Australian Art Orchestra dazzle in Berlin

The Pierre Boulez Saal is nestled amongst a couple of Berlin’s most grandiose concert halls, but its stylish contemporary ‘live’ performance space promises intimacy rather than symphonic drama. Founded in 2016 by Daniel Barenboim, the distinguished pianist-conductor and director of the Berlin State Opera, the Frank Gehry-designed 600+ capacity hall is a stark yet warmly minimalistic, wooden-panelled, entirely circular-shaped structure of moveable parts. It’s one-of-a-kind even among Berlin’s cultural riches, presenting not only chamber music in the ‘classical’ tradition but offering musical experimentation across diverse international cultures and genres. Included in the remit is improv/jazz and its current curator Piotr Turkiewicz has form as an initiator of enduring and innovative projects also as long-time director of the Jazztopad Festival in Wroclaw, Poland which has premiered works such as Charles Lloyd’s Wild Man Dance and Jason Moran’s Wind.

Pierre Boulez Saal is the musical equivalent of a theatre-in-the-round inviting performers and audience to enter the same shared mental as well as physical space. It felt tailor-made for the trumpeter Peter Knight’s purely collaborative ‘collective improv’ ensemble Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) who performed over two evenings in early June. The concerts were largely based on the album project Hand to Earth released in 2021. The beating heart of the performances was vocalist Daniel Wilfred’s song cycles (‘manikay’). He and his brother David, the keeper of the songs and digeridoo player, are from Yolgnu, an indigenous aborigine clan from Arnhem Land in North-east Australia.

Remarkably you’re listening to the oldest musical tradition still in existence, going back more than 40,000 years. The addition of Sunny Kim, a Korean vocalist, who’s previously recorded with New York guitarist Ben Monder, ties the music also with the Asian Pacific pushing further Knight’s manifesto that ‘imagines new musical forms to reflect the energy and diversity of 21st century Australia’. Knight persuasively draws on influences such as fellow countrymen Necks post-minimalism, free improv and ambient Nordic-inspired electronica.

It’s clear this is no Westernized first-nations fusion project: Daniel Wilfred’s songs are continually in the process of being updated (he has worked over a decade with AAO) as he aims to share his life story across cultures and time, connected by the ‘raki’, a spirit that ties everyone together in the song. Both evenings contained stirring otherworldly combinations: David Wilfred’s grainy, sonorous vocal chant was at its most penetrating alongside his digeridoo-playing brother David, and Kim’s electronically-looped phase-shifting choir-like wall of sound.

During certain songs, the pair spontaneously moved their bodies ceremonially in a slo-mo dance around the circle; Kim in graceful seagull-like swoops and David, who flapped his arms around rather comically while intermittingly making bird-like chirps. It was an enduring image. The blend of his digeridoo and electronically-processed bass clarinet/overtone flute played by AAO associate artist Aviva Endean was a feast of deep vibration and subtly pulsating rhythms. Trumpeter Knight’s tender yet icy splintery tone in the vein of a Nils Petter Molvaer or Arve Henriksen, was electronically layered and well complemented by vocalist Daniel’s pungent blend of grace and animalism.

It was testing at times, mesmerizing at others, but always extraordinarily intriguing in its organic synthesis of the ancient and contemporary. Within this immersive ‘live’ performance space, the song cycles, circular breathing, microtonal and drone elements that characterize AAO’s music carried with it an air of timelessness. The feeling of no beginning or end was halted only for the sake of westernized performance time limits by the crack of Daniel Wilfred’s clapsticks and a humble thank you.