Hand to Earth on recording Ŋurru Wäŋa in Melbourne and New York

Transmission 253: Interview with Hand to Earth

Hand to Earth is a music ensemble formed during a residency of the Australian Art Orchestra that brought together musicians from different countries and traditions through improvisation. Core collaborators include Sunny Kim, Daniel Wilfred, and David Wilfred, with contributions from Lawrence English in production and post-production contexts. The group combines Wägilak song cycles with contemporary practices, using voice, yidaki (didgeridoo), bilma (clapping sticks), clarinet, trumpet, electronics, and studio layering methods recorded across Australia and New York.

Title: Ŋurru Wäŋa
Artist: Hand to Earth
Release Date: 2025-08-22
Genres: Ambient, Avant-garde, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music
Label: Room 40
Description: Interview with Hand to Earth on Ŋurru Wäŋa, their upcoming Room40 release on 22 August 2025, linking Wägilak songlines and Korean poetry.

Ŋurru Wäŋa (pronounced Wooroo Wanga, “the scent of home”) is the ensemble’s album released on Room40 on 22 August 2025. The title work presents two interrelated parts: Sunny Kim intones verses from Korean poet Yoon Dong-ju’s “Another Home,” set against Daniel Wilfred’s song in the Wägilak language.

What first started the idea of forming Hand to Earth with members coming from such different musical backgrounds?

Peter Knight: Well, the band started during a residency run by an organisation I was directing, the Australian Art Orchestra. It brought musicians from all around the world to create music from different cultures and disciplines, using improvisation as a way of making connections. Hand to Earth wasn’t planned; it organically formed as a result of a certain group of people being in the same space and time for two weeks in a very remote location.

Particularly, Sunny Kim and Daniel Wilfred met during that time. As soon as they started to sing together, they felt there was something special.

How did each of you first connect with music on a personal level before the band existed?

Well, I guess we’ve all got our own stories. What Aviva, Sunny, and I have in common is that we were all part of the global community of improvised music, and we’re all very interested in contemporary ways to approach music.

With David and Daniel Wilfred, they come from a very traditional background. They live in an extremely remote area, and their links to their traditional culture are unbroken.

Their culture has been traced back for 60,000 years, making it the oldest continuously practiced music culture on the planet. They have been collaborating with non-Aboriginal and contemporary avant-garde musicians for about 15 to 20 years most importantly with the Australian Art Orchestra.

That goes back before Hand to Earth, and they’ve developed ways of weaving their practice into the kinds of settings we, as contemporary Western musicians, create. They’re very special, gifted musicians, with a particular set of experiences that are quite unusual.

The album title translates as “the scent of home.” How does each member interpret that idea personally?

I feel like I can answer that because we spoke about it quite a lot when we were talking about the album, and about the song that Daniel sings, Ŋurru Wäŋa. We talked about that song together, and then Sunny said, “I know this amazing poem by this Korean poet.” It was so similar in intent and essence that it made sense to bring these things together, because what they are both getting at is something essential to being human.

We all long for that return home. It can be very practical, but it can also be metaphorical. It’s deep within all of us. I don’t want to speak too much for everybody, but I know Sunny very well. She’s one of those people who has lived in many different countries. She grew up in Korea, then her family moved to Thailand, then to other Asian cities. She studied in Colorado, then at the New England Conservatory in Boston. She lived in New York, returned to Korea, and eventually settled in Australia.

I know she always feels like she’s searching for home. Like many people who relocate across cultures, there’s always that sense of wondering where home is. In the Australian context, that longing for home is deep within us. There’s an awareness of a colonial history that is unresolved and recent, and that all settlers in Australia have arrived relatively recently. I think we all carry this somehow, whether we admit it or not.

The name of the album also refers to this: the idea that notions of home are layered and complex in Australia, as they are in many parts of the world. I can speak best to that feeling in the context of being part of this project we call Australia, more than I can for other parts of the world.

When you began creating music together, what were the main challenges in merging such different traditions and instruments?

One of the struggles we had was that David and Daniel’s tradition is so strong. The music is so remarkable that, as a non-Aboriginal musician working with them, I found myself asking, “What am I doing here? Why am I here?”

I would think, maybe I should just step away and leave this beautiful tradition, these amazing songs, as they are, because they don’t need me. Another temptation in that situation is to feel that your role is simply to serve that tradition, to find a way to be useful to it. But I don’t think it works so well like that, because then it’s not an actual exchange. You’re not making something new – you’re just creating a setting for something that already exists. I don’t think that idea is very interesting to David and Daniel either.

At the Vancouver Jazz Festival last year, we did a panel and someone asked a similar question: “Why, Daniel, do you collaborate with these white musicians and Korean musicians?” Daniel has a way of cutting straight to the point. He said, “I sing my songs to them, and they sing their songs to me.”

For me, it was like a light bulb going off. I realised that he hears what I play as my ‘song’, that I have a song to sing. Even if I’m not always sure what it is, he hears it, values it, and wants to hear it. That, for me, distilled the essence of why Hand to Earth works when it’s working: it’s a ‘coming together’ of each of our songs.

What kind of atmosphere did Melbourne bring to the recording of the title tracks, and how did the setting influence the music?

The album was recorded in my studio, which is also where I live. I live in an old converted factory, and Daniel and David have stayed there quite a lot. We’ve also done some recording there before, so they feel very comfortable there. It feels like a kind of second home.

That day, when we started that recording, it was very spontaneous. Daniel just got in the mood to sing and said, “Can we go and sing some songs?” I said, “Let’s just plug in a couple of microphones and record. Why not? Let’s do it.”

He tends to deliver distilled brilliance in short bursts. He’s not really into the way we often record, where we sit around and talk about things a lot, doing things over and over again. He always says, “Oh, you guys talk too much. Talk, talk. Let’s just play.” That day there was no ‘talk, talk’ —he was simply in the mood to sing, and that’s what happened.

He also had this feeling to sing the song about the honeybee, the song cycle about the honeybee. I hadn’t heard it before, actually. I don’t know why it is that sometimes certain song cycles or certain songs are right, whether it’s just a mood of his, or something else he’s seen or heard that has made him go to those songs. But a lot of the songs on that record are from a cycle we weren’t familiar with before.

How did Lawrence English shape the textures and spaces in the album during production?

You know Lawrence, don’t you?

I interviewed him when he was in Japan.

Mm-hmm. Well, you would know how brilliant he is, then. He’s really quite an extraordinary artist and thinker, and he’s also an incredibly generous, emotionally intelligent person.

He’s so good to be around, and it’s great to have his input in the creative process because he sees things that other people don’t see. He hears things that other people don’t hear. He’s able to distill things into language in a way that’s very valuable, especially when you’re in a group that’s been together for a while and you have your own internal dynamics.

Having somebody like him sitting just a little bit on the outside and saying, “Hey, have you thought about this?”, that’s what he brings. That’s one of the things he brings.

He also brings a lot of technical expertise. I’m always amazed at how clearly he hears things and how, when he mixes or re-edits something, you learn something about the music that you hadn’t realised before. That’s another of his gifts.

The song cycle traces birds and trees as part of the Wägilak dreaming. How central is nature to your writing and performances?

It’s absolutely central to David and Daniel’s culture, the Wägilak language group up in East Arnhem Land. Everything is about nature for them, about the world, how you move through it, how you look after the land, and listening to the land.

It’s a matter of survival because it’s a harsh place. You have to know what you’re doing. If you’re going to move from one place to another, you have to be prepared, otherwise you may not survive. It’s literally a matter of life and death. My understanding is that they use the songlines to move through the land and to know how to do that. For them, nature is everything.

For Anglo people, and other settler Australians, it’s a completely different thing. I like nature, I like being in nature, but I don’t know it like they do. I’m learning, becoming more in touch, but I’m someone who has spent much of his life hunkered down, practicing music in sealed rooms.

Are there specific places that directly influenced some of the compositions on Ŋurru Wäŋa?

Definitely. We’ve all been to East Arnhem Land with David and Daniel, and we’ve travelled through that country on a number of occasions with them while on tour, as well as spending time where they live and being taught by them about that land.

I think it’s seeped into us—that’s for sure. It’s a magical place, but also a really challenging one. The nature is harsh, and it’s hot. All of that has infused our music.

It’s not just the songs they bring, which come from the land, but also our own experience of the land—Sunny’s, mine, and Aviva’s.

Has working together altered the way you each view the relationship between music, language, and land?

It’s always hard to say exactly how, but I feel like it has. It has certainly altered my relationship to music, and to being a musician, in a bigger sense than just the fabric of the music I’m making. One of the really rewarding things about playing with Hand to Earth is that people are moved by the music in a very particular way—not just because of the music itself, but because of what it represents.

There’s an optimism in creating collaborative work like this, especially if it succeeds—if it actually harmonises, or whatever term you want to use. That’s something art can do: it can be a powerful medium for showing possibility.

When Hand to Earth works, and when audiences are moved by the music, it feels like we’re doing something genuinely worthwhile and important. I don’t want to sound pompous about it, but it feels like it’s more than just music—that we’re doing something that needs to be done.

Is there already new material in progress since the release of Ŋurru Wäŋa?

There is. About four weeks ago, we were back in the studio with Lawrence—this time in person. It was mid-tour during an Australian run, and we spent about three or four days recording some raw material.

I haven’t had the chance to work through it yet. I’m leaving it to sit and cook for a while, then I’ll come back to it—hopefully it will be a nice surprise.

Photos courtesy of Hand to Earth

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others