Moana & The Tribe Collaborate With Six Indigenous Wāhine For ONO Album

Monday, 4 November 2024, 8:55 pm
Article: RNZ

Moana & The Tribe have returned with a concept album project that starts in Aotearoa and travels around the world - encapsulating the voices, language, and culture of six indigenous wāhine.

ONO builds on the band's musical work fusing traditional Māori instruments and karakia (incantations) with hip hop and contemporary sound.

While touring Moana Maniapoto has been inviting budding singers onto the stage to jam with, and it's these connections over the past 20 years that have helped her form her latest collaborations.

All except for Inka Mbing, of the Atayal ethnic group of Taiwan. And the story of how she got to be on the record was a whirlwind, because they had originally gone to Taiwan to collaborate with a different artist, Maniapoto says.

"Then when we got there - because we were performing in a festival - the woman said 'oh lovely to meet you, okay, gotta go now', we were like 'what? But we've gotta do this -' she says 'oh no, I can't do it this weekend', and we were like 'oh my god, we're flying up to Taipei'."

After arranging another flight to Taiwan, they went to meet Mbing in the mountains with a translator and that nearly fell through as well, until they found a bond over advocating for their respective languages.

"We'd got the music and we were just playing it to her, and then she had this look on her face like, I knew that she hated it. Honestly, she actually hated it," Maniapoto tells Music101's Charlotte Ryan.

"She didn't like the beat, it was too much for her, she's not used to it, she's very traditional so we went back inside and I told her how the beats is … like a trojan to get the language out there.

"And I told her all about how my father and everybody had the language kind of beaten out of them and then she said it was the same thing for her, and then she said okay, push the button, we were good. And what a voice."

Maniapoto also found a cultural connection with Mari Boine, another featured artist who is a Norwegian Sámi. They also raise their independence flag on 6 February - coinciding with Waitangi Day - and are going through a language revitalisation, she says.

"One of my friends explained to me, they don't use words, they channel whatever they're talking about so they become the reindeer, they become the snow, and that's why it's so ethereal, her voice, you know, you can sort of feel the snow and ice around you. She's just got the most amazing voice."

Her collaboration with Megan Henderson, lead singer and violinist for award-winning Scottish band Breabach, for 'Maiea' came about from an initiative called Boomerang. Twenty-one artists hunkered down at the Muriwai Surf Club near her home to write and arrange songs before testing them out on the locals.

"Then they started to play the bagpipes and I thought oh my god, these are the loudest things I've ever heard, what the hell?! And they all had ear plugs on.

"We're thinking how is this going to work, we've grooved with our Aboriginal brothers and sisters but we don't know about Scotland so we sat down, we had a big kai at home, they had lots to drink and then we figured out they'd been colonised like the rest of us and we got on like a house on fire.

"She has the most beautiful voice, it's like a bell.

"That song is all about calming someone who is not feeling well, that's feeling stressed out and when you put it on, you sort of go 'ahhh'."

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