Says Skillen: “Craig rang me up and said, ‘Some guy called Yo-yo Ma just phoned me — do you know who he is?’” The award-winning American cellist and United Nations Messenger of Peace had encountered the film and hoped to record some original music related to his environmental concerns during his early-2020 visit to Cape Town.
Foster and Skillen contacted guitarist and producer Jonny Blundell from Rootspring, vocalist Zolani Mahola, legendary singer and player Madosini and bassist Bryden Bolton and others to become the Seachange Collective, “and we went hunting for things to make sounds with”. Among others, they found shark-egg cocoons, mussel shells and “a whale ear bone with an amazing resonance if you hit it underwater; a cuttlefish shell that I added strings to; and an ancient, huge abalone shell whose pitch changes as you submerge and raise it”.
And then there’s the “octopus drum”: the voice of the kelp forest itself, which Skillen crafted as a tuned drum cut from eight different lengths of hollow kelp stem. The artists performed what they were developing for Ma in early February 2020 in Cape Town, and were supposed to play with him in New York for the UN 75th anniversary. “Meanwhile, we were working continuously on the song, and Zolani in particular was getting increasingly absorbed by the natural world of the ocean.