ABSTRACT
Drawing on the work of philosophers Henri Lefebvre, Édouard Glissant and Gaston Bachelard on rhythm, relation and water, this chapter explores how several composers, sound artists and performers use music to reimagine and transform our relationships with watery areas near the Murray Mouth. By engaging in composition processes which require exchanges and interactions across and beyond ethno- and anthropocentric boundaries, these artists redefine musical creation as a form of recuperative and restorative collaboration. Sounds become memories, and musicians are historians tasked with retrieving residues and shards of acoustic meanings in profoundly disfigured (arrhythmic) areas.
As they hear (recover) resonances and echoes, these musicians consequently reveal and expose polyrhythms with which to compose beyond the exploitative shadows of areas devastated by salinity. Such compositions invent and sustain new languages of awareness which are cognisant (rather than defiant) of salinity. These languages do not occupy space, but (re)compose and nurture it through rhythmic accumulations and proliferations of ontological significance, as both the environment and its traditional custodians, the Ngarrindjeri Nation, contribute to their formation.
