My Band is me but I am attached to many projects. Based upon the principles of altering consciousness through sound (Nada Yoga) I engage in trance ceremonies whenever I perform. My "music" should not be listened to while operating machinery or anything involving a sharp edge. Is is best ingested when in a ventilated state of non-mind. Om Shanti.
Why this name?
Nada Yoga is union with God as sound. nada baba is he who practices such.
Do you play live?
Live in my two nations: Australia and Sweden. Enjoy festivals and mass dance exepriences. Finest moment among many was perhaps playing to the sunrise at a full moon party of 500 at the squatted village of Ruigoord (http://www.ruigoord.nl/) outside Amsterdam in 1998.
How, do you think, does the internet (or mp3) change the music industry?
It is becoming more about performance and community rather than sales and image.
Would you sign a record contract with a major label?
No... not enough time with what I am already doing.
Band History:
I stated as a poet and dance with improv performance groups around my home town Toowoomba in Australia. Many nights of 4 track adventures and altered states. In 1991 I saw the Butthole Surfers play and nothing was the same again. I quite my job and moved to Sydney to take up the life of a Bohemian Art Object. From 1991-1994 I practiced poetry and sitar whilst as high as a kite.
In 1995 I joined the performance art group Senslesss after hearing Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs speak at Sydney College of Art. We made huge sculptures and played them with fire, film, costume, instruments and acrobatics in art happenings.
In 1996 I hitchhiked around Tasmania on a self-financed busking tour which my music comrade and I later took to New South Wales and Queensland.
In August 1996 I travelled to India via Thailand. In India I stayed with Buddhist monks in Ladakh, studied astrology in Dharamsala and Indian Music and yoga in Varanassi. I stayed 3 months in a huge house on the banks of the Ganges with Rainbow travelers from all over the world. Here I met my now wife. Erika.
In 1997 I travelled to Europe and North Africa. Met again with Erika and busked in Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and lived the whole of 1998 in Amsterdam as a street musician and squatter.
In 1999 returned to Australia and helped run a warehouse space for artists and musicians in Redfern, Sydney.
In 2000 returned to Sweden and settled in Umeå in the far north of the country. Have been playing a lot since then at festivals around the Sámi homelands of Lapland.
Your influences?
Pandit Pran Nath, Angus McLise, Le Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Gibby Haynes, Genetic Drugs, Terry Riley, Jaron Lanier, Fursaxa, Siberian Shamanism, Fluxus, Nikhil Banerjee, Bauls, Anton Artaud, Charlie McMahon, Surrealism, High Tone.
Favorite spot?
Parvatti Valley.
Equipment used:
Anything that makes sound... didgeridoo, sitar, drums (dolak, djembe, dembuka, tablas), jaw harp, harmonicas, flutes, guitar...
Anything else?
In 1995 I was living in Sydney, Australia in a suburb which was home to many Aborigines,
the indigenous people of Australia. Called Redfern, it was centered on an area known as “The Block”, a crowded jumble of houses and old factories where around 1000 Aboriginal people lived on land that was returned to them by the Australian Government in 1973. Despite having grown up in Australia this was, at the age of 26, my first exposure to large-scale aboriginal culture.
I was fascinated by the stories and struggles of the aboriginal people and after a short time of living in Redfern I wanted to learn to play their long flute-like instrument from the far north of Australia. Most people call it a Didjeridu, but that is a European interpretation of the name based on the sound the instrument makes. The aboriginal people call it by several names, some being Yiraka or Yidaki (trachea), Artawirr (hollow log), and Ngaribi (bamboo).
My first Didjeridu was a copper pipe, played a bit like a trumpet, but with a small enough aperture to make it easier to circular breath, as is needed to play Didjeridu. Shortly after this a friend of mine who lived in an isolated Aboriginal community in the far north of Australia sent me a Didjeridu. This instrument I played for a year, until I had the opportunity to leave Australia and travel as a near destitute backpacker. When I arrived in England in 1997 an English friend gave me his Didjeridu as he was about to go to Australia and could not carry the heavy instrument with him. So I was now broke and in Europe with a Didjeridu. I began playing on the streets as a busker, earning enough money to survive and stayed in Europe for 18 months, meeting up again (we first met in India in 1996) with the girl who I would eventually marry and settle in Umeå with.
I lived as a street musician in Amsterdam for most of 1998, and have played at cafes and festivals in Spain, Holland, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. I have been on television in Holland, Germany, and Sweden. My most recent achievement was playing at the 397th Saami Winter Market in Jokkmokk, from the 7th to 9th of February 2002 where I was part of a group of Saami, Inuit, and Swedish musicians whose performance was recorded by Finnish radio. Playing the Didjeridu has given me many opportunities to meet people. There is much interest in the instrument and the ancient culture it represents. The Didjeridu is more than just an instrument for me, as it has a presence that is difficult to describe without using spiritual terminology. The breathing technique and the hypnotic tones it produces have a highly meditative effect on myself and often on those who listen.
The Didjeridu has become identified with what is labelled The New Age. I think of myself as coming from a culture which is described in the book “The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet” , as alternative lifestylers’ whose “model society is based on four essential elements; firstly holism of experience, secondly community with it’s qualities of interrelatedness and co-operation, thirdly ecology, with its sustainable ethos and fourthly, a creative spiritual milieu.” (Neuenfeldt et.al. p140). It goes on to say that it is the rejection of materialism by alternative lifestylers’ which separates us from the New Age movement, which “has become in many cases a highly commercialised and profit making industry” (ibid.).
