Robert Zielinski: The inlet was a creative outlet

Robert Zielinski & Manuela Centanni will perform New Music from the South West, showcasing music from his new album, Kiangardarup, at Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre on Saturday, August 9. BOB GORDON talks to Zielinski about the unique inspiration behind the album.

There’s something about the way that Robert Zielinski talks about music. It’s not in terms of notes, scales, or structure—though these unspoken technicalities are well-worn within him—but about place, time, silence, and listening.

Listening, especially, seems the key component when you consider the creation of his latest album, Kiangardarup.

In 2015, following the passing of his musical mentor and dear friend, Mick Doherty—a man who had not only taught him traditional Irish fiddle but also encouraged Zielinski to return to his instrument following a long layoff due to injury—with an unyielding workload of violin repairs in Perth, Zielinski made a pivotal move to Torbay, a quiet stretch of the coastal South West. That transition would reshape not only his environment but the arc of his creative life.

“I needed to get out of the city,” Zielinski, who also makes and repairs violins, reflects. “I was repairing instruments from 8am until nearly midnight at times. There was no room or space for music. It’s very hard to say no to a musician who needs their instrument fixed. So I went down to Torbay to concentrate on making violins. And then I gave myself time to make my own violin.”

That violin is made of sixty-year-old Italian spruce and eighty-year-old Bosnian maple. Upon its completion, something profound occurred: the emergence of an entirely new body of music—melodies shaped intrinsically by the natural environment.

“When I went down there, I stopped playing traditional Irish music,” Zielinski says. “I started what I thought was just making up stuff in my head. And I was like, ‘I wonder why I’m not playing tunes anymore, like traditional tunes.’ Then, when I finished the violin I was making, I had all this music in my head. I was just surrounded by music, basically.”

That spontaneous suite of seemingly abstract musical ideas was later named Kiangardarup, one of the original names of the area around the Torbay Inlet, given to Zielinski by Minang elder Vernice Gillies. “The very first piece I played in public was at a concert in Fremantle, and I noticed the room went very silent. The piece was called The White Bird.” Zielinski says. “People wanted to know what it was. A pianist from Melbourne told me, ‘You’ve got to record that.’

“It was only afterwards that I realised it was an hour-long suite that went from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, about the Torbay Inlet, where I used to go all the time,” he explains. “So I didn’t set out to write this piece. It was just part of that experience.”

In the liner notes for the Kiangardarup album, Zielinski describes the Torbay Inlet as being like an old friend, reminiscent of the many years he lived and worked on the west coast of Ireland. It was important to record the music he had composed in his mind—it wasn’t mere nostalgia; it was a new, natural and beautiful presence.

“I knew that I had to record it,” he says. “I had to share it, and that started a long journey of ‘how?’ that lasted six years—because I’d heard that music standing next to the inlet. So I heard it once again without instruments, in its perfect state, if you like, and then I had to try and emulate that as close as I could to what I heard.”

Collecting his thoughts, Zielinski pauses for a moment before explaining further.

“I heard it in four layers,” he reveals. “The fiddle was the main storyteller. The flute is the question and answer that exists in the bush, and it also inhabits the sky. The bouzouki is the top of the water, and the cello is under the water and down in the sand, in the ground. Those were the closest instruments to what I heard when I was down there.”

Zielinski’s quest to record Kiangardarup was as unconventional as its composition. Though he first attempted to capture it inside the Perth Concert Hall, the result felt “too aloof and grand.” Churches and studios followed, but none could contain the essence of the suite.

Then came a turning point. A friend suggested the MixPre-6, a field recorder allowing for location recording in nature. “The violin needs space,” he explains. “It blooms. And if you put it inside walls, it gets confined. Yet, it needs reflective surfaces to not sound completely dry.” He combined it with an AKG C414 multi-pattern condenser mic and a copy of an old-fashioned ‘50s ribbon microphone.

“I started experimenting, and what I found was that you can use the surface of the water as a reflective surface when there’s no wind. So if I’m standing here, the water’s there, and I’ve got the microphone pointing out towards the water.

“Some of my violin parts were recorded right beside the upper Torbay Inlet, and the others were in the Karri forest. I used the big trunks of karri trees as reflective surfaces and walked around until I found a sweet spot and just put the mics there. The sense of space from recording outside is something you can perceive and not necessarily hear. It’s very subtle.”

For 18 months, he ventured into the bush, recording the dawn-to-dusk tracks during the day and the dusk-to-dawn tracks at night, waiting for the right moment.

“In the dead of night,” Zielinski recalls, “I’d go out night after night. Sometimes I’d only just set up the gear, and it would rain, the wind would pick up, or there would be an army of frogs, crickets, or crows. It was amazing because when that particular piece of music was ready, it would come out, and you couldn’t force that. So you could go out and go, ‘You know what? It’s not tonight.’

That made for some tough calls, but everything had to be in its right place by means of getting it right.

“You see, that’s the thing,” Zielinski points out. “Going back to when I couldn’t play, if you’re too invested in the piece of music that you’re playing, it can’t come out, because you have too much attachment to it. When you just simply do your job, that’s when, upon listening back, I noticed the music was firing.”

While already connected, Zielinski’s relationship with the inlet developed into an innate and wonderful understanding.

“If you get the right amount of moisture in the air, the fiddle is going to be very sweet,” he says. “Stick a mic on it, it sounds good. So after it rains, the drips from karri trees last about three hours…‘drip, drip, drip.’ So you wait for three hours before you can record. There was one night when Manuela (Centanni) was over, and it rained all day, but it stopped at about three o’clock. We already had all the fiddle recordings in the can, and we were going up to (recording engineer) Lee Buddle’s studio the following week to record Manuela’s flute parts before she went back home to New Zealand.

“Even so, we went out to West Cape Howe National Park, and it was perfectly still. Put the bow on the fiddle, and you just couldn’t go wrong. So about eight tracks on the album came out in one go that night.”

Zielinski’s recorded fiddle parts were then taken to Buddle’s studio, whereupon Centanni added her flute. Cello, bouzouki, and didgeridoo were contributed by Melinda Forsythe, Jim Green and Ken Hayward, respectively.

“We had an amazing team. The musicians put their all into this record, as did Lee Buddle. His skill and experience of over 30 years and his total belief in the album made it possible,” Zielinski says.

“But most of all, I couldn’t have completed this work without my partner, Manuela. The endless listening we did together and her enormous help with the arrangements, not to mention her beautiful playing, her work on the sleeve notes and the artwork.”

The album was mastered by Andrew Walter at Abbey Road Studios in London. To give some idea of the lengths Zielinski went to, he travelled to London to visit senior engineer Andrew Walter at Abbey Road Studios, where he worked. This was to decide whether Walter was the right man for the job, and he was.

The result is a stunning suite that stands with and alongside the sounds of the natural environment in which Zielinski’s fiddle was recorded. The suite was premiered in the Perth Concert Hall in May 2024, receiving a standing ovation. The album was launched last November at the Heath Ledger Theatre and recently won three silver medals at the Global Music Awards, but its journey has only just really begun.

A documentary team has been filming Zielinski around the Torbay Inlet and will be shooting his upcoming performance on Saturday, August 9, at the Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre, performing the Dawn To Dusk portion of the suite with Centanni, accompanied by French cellist Camille Lalanne and beloved Fremantle musician John Reed on bouzouki.

Centanni’s photographic imagery in the Kiangardarup booklet is yet another thing of beauty, and there is plenty more of it to be utilised onstage as Zielinski works towards touring the suite around Australia and hopefully abroad.

“Where we’re aiming to go is to tour the piece with the four musicians, with Manuela’s photographs taken down in Torbay projected behind us on a giant screen and the bush sounds that were recorded there piped through the hall in surround sound,” he says.

“I’d really love to just bring the experience of Kiangardarup into really good halls with the images and the sounds of the bush. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Robert Zielinski & Manuela Centanni will perform New Music from the South West at Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre on Saturday, August 9, 2025. Tickets are on sale now from kalamundapac.com.au