Tribewanted: Vorovoro

In June and July this year myself and my partner Georgie were lucky enough to experience the wonders of Vorovoro. Needless to say we had a fantastic time and we miss it hugely now we’re gone.

If you were there whilst we were you may remember our personal project – to write and record a Vorovoro song. You may have even contributed to its creation! Well, I’m happy to say that now, 3 months later, it’s finally finished! I’ll recount the story of it’s creation below. First off though, click here to have a listen! -

Circle Circuits – The World Will Come to Vorovoro

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Georgie and I are the sort of people you could safely call ‘music obsessives’ without causing offense. I play the computer (in that I use a computer to compose electronic music) and Georgie is a singer, songwriter and guitarist. Between us we are travelling with a mini studio including microphones, a keyboard, a laptop, a guitar and a myriad of cables to connect them all together. Almost as soon as we’d decided to visit Vorovoro, then, we’d hatched a plan to turn our experience into music.

What with Tribewanted being a communal place, we thought it would be nice to include everyone who wanted to be included. So we presented our idea to the tribe at the morning meeting on our 2nd or 3rd day and were chuffed at the positive reaction we had! It became apparent that Vorovoro is swamped by musical talent both Fijian and foreign and that an island song, pooling this talent, seemed long overdue.

My musical aesthetic is to only use sounds I record myself. I produced a whole album using this method last time I travelled, and we thought it would be cool to use sounds purely captured on Vorovoro to make this song, too. As such we set about recording all the noises we could that summed up the island. This was aided by a blackboard on which tribe members scribbled the sounds they’d like to hear in the song. Some were more attainable than others – if anyone knows how to accurately and effectively record bats then please let me know! Once we had a decent range of sounds (grog pounding, cicadas, the sea, Team Fiji’s laughs…) I set about making a beat and a rough structure. Meanwhile, Georgie worked on the lyrics, bass and guitar parts.

Soon the song was starting to take shape, but our ambitions were growing, too! Georgie envisioned a choir singing the chorus of the song, plus a part sung in Fijian. The range of recordings we had of people, animals and things on Vorovoro meant that weaving them all into the song was going to be quite time consuming. Production became something of a labour of love and at times dominated our island experience. (That’s not to say that making music in paradise is a bad thing, of course!)

About a week and a half through our stay we helped put on the Vorovoro Sessions gig, which was a wonderful showcase of the musical talent on the island. During the gig Georgie donned her choir master hat and orchestrated a 3 part harmony amongst 30-odd people – tribe members and fijians – for the chorus of the song. It was very impressive to behold!

Our self-imposed deadline for finishing the song soon became Tuesday, so we could play the results to Tui Mali when he visited. Work continued with guitar and ukelele parts being played by Georgie and Ben, the lali being beaten and the Fijian lyrics sung by Save, the grog being pounded by Sosi and eager ears ever wanting to borrow the headphones and listen to the progress! Come Tuesday, though, it was clear that the song would only be part-finished. However, there was enough to entertain Tui Mali and the tribe gathered around the Kava bowl.

Several months and 2 countries later I’ve finally finished the production side of things. Progress wasn’t helped when I lost my studio headphones, but once they’d been replaced I re-immersed myself in the evocative soundscapes of Vorovoro and completed something that me and Georgie are very proud of.

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who helped, which, as seems fitting for the Tribewanted project, was most people on the island in the end! The encouragement we received throughout was wonderful, too, so thank you to everyone who thought it was a good idea and told us we were doing good when we needed to hear it!

we’re going to compile a list of ‘ingredients’ soon, detailing all the sounds that went in to the making of the song. In the meantime, have a listen yourself and see what you can identify!

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You can hear my music as The Reverse Engineer here: The Reverse Engineer

You can hear Georgie’s music in Dogs Don’t Dance here: Dogs Dont Dance