RONA is creating the sounds of the future for right now. The Kaytetye artist, producer, and DJ, is set to transform our lives at RISING Festival this weekend in Melbourne. As part of the First Frequency experience, RONA will present a set infused with sounds and rhythms from her home in the desert. Instilling the vibration of Country into her work, RONA’s music creates conversations that transcend electronic music, connecting past, present and future, and making way for a deeper connection and understanding of Country. We spoke to the clever DJ, producer and empowering voice about the intention behind her music and performances:

You’re great at telling a story through your music and your performances. How do you think that storytelling in a sonic way helps people to understand what you're trying to convey more so than public speaking would?

That’s a really interesting question. No one's ever asked me that. Music has a way of connecting with people that other mediums don't. The visceral feeling of rhythm and vibrations in your body are so powerful as a form of collective movement and storytelling and healing. People can tell a story and and say things with words, and that is also really effective. But I think that collective space of people all standing together and feeling the vibrations of storytelling is something that, in my experience, has moved me as an individual. I've seen the way that it's moved dance floors, there's something so liberating about that collective experience of music and a space like Rising. Being able to play to the town hall, which is a massive space… there’s going to be a lot of bodies in the room in a space that we've completely curated. It’s such an exciting prospect for me, it feels like this moment in my journey as a musician where I'm really able to show up completely and authentically in the way that I want to.

We've crafted who's going to be there in terms of the musicians that are playing before and after me and the power of that sonic experience and collective experience, we've really intentionally built it. I’m just so excited by it. I've been dreaming of a room like this to play in for a really long time. I feel like as a DJ, because I've been playing for a few years and the culture of music has been moving to a higher BPM to this hard and fast style, I’ve naturally been swept up in some of that, and I think in some ways I've felt like I haven't been able to fully express my vibrations and storytelling that come from within me because I'm in this space and movement that is pushing that way. But I really want to slow things down and this show feels like a moment where I'm really able to go, okay, what does it look like for an hour and a half of just Rona not being swayed by other stages at a festival or thinking about the context beyond? This is just about the way that I want to show up. Slowing things down is something that I've been naturally doing in my writing and I'm really excited to do that in this space.

Yeah, that's true. You're not trying to hype up a crowd up for other artists.

Exactly. And I actually said, when we were programming, I want to play in the middle slot, like I wanna play in the middle slot on the Friday night. Someone's opened the space and set an energy, I get to hold that energy and then pass that on to someone else. I'm just so excited to be the shepherd in the middle. And craft my own space that holds that energy that's not yet fully club, but it's not stripped back. It's this kind of middle space, that in between.

How did you learn to produce and DJ? When did that come into your life?

I was raised around music and I played classical music from a young age and really resonated with bands. When I was a teenager, I was in different bands. When I moved to Naarm when I was 17, I started going to clubs and I became a club rat. That love of music in the band world translated to this newer love of electronic music, being in these spaces where the dance floor was heaving and moving for hours, and those collective experiences really inspired me. I remember seeing different producers, people that were playing live shows with synths in the club or in other spaces where I just got so inspired and I looked at what they were doing and felt the way that they were able to move a room and knew that was something that I wanted to explore. I bought my first synth in 2016 and just started crafting my own sounds and that developed over time. 2019 was when I really felt like I'd found my stride and released my first EP in 2020. Actually this week is the three year anniversary, which is wild. I listen back to it, I'm like wow, this shit was actually really good. I'm constantly chasing that. There's something about the naivety that you bring when you write for the first time like this newness of it and the childlike wonder of your first productions are so special and magical when you're not overthinking it. I kind of wish I could pedal back to that. You are not overcritical of your work, you're just creating.

It's funny, isn't it? The more you learn, the more narrow minded you can become in thinking it has to be done a certain way. How did growing up where you grew up shape your sound? I love how you talk about the vibrations of Country.

I'm actually sitting where I grew up, on the country just outside of Mparntwe, Alice Springs. I grew up on a small property where literally if I look out across here, all I see is the expansiveness of Country. Like there's not a cloud in sight. You can see all the way from this side to this side. There's no buildings obstructing anything. And I do think that expansiveness and the freedom of space is something that has deeply informed the way that I hear the world and the way I create music. People have said that to me before, that if you listen to the music that I create when I'm off this country, it sounds completely different to the music I create when I'm here. The music that I write here is expansive and organic and really draws from the vibrations of this place. I have a massive bank of recordings that I'm constantly recording out here and a lot of desert birds, and I've been sticking poles in the ground recently to try and record the earth.

Wow. What does that sound like?

Yeah. It's pretty low res, like it's below 10,000 hertz. It's a bit of a rumble.

That's such a good idea.

Yeah. It's the listening that leads to the story which I found so powerful. Last last week I was recording the relationship between plants, animals, and kinship systems and working on these videos and a websites for language learners. I was just sitting out there with some old people and I whipped out the laptop… we'd spent the whole day together and it was almost nighttime and I just started writing. It’s just really beautiful to capture these experiences and feelings in the moment when I'm on Country. It’s so rewarding for the listener to.

Yeah. I listen to a lot of music based on frequencies and Morphic Fields. I think it’s really great when you know what you’re listening to has a purpose and is infused with things that have the intention behind them to make you feel good. Everything is always affecting our energy.

Absolutely. You know, within cultures here in the central desert, we have these healers which are traditional healers that use many different mediums of healing. Some if it involves touch, some of it is astral projection. And some of it is through song. So people collectively sing to heal groups of people. It’s incredibly powerful as a healing force. One of my aspirations is to figure out how we bring those songs that are really sacred into the music without [explicitly] sharing them publicly. What can we bring into the music? Is it the rhythm? Is it the melody? Is it just their voice? What are the things that actually we could channel into this body of healing songs that would be able to be shared with the world? It takes a lot of time and trust-building to figure that out. Their healing powers should be felt by everyone.

I can imagine that it must be really hard to let go of things like that. Both you and they would feel so protective of that practice. What's something that you are passionate about aside from music and something that you wanna use your growing platform for?

It's funny, because music was a side piece to my work, which I've slowly been stepping away from, but now music is becoming more of a focus, which is so exciting. But I’m still using that platform to be able to share what I'm doing outside of music. I'd say that the one thing that I'm really wanting to continue focusing on in my world of music and in in my growing platform is speaking to people about how we build futures that are grounded in reciprocity and balance. I think that the world has become so extractive and there's so much inequity and from a First Nations experience, seeing the way that lack of funding and wealth is deeply impacting our communities. One major task of my lifetime and something that I'm continuing to work in is how do we restore balance and redistribute wealth and create balance within the ecosystems that we live in, not just in First Nations communities and Australia, but everywhere across this planet. And there's ways we can do that, but for me, using my platform to be able to share stories about that and move people to create futures that are built on collective care and built on restoring balance. We shouldn't live in a world of everyone wanting to have more, do more and be more as individuals, but we should be living in a world where we collectively care for each other and restore that balance. So I like the phrase collective care.

That's a great phrase.

Like one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is that Indigenous people are custodians, right? And we will continue to be custodians, but how do we teach and share the values of custodianship to everyone living on earth? What does it look like if everyone is thinking seven generations into the future and thinking and operating in a way of collective care, not of individual benefit? Maybe it's big and lofty to talk about that to a music audience. They're all like, what are you talking about? But that I guess, is everyone's human.

Everyone's human. And through your music you tell those stories, too.

Yeah, my next EP explores how the future is here and everything we have within our communities and within Country on this earth is what we should be focusing on. So I'm using motives of the visuals and creative of like spacesuits, but it's black fellas on country wearing spacesuits. It's not on Mars because we are the future.

Listen to RONA's music HERE.

@rona.ngamperle