Medicine Songs is an offering of a melody weaving poetry, essays, and storytelling with an accompanying sound album. The work explores the intersection of nature, vibration, and ritual healing practices, creating an immersive experience where text and sound move together in ceremony. It invites the listeners to engage with literature not just as words on a page, but as living, resonant soundscapes. The compositions below are a glimpse into the project’s sound elements. While not all the songs will appear in the final form, they reflect the sonic environment that is still unfolding and growing.
Read the Manuscript in process - MEDICINE SONGS
The title Medicine Songs calls upon lineages whose songs continue to be a source of guidance and learning. There are chants, drumming and many forms of medicinal sound. Hózhóójí refers to the Diné (Navajo) principle of harmony and right-relation, a state where beauty, balance, and wellness align across the human, ancestral, and ecological worlds. It teaches that living attuned to the land restores coherence and reminds us that harmony is both a practice and a pathway back into relational wholeness. Milkarri refers to the Yolŋu women’s crying-voices of Arnhem Land, ceremonial voices that call the ancestors, bind people to Country, and keep the land’s memory alive. Its teachings hold that sound is a bridge between worlds, carrying grief, kinship, and ecological continuity through the power of breath and lineage. Icaros refers to the medicine songs of Indigenous Amazonian ceremony- songs understood as carriers of healing, knowledge, and ecological awareness. I invoke these words with reverence, not to claim the lineage as my own, but to honor their teaching: that sound is medicine, vibration is language, and creative practice can guide us back into relationship with nature.
