Ngunmal, by Amby Downs

Ngunmal

by Amby Downs

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Matte laminate and monchrome printed sleeve with insert art

Includes unlimited streaming of Ngunmal via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$9 USD or more

1.	Ngunmal 28:48	buy track
2.	Ngunmal (excerpt) 06:56	buy track
3.	I Am Holding My Breath 20:47	buy track
4.	I Am Holding My Breath (excerpt) 05:17	buy track

about

A Note from Lawrence English
The work of Amby Downs, aka Murri/European artist Tahlia Palmer, occupies an intensely personal and unique space in the Australian music landscape. It is a project that speaks as much to trauma, as it does to aspiration or hope. It is work that recognises the complexities of intergenerational exchange; emotionally, socially, politically and culturally.

For the past half decade, Tahlia has been seeking to trace unspoken, and in some cases deeply fragmented histories, and thread a linage that is heavily worn by the weight of colonial aggression and obfuscation. She is a collector, a researcher and a surgeon, stitching together these pieces of connective tissue, and through doing so she creates the opportunity to imagine, perhaps even re-imagine, the stories that have forged her very being.

Ngunmal and I Am Holding My Breath are two long form works that exist both as sound pieces and as audio visual installations. They are pieces that operate in the realm of the physical. They are loaded with a low frequency energy that breathes, sighs and yearns. There’s a sense of simultaneous constriction and expansion in her compositions, a quality that draws you in deeper and deeper. This depth is sensed as pressure. In some respects her sound works mimmic the research that feeds into them; even the smallest crack, the tiniest murmuring, can be split open to reveal an entire cavern of sound.

Amby Downs, and Palmer’s practice more broadly, asks us to make ourselves available. It asks us to be vulnerable to places and situations of not knowing, to be uncertain, to being unsettled. It prompts us to recognise within ourselves the way we operate in the day to day, and through doing so opens us up to experience these wildly intense, provocative and ultimately beautiful works.

credits

released November 11, 2023

This edition includes a download of both the films from which this work is drawn.

ngunmal
- fence sounds: Lawrence English
- everything else collected and put together by Tahlia Palmer

i am holding my breath
- sounds collected and put together by Tahlia Palmer
- mixing help from Paul Ceraso

Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space
Design by T.Pakioufakis

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Room40, a beacon of sound...ringing out from the deepest south. Also home to our sibling labels Someone Good and A Guide To Saints.

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