Oceania I

"Where Maori musical culture meets the modern world"

Many centuries before there was a New Zealand, there existed Aotearoa, the 'Long White Cloud' homeland of Maori culture and civilisation. The first Europeans arrived with the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642. The Maori, however, prevented Tasman from landing on the soil of Aotearoa, and it wasn't until Captain James Cook's voyages in the following century that the country finally capitulated to European interests. In 1840 Aotearoa became New Zealand, a British colony.

Oceania II

According to legend, Hawaiki is the place half-real, half un-real, where man walked with Gods and had an innate communion with all animate and inanimate things. It's from here the Maori made their voyage to Aotearoa, leaving on a journey to a new land, but perhaps never leaving the old. This sense and knowledge of a spiritual past is what informs our present existence.

Which leads us to the second album of Oceania; the first released in 1999 to both local and international acclaim and reaching double platinum sales in New Zealand.