Plan 9 win a prestigious award for The Bewilderness

Winning the prestigious SOUNZ Contemporary Award for their album The Bewilderness at the APRA Silver Scroll Awards in March was a surprise for the musicians of Plan 9.

David Donaldson, Janet Roddick and Steve Roche have been creating music together since the mid-1980’s, as part of the Wellington group Six Volts. They formed the Plan 9 composing collective in 1995 and with it they’ve created prize-winning original music for numerous screen projects and feature films, ranging from What We Do in the Shadows to Antarctica: A Year on Ice and They Shall Not Grow Old. Their theme music for RNZ’s Morning Report has woken radio listeners since 2014.

But The Bewilderness is something different, says Roddick. “We’re used to making work for other people, getting a brief, some picture to look at. In the 2020 lockdown, our film work ground to a halt, so we applied to Creative New Zealand for funding available to artists who weren’t working.”

Plan 9’s album The Bewilderness

“…something different.”

Donaldson says they found the lockdown bewildering. “We based the work around going from ‘normal’ to that strange new state. But we really started with the choice of musicians and a place to record. We have the incredibly beautiful acoustic space of Stella Maris Chapel in Seatoun attached to our Wellington studio. The whole rehearsal time was in the space where it was recorded live.”

The group thought strings would work well in the chapel and so they formed an altered string quartet, with Roddick singing alongside throat singer Jonny Marks, a musician she describes as fantastic. “Steve plays rhythm fiddle, he’s got a beautiful feel, and Tristan Cater the flashy violin bits,” she says. Donaldson on bass and cellist Ruby Solly completed the ensemble.  

The ensemble for The Bewilderness

(from left) Jonny Marks, Tristan Carter, Steve Roche, Ruby Solly, David Donaldson and Janet Roddick.

The second track, The Big Sea, has a mesmerizing repetitive quality. “Wave upon wave upon wave, coming ashore. We’ve never, in all of our lives, seen its like before. The big sea!”  Do the words and music suggest the sea is a metaphor for the pandemic itself? “We live on the south coast”, explains Donaldson “and during lockdown we had a gigantic swell.  So, the song is about a real event happening, but also a metaphor for what we were all going through.”

Plan 9’s aesthetic has always involved exploring new sounds, since the trio’s Six Volts days. For The Bewilderness they located a new Indian harmonium for Roddick to replace their old “slightly out-of-tune” one. “It’s tuned to concert pitch, looks really beautiful and took about a week to get here from small-town Illinois,” says Roddick.

The SOUNZ Contemporary Award has never been awarded to a group, and they didn’t supply a score for the judges. “The score was just a starting point,” says Donaldson. “Then it was developed over seven days of rehearsal.” He smiles broadly. “I’m more proud of winning this than another film or TV award. It’s our creative work.”

The Bewilderness by Plan 9, winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award in the APRA AMCOS Silver Scroll Awards in March 2022, is available on Bandcamp.

Watch a video of The Big Sea here.  

A shorter version of this article appeared i the NZ Listener issue 9 April, 2022