Hand to Earth - Ŋurru Wäŋa (2025)

This is a special project, you can see it in the album title in Wáglilak language, you can see it in the multi-ethnic line-up and the music itself. The latter can be only described as world music meeting dark ambient and this thought alone would make me very excited to try these sounds.

There is a lot to read about the album (and I recommend doing so on the project's Bandcamp page), but the main things are that sense of belonging and the notion of home are the main themes here. This cannot be a surprise since the members of the projects come from very different places. However, whenever this happens, people very soon discover that it doesn't matter at all as their home can easily encompass entire planet.

There are Korean poems and singing in one of the native Australian tongues that represent the folk/world music part and the minimalist, dark but also quite surprisingly uplifting and soothing backgrounds that add up to the ambient part of the music. The effects are mesmerizing, especially that they are fueled by the use of various (and so different from each other) instrument as the music here is "written in the scribble of electronics, in the sighs of the clarinet and trumpet, in the broad brush strokes of the yidaki, and the snap of the bilma" (kudos to those of you who know what those are, I didn't). 

Ŋurru Wäŋa costs 9 USD.

Check: Gaḏayka

Country: Australia, South Korea

Genre: dark world music

Label: Room40

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