Today, Amber Fresh (aka Rabbit Island) shared her album Deep in The Big. She takes us on a journey through the components of the release that make it ever-so-special.
A crappy and sacred sharehouse by the river:
While I was making the music, I lived in a very special house that was falling down slowly but in which lots of magical things happened. There were healing things that happened, friends and I saw visions about the universe and each other in the lounge room, bedroom, and backyard. It was close to a river called the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) but with your eyes closed, it felt close to everywhere. The river and things that happened in that house are in all the songs.
Goode Beach in Torndirrup National Park:
That's the actual name of the beach I grew up by, and this place always affects me. I slept each night with the sounds of tiny waves from the beach and frogs from the freshwater lake doing their thing, and all that plus the granite, the islands, are always in the music I make, but even more so for this album. In some of the songs, I feel they hover over the water... Doesn't mean they won't make sense in a desert or city too - apparently, there are songlines that go from that area all the way to Uluru.
Buddies/ Camp Doogs:
There are many friends who are wound into these songs, through all the strong connections we've made in Perth and Fremantle as we've created and played music to and for each other over years. One Camp Doogs, I was playing with Jake from Methyl Ethel, Sam Maher from heaps of bands and who's a handpan legend, Laura who is Kučka, Stephen Bellair from Doctopus, and we made something very special in that Camp Doog's space created by friends. Doogs was/is a camping festival down south... My friends are super important to me and make it into the music often. It's not influence, like how to play or what to play, but an influence on your inner being which comes out in songs. I could list a million* (almost) friends who are important to this music but it would be an expanding list as more appear in the future and write themselves retrospectively in.
Heartbreak. of course:
My own heartbreaks, other people's heartbreaks. But this time the sadness is transformed into something bigger. I guess the heartbreak is about something bigger too. Not just some person but all the heartbreak of our earth. All of our love and connection mixed in at times when that goes wrong. Somehow when I was making these songs I could be crying and in the depths of heartbreak but also secretly know or be told in my spirit that something good was going to happen, even if it's after we're all gone.
Hot milky coffee:
Well, probably most music is influenced by some sort of beverage. In this case, it was coffee as we did recording in Melbourne and then by the ocean in Perth. It's kind of shit to put milk into coffee, as all my French friends tell me, but hey, you have to follow your own heart and mine says milk.
Image - supplied
