BY ZOE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN, LEAD WRITER
Tributary
Damien Kingston Trio (Damien Kingston — guitar, Hamish Houston — bass, Tom Robb — drums)
Scratch Match Records, 2019
Three years ago, a river in New Zealand turned into a person. After 170 years of campaigning by the Indigenous Maori Iwi nation, the longest-running court battle in New Zealand’s history culminated in the Whanganui River being recognised as a person with the same legal standing as a living being.
In lutruwita/Tasmania, the timtumili minanya or River Derwent (meaning ‘clear water’) pools into the freshwater Lake St Clair, tumbles through Southern Tasmania, and itches quietly toward the sea.
We don’t often think of this river as a person, but Damien Kingston’s Tributary brings personality to the body of water. As part of Mona’s River Derwent Heavy Metal Project, and with the help of researchers including marine scientist Ada Crantock, the jazz guitarist has composed a musical soundscape of the river to illustrate its environmental health.
Since the colonisation of timtumili minanya, the waterbody has been suffering from pollution. Industrial waste, stormwater run-off and, in recent years, fish farming have seen heavy metals and nitrates rising alongside an outbreak of Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome disrupting the complex tidal ecosystems. Compounding the issue is Tasmania’s coastal sea temperatures, which are rising at more than triple the global rate due to anthropogenic climate change.
Damien Kingston gives voice to the Derwent through these changes, as he interprets the topography of shells, the sounds of the natural environment, and his own personal response to the turmoil.
The feeling of unease amid change is perfectly captured with abundant use of dissonance, which evokes the solastalgia the crustacea might feel for their surroundings and the wider ecosystem of the river. Kingston’s jazz style is free-flowing and expansive, leading you through murky depths of discord with columns of bright cadences like sun captured in water.
While listening to the improvisational Lowercase, I was reminded of Ceridwen Dovey’s book Only the Animals; the chapter documenting a free-wheeling barnacle’s life travelling from boat hull to boat hull, in a prose style rhythmically similar to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This came after the first track Iron Pot, which I struggled with, as I found it a bit repetitive and inaccessible.
In the sixth track Otago, named after the ship which sank in the Derwent and remains in Otago Bay, you can imagine bubbles rising sporadically out of a shipwreck. The tangled rhythms of Three By For evoke a ragged net washing to shore, giving way to the meandering sound of Shells. But the one which had me was the title track Tributary, a tune which seems to alchemise saltwater and fresh by floating a raft of chords above shadowy modal undercurrents, sinking into dreamy silt and sand at the river’s edge.
Released not long after the hottest summer on record, when the Barwen and Namoi tributaries of Australia’s lifeblood Murray Darling river went dry, Tributary is an important work for our times.
I used to live in Queenstown, where 100 million tonnes of sulfidic tailings were dumped into the river in the worst case of acid dumping in the country – waste is often hidden, spirited away in vessels of cultural shame. We need musical stories to imbue a sense of personhood to these waterbodies that support our life.
Listen to Tributary on Bandcamp.
Damien image supplied. Featured image: The #B’s via Flickr CC BY 2.0.
