Cooee is the result of collaboration between poet, author and visual artist Kirli Saunders and illustrator, producer and musician Mark Chester Harding - and the smorgasbord of talents already mastered by the pair has granted them complete agency of the project. There isn’t a corner of the sound that isn’t singularly deliberate and theirs.
When they met, they were arriving from opposite ends of independent music. Harding had spent more than a decade playing in bands and admitted he had “kind of given up on writing music,” feeling jaded by the release process. Saunders, meanwhile, was stepping into music from the worlds of poetry and visual art, bringing a storyteller’s perspective shaped by Country, community and language. “It was like puzzle pieces, the way her words matched with the phrasing that I use when I write songs.”
The foundations of their debut record came to creation on Harding's couch, demos of his perfectly supporting the melody and lyricism pouring out of Saunders. This truly “DIY” method of creation has obviously found an itch that needed scratching within the Sydney-independant music scene with appearances at poetry stages, community events and venues, including an appearance with Bankstown Poetry Slam at the Sydney Opera House - before their debut release had been released.
“It’s sort of just Kirli and I in the project,” Harding explained. “We’re doing all the PR and organising the gig and everything ourselves.”
It would be juvenile to write this article without acknowledging that artists are increasingly becoming “DIY” because of the insurmountability of the music scene and the price of professionally outsourcing all of the materials and services required for the creation and rollout of a release. In a state that still calls itself the centre of Australia’s music industry - home to nearly half of the country’s music publishers and hundreds of live venues - the reality for many artists is a paradox: a thriving sector on paper, but one that often asks musicians to build things themselves just to stay in motion.
Cooee mark a milestone, a reminder that divine magic can come from not one but two artists building a project together from instinct, trust and community.
Words by Sabine Lee Cook