waterfalls and creeks gush and babble.

It was there, in 2016, atop a cliff face in Tarraleah, a historic 35-building art-deco estate built to house workers who assembled the state's pioneering hydroelectric dam scheme, that Indigenous Australian songman Daniel Wilfrid met South Korean-born vocalist, improviser and educator Sunny Kim, and came together to sing about the stars.

“As musicians we sense subtle changes of energies and emotions through our ears. Hearing takes primacy as we learn to tune in intimately to the ecology of sounds. Sunny Kim”

The Voice’s Sonic Meaningfulness

Hand To Earth in Phoenix. Photo credits: Bronte Godden

”Daniel's voice was unlike anything I'd heard," says the conservatory-trained Kim of Wilfrid, the custodian of a 40,000-year-old oral tradition. "It travelled into the open space, to a plane of existence strange and unknown to me. I needed to understand. I followed him around. I listened to his silence as well as to his voice." (Kim 2020)

Both were in Tarraleah as faculty leaders for the Creative Music Intensive, an annual residency hosted by the Melbourne/Naarm-based Australian Art Orchestra–an ensemble that since 1994 has explored the interstices between disciplines and cultures, largely through improvisation, imagining new musical forms for a culturally diverse 21st century Australia in the process.

Wilfrid was visiting from his home in Ngukkur, a remote community on the Roper River in the Roper Gulf region of southeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, at the opposite end of Australia. Kim was over from Melbourne/Naarm, to where she'd recently moved after a two-year creative retreat in the mountains of Seoul, hearing songs in the sunsets, trees, insects, rocks and wind, and being called, she felt, to sing along.

Their return the following year yielded further creative interaction: "We sat on the grass and discussed our love for Mother Earth and our duty to protect her. When we stood to return to the group, Daniel said, 'Sunny, wait, I hear a song, sing with me'." (Ibid.) The song that Wilfrid heard was rooted in the ancient manikay song cycles of the Yolngu, the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land, in his Wägilik-language repertoire.

Re-animated by Wilfrid through improvisation (the mark of a great manikay songman) (Curkpatrick 2013), it told of two birds, one from Arnhem Land, another from Korea, singing for 'Country' - the term used by First Nations people to describe the land, waterways and skies to which they are connected through ancestral ties and family origins.

"Since then, we've been singing this song, becoming two birds, one with the winds, the elements and the spirits of the lands we fly over," says Kim. "We call out to those on Earth to come together" (Kim 2020).

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David and Daniel Wilfred. Photo credits: Sarah Walker

The Sound of Place, Live and Recorded

Fast forward to September 2025 and St Giles Cripplegate, a medieval church-venue within the Barbican Centre, London, where the Australia-based quintet Hand to Earth are performing material from their back catalogue and new third album, Ŋurru Wäŋa. Alongside Peter Knight on drifting trumpet and ambient electronics, sound artist Aviva Endean on flute and clarinet and (sitting this song out) David Wilfrid, Daniel's uncle, on yidaki (didgeridoo), Kim and Daniel Wilfrid duet powerfully on Guguk ('Bush Dove'), the song that started the project.

Kim's ethereal, avian-like vocalese winds a silvery thread through Wilfrid's rich, raspy songline about a bird that flies everywhere, staying briefly in one place before moving on again. The emotional force of their combined voices seems to compel Kim to wheel her arms about her body. "As musicians we sense subtle changes of energies and emotions through our ears. Hearing takes primacy as we learn to tune in intimately to the ecology of sounds" (Ibid.). The sense of displacement, and the search for belonging, is palpable.

The six songs on Ŋurru Wäŋa (pronounced 'Woora Wanga', meaning 'the scent of home') make up a cycle that examines notions of homecoming, expanding on the songline of Djuwaḻpada, a creator in the Wägilak dreaming story, who walked through central Arnhem Land to the north-east coast, singing the place and its beings into existence. The songs outline the seasons, trace the path of honeybees and the flight of birds called mäḏawk and wäk wäk, describe the stringybark tree whose wood makes the bilma (percussively sharp clapping sticks) that Daniel Wilfrid plays, and never leave his side. "These clapsticks keep me alive," he says (Djuwalpada, 2019).

Five of the tracks were recorded in a single session using voice, bilma, and yidaki – the three instruments crucial to manikay's invocations of time and place – in combination with synth drones and other materials.

"The rest of the sounds came in separate iterative sessions. Settings were developed through spontaneous layering and rubbing back," writes Peter Knight in the liner notes. Artistic director of the Australian Art Orchestra from 2013 to 2023, Knight established the Creative Music Intensive in 2014 and founded Hand to Earth in 2018. "This process reflected the approach we take to live performance but stretched across time, our voices calling to one another. Creating connections, resonating, blurring, vibrating." (Knight, 2025, liner notes)

Soft Centre x Carriageworks x Vivid Full. Photo credits: Jordan Munns

Hand to Earth and the Sonic Turn

At a period when scholarship and culture is foregrounding listening, sound and acoustics as potent ways in which to understand notions of power, identity, memory and place, it can be argued that Hand to Earth enact this sonic turn in Australia – a continent whose Indigenous listening traditions, complex post-colonial politics and globalised art scene are situated to showcase what sound can do.

The group embody what it means to listen to place, make music from place and know place – 'place' being Australia – instead of simply decorating it with sound. They strive to honour the sort of Indigenous listening practices described by Aunty Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, a Ngangikurungkurr elder from the Daly River in the Northern Territory, when she states, "In our Aboriginal way, we could not live good and useful lives unless we listened ... not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting then acting. Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years" (Brennan and Ungunmerr-Baumann, 1989, 38-45).

"We are five friends from different backgrounds trying to express what we imagine [Australia] sounds like," says the tall, considered Knight of a band whose international reputation, buoyed by government arts funding, continues apace. "Sound is a really great guide and equaliser. There's a level of abstraction to Hand to Earth. It's minimal, never didactic. When making sounds with Daniel I like to imagine that I'm walking through a landscape, recreating the feeling of the sounds of the bush.

"One of the exciting things about playing in this band is that it moves people. I think we all share the trauma of colonisation, and most of us would like to find a better way to live together in the world. I'm not saying that drops away, but you can have authentic moments of real communication."

Over the past seven years Hand to Earth have played international venues from Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin to the Lincoln Centre in New York. They have collaborated with experimentalists including Sami singer Ánnámáret, Polish violinist Amalia Umeda and UK-based multi-instrumentalist Shabaka, whose guest spot at Barbican St Giles, playing clarinet and Japanese bamboo flutes, added another boundary-leaping dimension.

"We were giving a workshop in Canada [at the 2024 Vancouver Jazz Festival] when Daniel was asked to describe what it was like to play music with people, white people, who are not from his culture," Knight continues. "He said, 'I sing my songs to them. They sing their songs to me.' It was a lightbulb moment for me."

Listening Practices, Audible Projects, Improvisation

According to the Melbourne/Naarm-based Endean, whose individual practice encourages interpersonal and environmental connections by creating spaces for deep engagement with sound, each member of Hand of Earth tries to listen across cultural norms and expectations.

"We each have different reference points that inform our aesthetics," says Endean, whose 2025 installation tactile-piece-for-humans-ears (Endean 2025) features a binaural dummy head customised to 'listen' to sounds created through bespoke 'Hear Muffs', evolving from works including 2013's 'Intimate Sound Immersions', a form of solo performance for one blindfolded audience member at a time.

"We are often listening for the deeper significance of a sound, or a song, to help us find our own way to connect and contribute meaningfully," she says. "I have the feeling that I'm in conversation not only with the musicians in the room but with the ancestors and spirits who have cared for that music for so long. Daniel told me early on that adding my new sounds is good for Djuwalpada, that [the spirit] is happy that his song is travelling all over the world. So, in that way I'm happy to be bringing new elements to these ancient songs."

("I'm sharing my songs with a new generation," Daniel Wilfred has said (Curkpatrick 2013). 'That's how those songs are going to stay alive. We are not going to look back but forward, because we are learning different things.")

"Having done this together for years now we trust the improvisatory process," Endean continues. "This is apparent in the collaborations we do that extend beyond the five-piece group; each new voice brings a new spark of energy, leading us in new directions even as we keep our core sound and intention strong."

Decolonising Sound

For Ánnámáret – a performer who hails from a traditional family of reindeer herders in Nuorgam, northern Finland, in the tundra above the Arctic Circle – bringing their two aesthetics together felt natural, since both value sound as a bridge with the potential to communicate and mediate, decolonise and reimagine.

"As Indigenous peoples we shared a deep connection through the experience of colonisation," she says of Two Rivers, a live collaboration held at De Singel in Antwerp, Belgium, on September 17, 2025. "David’s vocal technique reminds me of the vocal technique in Sámi yoiking, and the complex rhythms of the didgeridoo resonate with Sámi [song] patterns. We listen, exchange influences, and learn."

Hand to Earth have enjoyed international residencies including, in May 2025, a two-week Soundweavings programme at BANFF Centre in Alberta, Canada - a programme that culminated in a shared bill concert with German composer Sandeep Bhagwati and Vietnamese đàn tranh [plucked zither] player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy. In 2026 they will further collaborate with Sámi musicians in a two-week residency in Nuorgam. But wherever they perform, be it London or Lapland, at the group's centre is the notion of Australia – a land that contains the oldest continually practiced music tradition in the world.

"[Australia] gives a strong foundation to a lot of music being made in the country," says the dark-haired Endean. "Australian musicians are very inventive and resilient, maybe because we're considered outsiders by the rest of the world. We pursue what we're interested in, almost without anyone noticing. It's a close-knit scene. People collaborate a lot and develop sounds and scenes that often become unique."

Hand to Earth. Photo credits: Emma Luker

Sonic Mapping, Relational Listening Theory, Cross-Cultural Listening

Hand to Earth's music making process is unique, asserts Knight, whose website homepage features a photo of him holding tin cans on strings to each ear, and whose current third solo album For A Moment the Sky Knew My Name is – like Ŋurru Wäŋa – released on Room40, the imprint owned by Australia-based polymath Lawrence English, an internationally lauded sound artist, field recordist, performer and practitioner of musique concréte (recorded sounds as raw material) intent on investigating the transformative potential of sound.

"[Hand to Earth] is not free improvisation but it's not composed either. It is somewhere in-between," Knight says. "We're weaving the threads of our different histories, lives and perspectives to become family."

This philosophy dovetails with the Wägilak concept of raki, literally the bush string made from rolled pandanus fibre woven together to make traditional 'dilly' bags for holding tools and collecting food - and metaphorically the thread that brings people together to dance, sing and play music.

"Raki makes sense of our process," says Knight. "Often when an ancient cultural tradition fuses with contemporary Western traditions, I'll ask, 'What are the Western musicians doing there?' But when our engagement is underpinned with this cultural practice of inclusion, of us merging to make a new song or build on a songline"—the sonic maps/multidimensional tracks that follow the paths of ancestors and creators in the dreaming and are essential to navigating Country—"we are part of it whether we like it or not."

The absence of a score when collaborating with First Nations Australians is additionally liberating: "There's a cultural hegemony embedded in a score that makes authentic connections difficult. We try to start from nothing and just be present and open. As settler musicians we're used to schedules and plans, which contrasts with the way that David and Daniel work.

"In Ngukkar, when there's a bunggul" (a traditional meeting place of song, dance and ritual) "people gather to eat and talk, then a song will start, then there'll be dance, then things will subside and become intense again. It's a bit like a session in an Irish pub," he adds with a smile. "There's a natural flow to everything that is also about attending to relationships."

Hand to Earth, then, approaches sound as relational listening, and improvisation as a relational space. They embody the essence of Lawrence English's Relational Listening Theory - a creative process "intended to make one's listening audible to an audience" (Sannicandro 2018). Their relationship with the idea of Australia, a vast and challenging continent whose apparent uninhabitability underscores the ingenuity of its traditional owners, duly involves regarding the continent as one great improvisation — the bold notion with which composer/pianist Paul Grabowsky founded the Australian Art Orchestra in 1994.

Grabowsky had returned to Melbourne after a stint in Europe, where he was dazzled by anything-goes brilliance of Mathias Rüegg's Vienna Art Orchestra. He wrote a suite of music for a large ensemble and needed a cast to play it - the AAO's ensuing 1995 album Ringing the Bell Backwards, a meditation on memory via the reimagining of European wartime songs, was hailed as a masterpiece. The AAO proceeded with some of Australia's most exciting collaborations. Among them, crossovers with musicians from India, Indonesia and most fruitfully, the traditional songmen of Ngukkur in Australia's south-east Arnhem Land.

It was Grabowsky (artistic director of Adelaide Festival 2010-2012; 2021 artist-in-residence for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and 2024 artist-in-residence for the Melbourne International Jazz Festival), who originally travelled to Ngukkur in 2004 to meet with the traditional songmen who maintained ceremonial observance across a large swath of their country ("Within minutes they were singing the Djawulparra manikay to me," Grabowsky has said. "Nothing prepared me for the sheer visceral power of this music") (Grabowsky 2023).

Having sought permission to return from significant Ngukkar elder and visual artist Djambu 'Sambo' Barra Barra, Grabowsky returned the following year with 10 members of the AAO as well as renowned (now late) Indigenous singer/songwriters, Ruby Hunter and her partner Archie Roach. Crossing Roper Bar (2005 - 2012) featuring the Young Wägilak Group went on to tour Australia and became a two-volume album. 2021's WATA: a gathering of manikay performers, improvising soloists and orchestra and 2023's Raki followed.

"Paul recognised that we live in a place of abundance, and as artists and jazz musicians we need to respond to what is around us rather than look to Europe and America for inspiration," says Knight. "We're in an era of dialogue around the post-colonial politics of an Australia that has been dominated by European cultures for the last 200 years and is now finding its place in Asia."

"It is always through improvisation that we manage to connect. Improvising is critical to most non-Western cultures and gives us powerful possibilities. Sound is the oldest form of human creative expression and sound is what we offer to each other in the moment."

Hand To Earth. Photo credits: Oli Sansom

Sonic Crossings, Listening to Now

Led by listening techniques and practices, mindful of improvisation as both offering and exchange, Hand to Earth brings the ancient and the future into the here and now. Their use of sound — texture, timbre, inflection, rhythm, tone, onomatopoeia — is multifunctional: an investigation of identity. A rejection of the sonic templates of the Northern Hemisphere. A mode of grappling with post-colonial tensions. A signifier of space. A container for memories. A reminder of priorities. A conduit for hope, connection, joy.

It's an approach that resonates with what American scholar Tom McEnaney posits as "a connection between listening, language and sound that locates a third way between materialism and constructivism, thereby situating the sonic turn within a generational effort to enrich social constructivism, formalism and historicism with an appreciation of material culture, non-human life and technological change" (McEnaney, 2019, 86-87)

In other words, by mixing social meaning with the physical and technical world, Hand to Earth's sound world is a bridge, a sonic crossing, a path to understanding foregrounded by sound. For Lawrence English, a self-described "professional listener", "Hand to Earth represents a "porousness" that is inherently Australian: "They bring together the sense of the songlines that have made their way through the millennia and in the same breath, the ensemble carries the reflection of contemporary life. They are a hybrid. They are generous and they make offers without expectation and in doing so create a sound world that feels effortless and atmospheric."

Hand to Earth's self-titled 2012 debut, released under the auspices of the AAO and nominated for a 2022 ARIA [Australian Recording Industry Association] Award, arguably piqued the interest of English, who added treatments, electronics and field recordings to their 2023 sophomore album Mokuy (a Wägilak word denoting ancestral guardian spirits) then released the record on his Room40 label.

"Lawrence has been a huge influence on the development of Hand to Earth, both as a producer and as a channeler of entities," says Knight. "I think he heard the potential for a connection between ambient sounds, ambient music and these ancient songs from Ngukkar, and pushed the sound in that direction."

English has said that his fascination with sound and listening stems in part from a Brisbane childhood informed by an obsession with birdwatching. "It taught me that the lumps of flesh attached to the side of my head let me know the world not just through our eyes, and that our ears revealed a way of knowing that was unique and afforded an approach to the 'excesses' of place that was really important to recognise," he says.

"Place represents the lived experience of space, something that is evolving and unless we are present and attentive to it, those moments are lost,” he continues. “The continuous cultural links that have been maintained in Australia carry with them an added responsibility for us folks living here to be present to what lies before us and in doing that to recognise the elegant complexities inherent in this country. The more we lean in, the more we have the opportunity to know."

Hand to Earth are leaning in. "Their music embraces where we have come from and asks us to imagine where we might go. It's a music outside of our time but very much of our world. It has been a delight exploring ways in sound together," English says.

Sonic Futures

Back at St Giles Church, on the opposite side of the world from Ngukkar and Naarm, Sunny Kim and Daniel Wilfrid are singing up the bush dove, the guguk, and the mäḏawk and wäk wäk, their voices, rich with sonic meaning, giving presence to absence, underscoring the fact that sound is, as the American ethnomusicologist and sound artist Steven Feld asserts, "always relational, always social, always in movement between the foreground and background of experience" (Feld 2020).

Bilma and yidaki vie and blend with trumpet, clarinet, flutes and laptop. Sounds overlap and embrace, evolving subtly, mesmerically, swirling with such dynamic restraint that the audience, too, is leaning in. This is sound as a cultural force. A shaper of interactions and identities. A medium for understanding place.

"We have a shared sense that as human beings we need to find new ways to communicate and create a more positive future," says Peter Knight. "Hand to Earth is a call to open ears - and to what is possible."

Hand to Earth - the Sound of Place in Australia

Written by:

Share article:

Introduction

The Voice’s Sonic Meaningfulness

The Sound of Place, Live and Recorded

Hand to Earth and the Sonic Turn

Listening Practices, Audible Projects, Improvisation

Decolonising Sound

Sonic Mapping, Relational Listening Theory, Cross-Cultural Listening

Sonic Crossings, Listening to Now

Sonic Futures

Further Reading:

About the Author

Jane Cornwell

Share this Article

THE ATTIC

Hand to Earth - the Sound of Place in Australia

Written by:

Share article:

Introduction

The Voice’s Sonic Meaningfulness

The Attic Newsletter

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

The Sound of Place, Live and Recorded

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

Hand to Earth and the Sonic Turn

Listening Practices, Audible Projects, Improvisation

Decolonising Sound

Sonic Mapping, Relational Listening Theory, Cross-Cultural Listening

Sonic Crossings, Listening to Now

Sonic Futures

Further Reading:

About the Author

Jane Cornwell

Share this Article

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