STACK #198 Apr 2021

MUSIC FEATURE

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HER MASTERED VOICE As female First Nation voices continue to pierce the common Australian consciousness of music – such as the shortlisting of Gumbainggir/Danggali woman Emma Donovan (with her band The Putbacks) and Pitjantjatjara/Torres Strait Islander woman Miiesha for the most recent Australian Music Prize – we're taking a look at how language and place inform two Indigenous Australian female musicians, as well as two celebrated international female artists who have shown what connection to native language can mean for artistic expression and legacy. Edith Piaf Long-mythologised to have been born on the

Miiesha Making the Australian Music Prize shortlist with your first album – at age 22, no less – is a remarkable feat, but the stirring interlaced stories of Miiesha's debut far exceed clinical stats. On Nyaaringu (meaning 'what happened' in Pitjanjatjara language), Miiesha unfurls her life as a proud Pitjantjatjara and Torres Strait Islander woman from the small central Queensland community of

pavement of Paris's Belleville district (though her birth certificate lists a hospital on the right bank of the River Seine), Edith Giovanna Gassion received her nickname 'Piaf' – slang for 'sparrow' – at the age of 20, when she'd already left the relative safety of the brothel in which she grew up and been busking on Parisian streets for five years. One of the most celebrated performers of the 20th century, her legendary life from German-occupied France to the world's stages has been the subject of many adaptations (most notably the 2007 Oscar-winning film La Vie en Rose ), and her heart-

shreddingly tender and personal torch songs – a style of music irrevocably connected to the French tradition – are widely credited with shaping the identity and influence of her home country. Her most beloved tracks include La Vie en Rose (1946), Non, je ne Regrette Rien (1960), and Padam, Padam (1951), and her music remains adored the world over, more than 50 years after her death.

Woorabinda, plaiting identity, politics, survival, and super-personal history together with interludes of her own grandmother's voice – an incredibly intimate central thread to the album's arc. If you haven't immersed yourself in the courageous beauty of Nyaaringu yet, you're doing yourself a disservice.

Mo'Ju Although Wiradjuri and Filipino artist Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga doesn't perform in the languages of her heritage – which include Tagalog, Ilonggo and Spanish – her inclusion here is critical for the reason her music explores this very fact: that she's keenly felt the 'otherness' of her ancestry, and an acute loss of culture especially related to the purging of language, while growing up in white- dominated Australia. “There's a feeling of grief associated with

Björk Björk Guðmundsdóttir is one of the world's superlative singers, and her Icelandic heritage is unendingly tangled into the musician's approach to her music. Her sudden international success as lead singer of Reykjavík band The Sugarcubes spawned the hit Birthday , which was released in both English and Icelandic – and it's the Icelandic version many fell in love with. If you've not heard it, take a listen, and hear an already euphoric song taken somewhere heavenly. In the 2016 virtual reality accompaniment to Björk's eighth solo album Vulnicura , listeners land next to the lighthouse at Iceland's beautifully melancholic Grotta Point for the song Stonemilker – the location in which she actually wrote the

the disconnect from culture by not speaking those languages,” Mo'Ju told RNZ Music in 2018. “Language is interconnected with your roots, and carrying on the traditions of your ancestors.” The sentiment is skinned to breathtaking rawness in her multi-awarded single Native Tongue from her third album of the same name (2018), which begins with the lyrics, “I don't speak my father's native tongue/ I was born under the Southern sun/ I don't know where I belong.”

track – and the artist has said she sees VR technology as specifically connected to the emacipation of her gender. “I really feel now those headsets are like a private theatre of anarchy,” she told The Guardian at the time. “I’m noticing more and more that it is especially liberating for women since we don’t have to deal with the history of patriarchy or play any power games... It is an open field, it’s wide open.”

APRIL 2021

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