Golden Bay’s Sika allured by sound

In celebration of this year’s 25th New Zealand Music Month, The Guardian is interviewing local musicians throughout May. This week Gordon Preece talks to Golden Bay sound musician Sika Rose.

Sound musician Sika Rose is all ears roaming Golden Bay’s unadulterated soundscape, garnering ideas to replicate it in his powerful, earthy and shamanic Sound Journey performances.

“In Golden Bay, I love to go to Te Waikoropupū Springs and listen to the sound of the water there, and all the different voices as it cascades over the rocks,” he says.

“The sound of the wind blowing in the trees, and then the water and the bird voices that echo off the valley or the water.

“In my sound journeys, I create layers of different sounds that add all these different textures together, it’s a very full, almost cinematic, soundscape.”

Sika’s Sound Journeys have been a frequency, and by all accounts a resounding success in Aotearoa and the world for their introspective abilities.

Hailing from South East England, Iain Rose had the nickname Sika since his deer-stalking childhood and felt it was sound to become his legal name.

Based in Tākaka for the better part of three decades, his garage is a studio with an assortment of instruments for his masterpieces including didgeridoos which was the epiphany for Sound Journey.

“I’d been living in the UK in a teepee for 10 years, and that was a very formative time for me to connect with nature very deeply,” he says.

“The didgeridoo was and still is a beautiful expression of that connection to nature, and the music that I play now is really a way of connecting with a very natural experience.

“I now play a lot of different wind instruments, and I’ve also added quite a few taonga pūoro [Māori musical instruments] that have been gifted to me by beautiful Māori people who have created them.

“The addition of them has been a huge influence on what I do, those sounds are so of nature immediately.”

Sika says his music entailed shut-eye audiences lying on yoga mats and it appealed to those who don’t take zen approaches.

“I would confidently say that there’s hardly any time when people aren’t really into it,” he says.

“They might have no experience whatsoever with anything spiritual, they just happen to come along and they’re like, ‘wow, this is really powerful’.”

When asked if Sound Journey suits Tākaka being Aotearoa’s unofficial hippie capital, Sika replies “yes, of course, and so am I, I am the archetypal Golden Bay freak”.

Visit sikamusic.com for details of Sika’s upcoming Sound Journey performances in the Top of the South.