Helium Project – Rino Tangi (Steel that Sings) (13th Floor EP Review)
On Rino Tangi (Steel that Sings), Tāmaki Makaurau’s Helium Project transform Gary Hunt’s hand-forged percussion sculptures, created by the former punk drummer, into instruments that gleam, sigh and resonate with a musicality that is central to the project’s warmth.
Across three pieces from their Sound of Steel performances, composer Nick Edgar and his eight-piece ensemble turn metal into rhythm, melody and texture. They blend the tones of steel with synths, strings and occasional voice, surrounding the metal with atmosphere and emotional reach shaped in the forge.
The Te Reo Māori title anchors the project in both the material and the spiritual. Each track name extends that link: Waewae kai kapua (“dreamer”), Hina (“goddess of the moon”) and Te Karere (“the messenger”). Together they trace a journey from dreaming through communion to communication, mirrored in the music’s gradual movement from stillness to pulse, from reflection to release. The fusion of Māori cosmology and contemporary sound design gives the record a deep sense of place, joining Aotearoa’s metal and myth into one body of sound.
The opening moments of Waewae kai kapua shimmer with restraint, chiming steel tones and gliding synths drifting across a soft horizon. Strings lend quiet tension while sparse bass grounds the reverberation, making the music feel almost sculptural, as if the steel itself were cooling between notes. From this suspended calm, the rhythm begins to stir and the dream slowly takes shape. That pulse carries the imprint of Hunt’s background behind the drum kit, which is precise but never mechanical, giving the steel its heartbeat.
In Hina, high droning tones and searching strings evoke night air vibrating before a bass groove slips beneath, danceable yet restrained. Wordless vocals glimmer through the mix, and the percussion answers itself in echo before the piece subsides into calm again. Te Karere gathers both threads: echoing steel and deep resonance form patterns that threaten to cohere, tension building until the rhythm finally asserts itself. Brass bursts flare like coded signals sent across distance, closing in a single bass boom that feels like arrival.
Throughout, the production lets Hunt’s instruments breathe, every overtone lingering in the stereo field while synths and strings orbit gently or shoot around them. The mix captures the tactile beauty of metal in motion, treating silence and motion as part of the composition. Out of that meeting of Hunt’s complementary crafts as maker and musician, Helium Project’s spacious sound design and the Te Reo Māori narratives that shape it, Rino Tangi creates something distinctively Aotearoa. This is a fusion of forge and landscape, mythology and modernity and imagination. It feels both grounded and ethereal, a reminder that in the right hands steel can still sing of belonging.
John Bradbury
Rino Tangi is out now
