Burranbala Concert

The Burranbala Concert presents new work by this extraordinary collective of First Nations, experimental and instrumental musicians for a concert of storytelling and sonic explorations.

Burranbala (meaning ‘catalyst’ in Yuwaalaraay language) has been created as part of a new music residency at Bundanon, led by Nardi Simpson. It brings together four selected NSW musicians for a period of co-learning/leading, celebrating Indigenous knowledges and practices.

Featuring works and performances by Sonya Holowell, Nicole Smede, Alexandra Spence, Nardi Simpson and members of Ensemble Offspring, the program moves between deeply personal compositions and collaborative improvisations to immersive celebrations of connection to Country and culture.

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaray writer, musician, composer and educator from NSW’s North West freshwater plains. A founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi has been performing nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. A participant of Ngarra-Burria since 2019, she writes about her experience: “Ngarra-Burria, put simply, has reinvigorated my ears, my mind and my spirit. It is not only a music program. It is a program about cultural responsibility, about land, story and country, and about what we Yuwaalaraay call the strengthening of dhuwi – our deepest breath, our essence – our soul.”

Sonya Holowell is a Dharawal vocalist, improviser and writer. For over a decade Sonya’s expansive vocal practice has woven avant-garde world premieres with electro-acoustic experiments with medieval chant and spontaneous long-form composition. She explores the plural self in its network of relations, directed toward truth and emancipation. She enjoys bringing this mantle to collaboration, as artist, Board Director and consultant. Sonya performs regularly with modular synthesist Ben Carey in their duo Sumn Conduit, and is a PhD candidate in Indigenist Artistic Research. She has recently joined the ARC Laureate Program Resonant Earth: Music, Ecology and Climate Justice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Ensemble Offspring is Australia’s leading new music group, standing at the forefront of musical innovation. Led by internationally acclaimed percussionist Claire Edwardes OAM, the ensemble unites the country’s most fearless and virtuosic instrumentalists with a core “pierrot plus one” line up of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion. Together, they create “visceral, joyous music” (Sydney Morning Herald) through kaleidoscopically varied performances that blaze a trail for Australian music. Since forming in 1995, they have commissioned and premiered over 350 new works, solidifying their position as the foremost champions of contemporary music in Australia.

Nicole Smede is a Warrimay composer, vocalist and multidisciplinary artist based on Wodi Wodi Dharawal Country. Blending field recordings, voice and ensemble writing, her work explores the relationships between land, language and memory. Guided by ancestral knowledge, she composes immersive sound worlds that invite deep listening as a form of connection and return to Country.

Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions, reimagining the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Alex is a current PhD candidate at RMIT, Melbourne, where her research explores the intersection between Sound Studies and the Blue Humanities.