If music is one’s calling, then why not name your project after an actual call? For Cooee, their music is a call to action and a call to collaborate, to their artist community and beyond. The multi disciplinary project of Kirli Saunders and Mark Harding takes its name from Gundungurra word Guuwii used “to call across valleys” and is one that has been met with a resounding response. Though Messengers is the project’s debut record, the group’s call has begun a conversation that already feels rooted in history.
When I speak to Saunders and her collaborator Harding, Saunders is tucked into what looks like a cupboard (in reality, a theatre dressing room between rehearsals) whilst Harding has joined from home between teaching commitments at TAFE, where he lectures in music business. The duality feels symbolic: theatre and pedagogy, poetry and production. The project’s identity embodies the ethos of combining worlds and mediums to make something new and inclusive. The pair met as the backing band for Jack Rivers’ Like A Version, and it was the first time ever that Saunders had sung publicly – truly a baptism of fire. Harding, an illustrator himself, found Saunders working alone in the studio on some mixed media, and instantly they bonded over their love of visual art.
When I ask how it feels to have Messengers out in the world I’m met with Saunders’ infectious smile: “I think it’s the best feeling ever,” she says, without hesitation.
“I’ve wanted to make music for such a long time. When you spend years working on something, it’s really special when it finally comes to fruition and finds its way into the world,” agrees Harding. “It feels like we’ve been living with this project forever. In one sense, releasing it felt like the end, all that work to get the album finished. But at the launch party, we had this strange moment where we realised this is actually just the beginning. It’s the first time anyone else is hearing it.”
“I’ve wanted to make music for such a long time. When you spend years working on something, it’s really special when it finally comes to fruition and finds its way into the world.”
Saunders is a celebrated writer with nine published books to her name. Harding had, by contrast, quietly stepped away from songwriting in recent years, turning his creative energy toward illustration. “I’d stopped writing songs for about two years,” he tells me. “I’ve always struggled with lyrics, I even had a book called 100 Poems that I’d tried to write songs from, but nothing really stuck.”
Around the same time, Saunders was launching her eighth book, Returning and Harding attended the launch. A few days later, he sent a tentative message: he had matched some of her poems to existing musical demos. “I can send them,” he wrote, “or they can just die as a WhatsApp message.” Thankfully, they did not.
“Hearing my poems as songs was incredibly special,” Saunders says. “I see myself as a writer first and foremost. This has felt like a really beautiful expansion of my literary practice.”
There is, as she notes, a nuanced difference between prose and lyric; when melody enters the art, the meaning is often changed. “Reworking poems into songs allows us to stretch metaphors, strip lines back, make them more immediate. Sometimes something observational becomes a direct address. There are new techniques, new structures. It’s been deeply satisfying.”
“I see myself as a writer first and foremost. This has felt like a really beautiful expansion of my literary practice.”
For Harding, the alignment was so surreal it was almost divine. “When I say it was like puzzle pieces, I mean it literally,” he explains. “Some of the early demos I’d written had very specific rhythms and cadences, and Kirli’s words just slotted in. It felt like magic. That’s what lead me to say, ‘This should be something’.”
Since those initial demos, the process has become wholly collaborative, shaping text and melody together, rather than retrofitting one to the other. What might have remained a handful of experimental tracks instead grew into a fully realised album. Beyond the songs themselves, the album’s intention is one of hope and peace in a challenging cultural time. “We’re living through pretty tricky times,” Saunders explains. “It’s easy to get lost in darkness and the hardships facing people everywhere.”
One of the album’s most immediate standouts, Yadingji, has already lodged itself firmly in listeners’ minds. “We’ve had so many messages,” Harding tells me. “Good or bad, but they all say the same thing: it’s in my head constantly!” The repetition, however, carries weight. “Yadingji” is a Dharawal word expressing gratitude. “It’s about thanks,” Saunders explains. “About offering something hopeful. The same with Welcome, it’s about homecoming. These are touchstones people can hold onto.”
Whilst the poetry and lyricism of Messengers is a defining feature the production and musical structures that run alongside are equally valuable. As Harding explains, “we wanted to capture a totally organic in-the-room sounding album. The production and arrangement mantra throughout recording was to honour the intention of those first songs we wrote together on my couch. Anytime a song started getting too big or complicated we stripped it back to whatever we were feeling and imagining in those first days writing together.” And as for all time musical influences for Cooee: Joni Mitchell, Big Thief, The Middle East, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake, Emily Wurramara, uncle Archie Roach, the Stiff Gins, Kaiit, Kee’ahn, Julia Jacklin and Stella Donnelly can all be found on their extensive list.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about Cooee’s debut is the breadth of collaboration. Nineteen of the thirty-one contributors are First Nations artists, elders, musicians and young people and for some, it was their first time ever recording. “There was a 15-year-old vocalist who’d never been in a studio before,” Saunders says. “Elders who paused what they were doing to come and be part of it. A brother playing yidaki. Being able to offer that space back, that mattered deeply.”
“There was a 15-year-old vocalist who’d never been in a studio before. Elders who paused what they were doing to come and be part of it. A brother playing yidaki. Being able to offer that space back, that mattered deeply.”
Almost all of these collaborators were in attendance at their launch at The Lord Gladstone in Sydney, “It feels like a safe Blak space,” Saunders says. “There’s a big mob flag on the wall. I’ve celebrated so many birthdays there with my mob.” At one point during the evening, the Mudjingaal Yangamba Choir, who appear on the album, positioned themselves in the stairwell and sang back toward the stage, their harmonies echoing through the room, which was “overwhelming”, and one can imagine why.
Cooee’s purpose extends beyond being a collection of songs, it is a living ecosystem of language, lineage, image and sound intertwined, and one that Saunders wishes to see become a platform of support.“For me, the dream is that Cooee becomes a meeting place,” Saunders says. “A space where more First Nations musicians, knowledge holders, activists and artists can share stories in different ways.” Saunders explains,“you call out to your mob, and usually you receive a response. I love that idea of speaking across distance and being answered.”
The call and response continues for Saunders and Harding outside Cooee, whilst we wait patiently for a second album, Saunders is preparing to tour her solo theatre work,Yandha Djanbay, with Harding adding to the score that underpins her performance. “It’s all interconnected,” he says. That interconnection feels like the essential and inescapable DNA of the entire project. Poetry becoming song, illustration becoming friendship and artwork, and community becoming chorus.
You can listen to Cooee’s debut album, Messengers, now on Spotify and Apple Music.
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