Booked to perform at London’s alternative music showcase venue Café OTO in July, Arts Laureate, vocalist and taonga puoro specialist Ariana Tikao commissioned two new works by another local legend, musician/composer Karl Sölve Steven, for the planned collaboration with London’s Rothko Collective. Making the most of her UK trip the Ōtautahi resident artist incorporated performances in Oxford and Norwich, supporting other Aotearoa artists living and exhibiting there. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described Café OTO as “…a clubhouse for people who love music from the margins,” and Ariana very kindly provided NZM with this account of her experience.

In late July I boarded a flight to London to prepare for my performance at the ultra cool and prestigious experimental music venue Café OTO. I was in the UK and Europe for four months last year, and some of the gigs I lined up for this trip built on connections I made then, including a creative collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and a taonga puoro sound bath with a Māori/Moana queer arts group called the Interisland Collective.

The Café OTO gig was the first music gig I’ve done in London since 2008, when I launched my ‘Tuia’ album and had a residency at the University of London’s New Zealand Studies Centre (now defunct). It’s  kind of wild to be embarking on a second wind of an international career at this stage, now my children are all grown up. My daughter Matahana lives in London, so I got to stay with her when I first arrived. (We joined a pro-Palestine protest march as pictured.) After getting over the jetlag I moved to stay in an apartment closer to the venue in Dalston. There, the rehearsals started with musicians from The Rothko Collective whose motto is ‘Classical Music. Unboringed’.

I had commissioned two new works by musician and screen composer, Karl Sölve Steven. They are based on two mōteatea I’d composed previously. We also rehearsed two pieces of music I played last year in Brazil with Sophia Acheson at the International Viola Congress, which I played with the collective’s director, violist, Dominic Stokes. Also on the programme was spoken word, and two stunning audiovisual works by the Dunedin-based Good Company Arts, who I regularly collaborate with.

Café OTO is a bit like Wellington’s Pyramid Club, but bigger. It operates as a café during the day and a music venue by night with an eclectic programme of acts from all around the world. I was booked there through Margot and Théo, my Auckland-based publishers (of Heard & Seen) who used to live in London themselves. I was given this one date, and even though I didn’t know at the time how I was going to pay for it, or what other events or gigs I’d be able to do around it, I decided to commit to it late last year, and afterwards began working out the logistics.

Fortunately, I received $2k funding from the NZ Music Commission’s Outward Sound programme, and then in June heard that Creative NZ had granted me $17k which would pay for Karl’s commission, musicians’ fees, and some of the flights and accommodation costs. Phew! Being a musician in Aotearoa can be a precarious way to live, so I’d been saving up and saying yes to all strands of income leading up to this trip, in case I would have to self-fund it (as I did last year’s UK and Europe trip). I felt relieved and extremely grateful to have been successful in these funding applications this time around.

Working with classical musicians who read off a score can at times be challenging for me, as I need to know where I am without ‘reading’, so am reliant upon knowing the work well enough that it is in my body, and also reliant upon cues from other players (or a conductor) which involves building trust. Sometimes it can be stressful too for classical musicians to be forced to play something outside of what is written. During rehearsals we worked out the arrangements for the new pieces, and had a Zoom call with Karl who guided us in his intentions for the pieces which he likened to a Velvet Underground-esque droney groove. It was brilliant to hear these new pieces come to life, off the page, and swirling around us in the rehearsal room.

The first piece we worked on was a lament written by an ancestor of mine who had survived a massacre during the inter-tribal wars of the 1830s at the site of Ōnawe, Banks Peninsula. Very much on my mind is the horrendous genocide currently happening in Gaza and Palestine, so I tried to bring some of that feeling to the performance of Tēnei Pori ki Ōnawe. The rhythms and melody of the chant were passed around the various players and it felt powerful and cohesive.

The other piece is based on a longer chant I wrote last year called Motuhia te Pōria which translates as ‘break the bond’, about an endangered native parrot called the Kākāriki Karaka (orange-fronted parakeet), which encourages the bird to be free once it is taken into the wild after being bred in captivity. It starts with tapping sounds which emulates the tapping of the baby bird’s beak breaking out of the shell. The other musicians then play with the melody, and we added in a middle open section of bird sounds and abstractions, before getting back into the groove. I was really happy with the end result, and hope to play these pieces again with some Aotearoa-based musicians.

The first half of the Café OTO gig was a solo set, and me giving an introduction to our unique instruments, used by our ancestors for all sorts of daily purposes such as wellbeing, spiritual connection with our atua (gods), communicating across distance, and a range of cultural and practical uses. If you think about it music still plays a vital role in our lives, and accompanies us in all of our human activities, but taonga puoro (and vocal music) provided the original playlist of life in Aotearoa.

The Café OTO audience was really engaged. I couldn’t have asked for a better crowd, with some younger audience members sitting on the floor around us, giving a house-concert vibe. The club is well-known for being a hotbed for musicians and composers, and there were also ex-pats and a few people from Ngāti Rānana, the London-based kapa haka group I’d visited the week before.

After the Café OTO gig I returned to the Pitt Rivers Museum and did a lunchtime performance in their main gallery space, performing a poem I was commissioned to write inspired by a kōauau (Māori flute) I met during my research trip there last year.

I also was asked to perform for Waiheke-based sculptor Anton Forde’s exhibition opening for his major work Eighty.One, featuring 80 life-sized pou in a triangular kaokao formation. That was up at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and I did a road trip there with my friend Emma from Cambridge, performing a set of music and poetry as part of the official opening – and was also involved in a ceremony with members of Ngāti Rānana early that morning. It was an honour to be part of the opening, and to experience Anton’s powerful response the Centre’s question of ‘Can We Stop Killing Each Other?’ (the theme for their upcoming season).

In these crazy and unsettling times of warfare and violence against indigenous people and the planet, I can’t help but feel worried for the future. But by coming together, and communicating in a deep and meaningful way, and sharing our artistic practices across nations and cultures, hopefully we can initiate a shift towards kotahitanga, a sense of unity, and common humanity.

Main photo of Ariana playing pūkāea is by Augusto.