Journeying and homecomings play out across the New Zealand tour of Where Water Meets, both in their music and in real life.
For one half of the Tasmania-based chamber folk duo, violin and viola player Emily Sheppard, it is a return to Twizel, the hometown she left when just 3. That would be 25 years ago now.
The tour was announced on the band’s socials with "We are coming home grandma!".
On the phone, courtesy of a new sim card, having just landed back on New Zealand soil, Sheppard admits to her recollection of the southern town being a bit hazy.
There are more recent memories, but she hasn’t visited the country since she was 15.
"It’s a homecoming, it’s a first tour here, it is meeting all my extended family, it’s a lot of things this trip."
So, that is the personal homecoming part of the story. Then there are the eels.
Eels, their near mythical journeying and almost magical homecomings, have become a significant strand in Where Water Meets’ music since playing Tasmania’s Mona Foma music and arts festival in 2021.
There they were told their performance — on a boat — couldn’t involve violin or guitar, their go-to instruments, and had to respond to the river.
"So we asked the skipper of the boat, ‘what do we need to know about the river?’. And he said, ‘eels’."
From that starting point they decided they’d make a stringed instrument using eel skin and embarked on a deep dive into the lives of the storied animal.
"We learned a lot about the amazing migration — they travel thousands of kilometres from birth and then back again at the end of their lives to breed," Sheppard says.
The musician is talking about the diadromous lifecycle of the eel, which sees them spending part of their lives in fresh water and part in saltwater. Tasmania’s short-finned eels travel to the Coral Sea to spawn, the juveniles returning to the island’s rivers to mature.
Sheppard is well aware of the important place eels occupy in Aotearoa.
"We are hoping to meet lots of people and talk to them, hear the stories of New Zealand eels.
"A broader project of working with the instrument is trying to do more research into eels and all different aspects of it."
Making the eel-skin instrument involved coming to terms with the material. There are many instruments that use skins to create resonating membranes — the banjo among the best known — but not all skins are created equal, Sheppard explains.
The eel’s skin is quite fatty and oily, as those fat reserves are essential for their long ocean treks.
"It has some really interesting sound properties and it was also really challenging to work with, it has taken us a lot of experimentation to figure out."
If the duo’s socials are any indication, their inquiries have also been culinary.
The instrument they have built is based on the Chinese bowed erhu, which has quite a trebly sound, Sheppard explains. It uses a python skin, which is much thinner than an eel skin. So the eel-erhu is different.
"We describe the sound as a hybrid violin-erhu sound. It’s not quite as trebly because the skin is a bit thicker.
"It’s very ethereal, people sometimes say it sounds like a voice or a flute."
As far as they know, theirs is the first instrument to use eel skin.
This meshing of art, craft and science recently won the pair a spot in a TEDx in Hobart, where they tied all these various threads together.
"The eel stuff is more about science communication I suppose, telling the eel’s stories."
They also have an eel skin guitar and violin, Sheppard adds, to complete the picture, but couldn’t bring it all to New Zealand.
Where Water Meets’ chamber folk is evocative, impressionistic, intricate and complex.
"We are bridging classical and folk as well as other genres," Sheppard says. "My background is as a classically trained violinist and a lot of the harmonic language comes from the classical canon, especially the impressionistic composers, like Debussy and Ravel. And also because it is very much chamber music in the sense of it is very musically driven, we do have vocals as well, but there is a lot of complexity and intricacy in the musical instrumentation and the choices as well. It is kind of the chamber music of folk."
While Sheppard was classically trained, the duo’s other half, Yyan Ng, brings a background in finger-style, steel-string guitar playing.
"He also played and sung a lot of blues growing up."
On top of which, the multi-instrumentalist also plays the Japanese bamboo flute the Shakuhachi, which is on the tour, and contributes percussion.
In the YouTube video for Secret life of Eels, played on the boat at that Mona Foma festival, Ng can be seen with wood blocks made of kelp.
He also sings. They both do.
"He’s also trained in opera, a little bit," Sheppard says.
While the pair are principally touring their album River Islands, there is also new material, which Sheppard says further develops their harmonic language, pushing the boundaries.
"We are coming up with our own chord dictionary."
Both players, but Ng in particular, use a lot of alternative tunings, Ng’s carried over from his steel-string playing.
"He has pushed that one step further by using some very weird tunings so he can play these chords, so they are physically possible. He has thicker strings in order to do that, even his guitar is made to support the sounds he is looking for."
The tunings change the resonance of the instrument, Sheppard says.
"So it is like we are tuning in to the key of the piece, so we have the maximum resonance possible for that piece, then we will tune again before the next one."
The expansive musical voyaging is winning them a range of opportunities, including writing the score for a film about a mountain in Hobart.
"It is based on a mountain that I get to see every day, so it is a mountain I have spent a lot of time on — it is a special project. They approached us knowing we have this focus on trying to evoke the feeling of the wilderness, the feeling of being in the wilderness, which is awe and wonder, among other things. I suppose that is what we are chasing with the sound. We sometimes also call ourselves existential folk, in light of that."
They are also writing music for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
First though, there’s the Twizel homecoming, a house concert there today. Then a show in Dunedin tomorrow.
Sheppard is prepared for the land to have an existential impact, maybe a bit like the effect Tasmania had on her 10 years ago.
"As soon as I moved, within a week I was, like, ‘this is home, OK’. Tasmanian does that to you. I suspect that New Zealand does that to you too."
The gig
- Where Water Meets plays the Dunedin Folk Club
When: Sunday, 26 February, 7.30pm
Where: 80 Lovelock Ave, Opoho (the bowling club)
