Toby Martin

Hi, Kate.

How are you going?

kind of fascinated by the idea of folk music and I think that any I guess any music that's played today is contemporary music it's you know it's a funny it's a funny term but I am interested in music that maybe is people think of as traditional and changes over time so the last record I just made before I've been living in England for a few years before I left was kind of my take on English you know English folk music but it didn't really come out that way it kind of comes out as a bit more punky kind of rock music but it's

It seems to be sort of, you know, folk music filtered.

And I've also just been making a record with Dang Lan, who's a Vietnamese-Australian performer, and that is kind of a meeting point between, I suppose, my kind of more Western folk ideas and her ideas about Vietnamese folk music.

My recent reading has kind of been bookended by moving back from England back to Australia.

So I guess while I was living in Yorkshire and I started reading a lot of poetry that was written by Yorkshire poets like Ted Hughes and not quite as popular as he once was, but I think the ways in which he sort of transfers ideas of landscape into words I think is very powerful, especially for a songwriter.

And also Simon Armitage who happened to live in the next village we were living in.

Also the way he uses

humour and poetry, but also some, I guess, more younger performance poets.

So Lisa Lux, who's a really great politically-minded poet from that part of the world, and Testament, who is an MC and hip-hop producer, but also a spoken word artist and playwright and poet.

So they were kind of the, when I left there, that's who I was thinking about, and I continued to read them when I was back in Australia.

Sure.

Dang Lan and I have been working together for a few years.

She is a musician who came to Australia in 1975 from Vietnam.

And she plays Dan Chan and Dan Bao, which are two fabulous instruments found in Vietnam.

And she's also a wonderful singer and composer.

Over the last couple of years, we've been working together trying to find a way to kind of match her instruments and her tuning with kind of my guitar and my tuning.

And it's the kind of thing that often there is some resistance maybe to more conventional musicians.

Those two things aren't really going to work because the systems are just so different.