- Moth Quartet: Spectres of Whenua
- Artist response text
- Moth Quartet
- Te Whanganui-a-Tara
- Photo: Rodney Vaughan
An artist response to the album Tundra, commissioned by Moth Quartet.
‘The challenge Moth Quartet set themselves with Tundra is to attempt to converse with voices of whenua that have never been encountered. By speaking with an unknown landscape their music becomes necessarily speculative. Moth Quartet are trying to close the physical distance between Te Whanganui-a-Tara where the music was recorded and far distant latitiudes. They call up the spectre of a landscape, and in doing so they recognise the animacy of whenua, what Amanda Monehu Yates (Ngāti Rangiwewehi, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Aitanga a Māhaki, Rongowhakaata) desribes as: the geological, atmospheric, hydrological and biological whanaunga [...] that compose the livingness of this world (Yates, 2021). Tundra draws from this livingness, creating spooky action at a distance that enlivens their improvisations, highlighting our entanglement with whenua, even when that entanglement is invisible and tenuous.‘
https://mothquartet.nz/music/tundra-essay/