You know. When one thinks of going on a two day hike up a mountain- you train for it. Seems like a really sensible thing to do. Wise even. But nah not us bro. Neither one of us on the team (except my sister Ruth I think) had any kind of regular fitness regime going on in our lives at the time. Except maybe the walks one would take to a cafe or bar for some social rendezvous or pointless business meeting. And I guess I did some bullshit bush walks sporadically on the weekends but none of these came with an immediate 70 degree incline. Nah this was a first aid kit, navigation skills, experience needed kind of grade 5 walk.

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In the Western world, you don't expect to share your grief with complete strangers but just as my mother, my sister and I were being held by strangers when we arrived at my Aine’s burial site, we were in fact being held in the arms of community as that’s what you do in PNG. No one judges the snot bursting from your nostrils or as Papua New Guinean’s charmingly refer to as ‘number 11’s’. No one judges you for how loud or banshee like your wails might be getting. No one judges you if you want to jump into the burial hole and throw your body on top of the coffin. You’ve just gotta get it out and that moment was like medicine to my grief because I was allowed to do it anyway I wanted and be held unconditionally. As my mum says, they like to call us poor but this is ‘rich’.

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After ‘the meeting’, I remember things moving pretty swiftly. Jack and I discussed ways we could go about making this album. It seemed imperative that if we were to present a culture as complex as Papua New Guinea’s to a contemporary world, it had to be through a visual lense as much as a sonic one. So we decided to go backwards from the visuals to the music. Seemed legit.

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