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Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum Taonga Pūoro

Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum Taonga Pūoro - Al Fraser
Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum Taonga Pūoro – Al Fraser

My last post was about the octophonic composition I composed and installed in January at The Auricle sound art gallery in Christchurch using recordings I made at Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum of their taonga pūoro collection. A happy spin off of this project is a 20 minute EP of the raw recordings. The print cost was supported by the public through crowd funding via pledge me and the E.P. is now getting printed and pressed and I expect to have them for release next week. I will donate 250 of these CD’s to the museum to sell as a fundraiser and hopefully this will raise some money and  awareness of this fantastic museum and its collection.

Murray Thacker has been collecting artefacts all his life and in 1975 he bought the cheese factory in his native Okain’s Bay to house his ever growing collection. In 1977 he donated the Museum to Aotearoa and so the collection at Okain’s Bay Māori and Colonial Museum is now ‘ours’ as Murray Thacker sees it as belonging to all New Zealanders. It is this generous ethos that gave me access to play these taonga tāwhito (ancient treasures), as most museums have very strict rules on handling artefacts, let alone playing them.

To hear a snippet of the instruments played at the Museum go to this link.

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