“Inspired ethnological musical exploration from an unlikely source.” — what better way to describe Michael Atherton’s Windshift? Michael Atherton might best be known in Australia as one of it’s leading scholars and practitioners of Aboriginal and Pan-Pacific music but somewhere in his history lies a fantastic composer/musician who understood a fourth way to bridge all sorts of world musical styles he grew up digesting. On Windshift, we get many ideas that could have begun remained in some historical stasis, shift to less obvious influences.
For someone deeply in tune with Australian folk and native music, Michael himself would readily admit that his is more of an immigrant’s tale. Born in England to Irish-Scot and German parents, out of necessity they migrated to Australia. Moving to the edges of Sydney, in La Perouse, Michael grew up around a mixed, multicultural community where he fostered friendships with existing Iberian migrants and indigenous members that made up its core.
Michael Atherton’s love of all the global music he heard growing up, spurred him to both study ethnomusicology and to strike out as a performer himself. By the time of 1990’s Windshift, Michael Atherton had decided to move beyond earlier musical endeavors either recording neoclassical music with Renaissance Players and one of Australia’s pioneering ethno-folk groups, Sirocco. Windshift caught him under the pull away from Australia and into the music of Pacific Asia — Javanese gamelan, Tahitian drone, and more — while leaving himself open to Australia’s uniquely evolving folk scene.
On songs like “Initiation”, “Chasm”, “Spirithouse” Michael seems to join the league of percussive New Age composers like Steve Roach, Anugama, and Ariel Kalma who don’t exactly embody any New Age or ambient aesthetic but line the edges of their music with it. Out of instruments like, everyone’s favorite, the didgeridoo, and various “exotic” instruments like the kulintang, Jew’s harp, saron, bamboo flute (to name a precious few) Michael adds intense color from samplers, synths, and modulating effects.
For someone, who could have created pastiches or overly faithful compositions with such varied instruments he openly mixes tones and ambiances together to create songs that truly stand apart from each other.
In the liner notes to Windshift, Michael notes his appreciation for newfound electronic recording methods and the album itself does represent a remarkable attenuation of the “folk” exploration quieting itself to the possibilities that can open itself via sonic mutation. “Logtalk” bares fruit to this. Even on tracks like “Sunshower” which find him shifting to strung acoustic instruments, Michael never loses sight that this album is music made to capture the environment where he is in, rather than the environment he came from. Gorgeous, made up of both continental European strokes and windswept, droning didgeridoo, “Sunshower” trapezes the fourth world without a pretense of any world.
If Windshift is Australian-sounding it’s because the orbit seemed to expand from within. Old age really seems to bring along a newer age.