Smoke Between Mountains is a new work by composer and AAO Artistic Director, Aaron Choulai with the Australian Art Orchestra. While on tour with AAO to Osaka, Choulai witnessed musicians Kutcha Edwards and Miyama McQueen-Tokita discover a shared understanding between First Nations Australian and Japanese knowledge systems, and their relationships to country. That exchange became the foundation and inspiration for AAO’s latest work, Smoke Between Mountains.

Composed for an ensemble of nine musicians, Smoke Between Mountains traces a dreamlike narrative against an innovative score that plays with the Ghibli sound world. The work draws on Shinto and Australian First Nations ecological thought, telling the story of a girl from a coastal mountain island in southern Japan and a boy from the high plateau of inland Australia, who begin to dream of the other’s world. The visions are vivid. Slowly, what feels like imagination begins to mirror reality as they try to understand messages from nature ahead of a climate catastrophe.

Against a rich visual backdrop of video design by Michael Carmody, the work unfolds through the voice and koto of Miyama McQueen-Tokita and the percussive storytelling of Adam Manning, as Aaron Choulai employs his Sono-Kinetic Conducting system to shape improvised moments of story through sound. Blurring the boundaries between composition, improvisation and mythic storytelling, Smoke Between Mountains becomes a meditation on connection, between cultures, landscapes, generations and the fragile ecologies that bind them.