Yirinda

Album review

In badjala, the ancestral language of an indigenous group of islanders off the east coast of Australia, "yirinda" means "now." Not "yesterday," but possibly tomorrow. On Yirinda, singer Fred Leone, who is of Aboriginal heritage, sings in badjala. The badjala language is dying out, and Fred Leone is one of its few remaining singers. The other member of the duo is Samuel Pankhurst, who is a bassist, composer, and producer within the realm of contemporary electronic music. The music they make together is far from an ethnographic or traditional recording. From the very first track, there's a long loop of singing accompanied by string instruments, which simultaneously calms and excites. We await the sunrise as if ritually as we enter into an album that's as ambient as it is organic. Fred Leone's voice is sweet and hazy, as if its timbre carries the weight of its own extinction. It's accompanied by few notes: bass with plucked strings, polyrhythmic percussion, moonlit harmonies, piano motifs, vintage synth loops…As with all music linked to a nation and its land, it follows the cycles of the earth and sky between the universal expression of feelings and the quest for musical adventure. The impact of the album’s London-based mixing engineer, who has notably worked with Björk and Arca, is audible: it oscillates nonstop between tribal music and futuristic arrangements. For those who are not specialists in aboriginal cultures, Yirinda will be evocative of zen trance music, a mass for the present time, within the confines of our world. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz