Track By Track: Troy Kingi Takes Us Through Holy Colony Burning Acres

This Friday Troy Kingi will release a new album titled Holy Colony Burning Acres.

Following on from 2017’s Shake That Skinny Ass All The Way To Zygertron, this is the third instalment in Troy’s 10/10/10 series, where he plans to release 10 albums in 10 years in 10 different genres.

This is Troy’s reggae album and its another winner.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda had a listen to the new record and then got Troy on the phone to go through the record’s 13 songs, track by track.

Click here to listen to the interview:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

M: This is part of a series when you are doing ten albums in ten genres in ten years?

T: Yes

M: And this is number three?

T: This is the third of ten. I’m kind of late, I missed one last year. The plan is to bring two out next year on the same day.

M: Oh great, no pressure

T: No pressure. This one’s called Holy Colony Burning Acres, and I kind of got inspiration from some of the early roots pioneers like The Abyssinians, Yabby You, which is King Tubby, I eventually got a bit of Bob Marley in there, but I tried to steer clear of him as much as I could, just ’cause I know everyone, when you talk about reggae, they always cling to that Bob Marley vibe so, just gotta find something fresh.

M: Have you been listening to this music for a long time?

T: I have, I always knew with this ten albums in ten genres in ten years I always knew that I was gonna do a reggae album and it just happened to turn up this time around and I’ve got some real hard-core reggae connoisseur friends who are like y’know, I think they didn’t really want me to do it. The reggae they love is like real Rastafarian, and I think that is the reggae that I love as well, because it has that spiritual essence to it. So, without going so deep as to become a Rastafarian, I tried to find how I could add that essence so it’s all about indigenous politics and there’s an undertone of colonisation and also, there’s a holy element to it as well. Colonisation through religion is part of it as well, but mainly the big question that comes up is, who’s to say whose God is better than who’s? The Christian God, Allah or Jah, or whatever and it’s weird to me that depending on where you’re born, the colour of your skin, who your parents are is gonna determine your religious beliefs, where if you just happened to be born somewhere else you’re gonna be something completely different, so just going into those sorts of topics.

M: The album starts off with a relatively short track, The Tower of Babel, which I assume you’ve got it there for a reason, to set the tone for things?

T: Yeah exactly. I kind of wanted to start the album with a pre-colonised karakia or taku taku and as you can probably hear there are various dialects and various languages that intermingle though out and then you have the strong taku taku or Maori karakia on top of that, then as you go through the album, it all ends with a normal prayer to Jesus, which in a way the album slightly gets colonised from start to finish as well.

M: Is that something that something you knew was going to happen before you made the album?

T: I had ideas and stuff and whether or not I could pull them off or not, I’ll leave that up to the listener, but there’s a few little things that pop up like that throughout the album.

M: Track two is called Ethiopia. What can you tell me about that?

T: I had just done a bit of research into a lot of theories of man-kind arriving from Africa, and in particular Ethiopia, but also those ties to Rastafarianism and King Selassie. King Selassie and all of that sort of jazz.

M: Who’s actually playing on the record with you?

T: I got my bass player from the first album, that’s Marika (Hodgson), she jumped on board and Treye (Liu), he’s been my drummer through the last three albums. We were the main guys, we went in and we recorded the majority of the tracks in three days then we got Hani Totorewa who was the original keyboardist for Katchafire and Guy Harrison, who’s in The Miltones and a few other bands, he came and did the horns, and we got a few other little bits and pieces but that was the core of the group.

M: The key to this music was to find the groove it seems to me. How did that come about?

T: Leading up to going into the studio was just a matter of finding the songs or styles from the early 70s that I really love and just sending them out to my crew and just getting them to listen to them and just find what makes them tick, the simplicity of them, not over-playing and then when we got into rehearsals it didn’t feel too hard or too forced, we just kind of jumped in and it was like we were playing this sort of music forever.

M: Track three is called Colour Of My Skin. What’s the story behind that one?

T: I’m just gonna say, it’s about the U.S and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

M: Ok, that’s probably enough said, having spent a bit of time there myself. Have you spent much time in the U.S?

T: I’ve been over there a few times, especially over the last three years I’ve been over to the States quite a bit. But yeah, I’ll just let you listen to the lyrics and you can come up with your own.

M: Pseudo Ego is next, not to be confused with Pseudo Echo, ‘Pseudo Ego’.

T: That one came about after comments made by somebody in the media about Fiji being a leach and suckling on the teat of New Zealand. So that was the trigger for it, and then also talks about some media outlets in general that can easily twist the story to suit their views or the views that they want portrayed when sometimes they’re not necessarily true, but also some places that aren’t getting media attention that probably do need media attention, case in point, West Papua, so just things like that, along those lines.

M: So do you think that some of the media outlets have an agenda that they’re trying to get across?

T: Yeah I do think so, sometimes they can be real subtle, it’s just the way they portray it and the way they want people to view their pieces, and sometimes can be a little biased.

M: Next one is Born of This Earth.

T: I wrote that song after seeing that photo again of that young toddler that was face down in the sand. It just broke my heart and that’s basically saying that we can’t fight hate with hate, love is kind of the only way forward.

M: So it’s kind of addressing the refugee issue?

T: Yeah, it also talks about refugee numbers like refugee quotas in countries and there’s just millions and millions of people that are just scared and struggling, I think of children in particular, just wanting somewhere safe to not have to worry about bombs flying through their windows.

M: And of course, even in we mentioned the States again, the border between Mexico and the States there was that photo that just came up a couple of days ago with the father and the young daughter dead in the river.

T: I didn’t see that one

M: Oh man, it’s a heartbreaker

T: Yeah, there’s so many stories like that all over the place

M: Mighty Invader is next

T: So that one, with his 250th celebration coming up it’s a different take on Captain Cook’s arrival in New Zealand.

M: I noticed you’ve got quite a few horns working in some of these tracks as well.

T: Yeah, so that was Guy Harrison, he did the horns and doubled up, but basically we probably had maybe five hours all up together in the studio and I didn’t give him anything apart from when he jumped in, he had his headphones on, I was singing from the control room, singing the melody and he was just playing it straight off the bat and I was like ‘Ok, we’ll move on, can you do a harmony on that?’ and he was like ‘yeah’, does that and then we moved on. We had a short amount of time so we tried to really push through and I’m really happy with what he put on.

M: Yeah it sounds great, in terms of sonic beauty and mellowness and it’s got all this warmth in it.

T: Yeah, and I’ve showed a few people and they’re saying the cool thing about it is it’s not your typical reggae horns as well there’s something a little different to it which I think is pretty cool.

M: Moving on to Bird Of Paradise.

T: So that one straight talks about West Papua and the injustices happening over there that have been happening for a long time.

M: Did you see the documentary, Soldiers Without Guns? What did you think of that?

T: Yeah, it was cool, that was the one when they went over with music, eh?

M: Yeah

T: I liked it. I think it might need a bit more than that over there, but that’s what I’m talking about as well, like you can’t fight hate with hate, needs love.

M: We Were Once Kings.

T: That talks about Hawaii, I’ve spent a little bit of time over there and had an awesome trip over to Tahiti this year, which talks of Hawaii kind of being our older brother, as Maori down here. So the spot in Tahiti, I didn’t even know until I went there that this was the Hawaiki that we always talk about on the Maraes since I was a little kid. Our birthplace kind of from Rangiatea and Tahiti, and Hawaii was the first place that they navigated to and found the land and hence given the name Hawaii from Hawaiki, and then Aotearoa being the last place to be found. So this talks about the commercialisation of such a strong, well it had such a strong cultural foundation, and the commercialisation of that talking of things like, our dance has become a cheap parlour trick, that sort of thing.

M: Yeah, I kinda wonder about that, being your basic typical white guy and when I see that stuff going on, there’s some unease there I guess about how it’s being projected and presented. Anyway, Babylon Grows.

T: That was our first single, that was actually the first song I wrote going into this album and, just the generalisation of Babylon being ‘the man’ or oppression or all of that sort of thing and at this point, well for me personally, it just feels like there’s a lot of that stuff happening and it’s just getting worse, and so it’s not actually a call to arms or anything, it’s just my view on what I’m seeing at the moment.

M: When you say it’s getting worse, do you mean globally or locally?

T: I think globally. Locally some spots are getting better, but I suppose just like anywhere some places are getting better, but overall if it’s not getting better they get put under an umbrella, not getting better, even though I know that there’s a lot of people making headway and doing a lot of good work to help their people.

M: We have Glass Eel next.

T: Glass Eel talks about, basically it is our journey from Hawaiki through to the island and I’m using the life cycle of an eel as a metaphor for that.

M: First Nation

T: First nation people, North America, I’ve had the privilege of talking to a lot of them through indigenous small film festivals and you connect with someone, they put you onto someone else and other things. Basically it’s just to show how similar our stories are as Maori and as first nation people, just the similarities, not just us, but all indigenous people we’ve got a real similar story and at the essence of it we are people of the land so the land comes first and I think I speak a lot about once the land’s gone we have nothing, through that song. Sorry I’m just rambling on.

M: No, that’s good that’s what we want. The second to last track is called How Much Fruit?‘.

T: I think it talks about the land as well like how much you take from it without giving back to it, how long can it be sustained without giving back to the earth. It’s actually quite a bleak song if I look at it. The chorus is ‘How can we see the same truth when you’re first and I’m last, can’t start anew until we address the past’, so for me as Maori, there’s always people trying to abolish treaty, like thinking we should start afresh, but when I think of the Treaty of Waitangi, I think of…I’ve had a lot of arguments about this and it’s like ‘man it’s in the past why don’t we just start fresh and be cool y’know like be nice from now’…and I’m like let me put it this way, just imagine you’re living in your house while your great grandfather or whatever, living in their house and then these guys just come in and are like ‘Hey, can I just move in with you’, and they’re like ‘Ah ok’, so they move in and then ‘Oh can I have the master bedroom’, ‘Oh yup, cool’, and then ‘Can you move out to garage now’, and then it’s like ‘Can you get off my land?’, and that’s kind of how I put it, it’s still there, that’s what happened, that’s our history, so that’s what I say, we can’t move forward until we address the past. Yeah, I don’t know, I could probably add a bit more, but that’s basically it. In order to move forward we’ve got to look at what’s happened and address it and stop hiding it, stop pushing it under the rug.

M: And finally we have Truganini.

T: This one talks of the last full blooded aboriginal woman from Tasmania…just the stuff that she endured and yet she was able to carry on and survive and I use that as a metaphor for all indigenous people all the struggles, trials and tribulations we’ve been through, but we’re still here and especially for Maori, we’re still really strong and proud to be who we are in ourselves, in our culture, and we’ll continue to be that way.

Troy Kingi will also headline Te Korakora on Federal this year on Friday night! It’s a FREE musical festival finale held under the Matariki stars.