BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER
The new album from MĀ.
Maarire Brunning-Kouka, the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa-based rapper, singer-songwriter, and sound artist better known as MĀ, describes Blame It On The Weather as “about Te Taiao, climate emergency awareness, my job as a kaitiaki, and the many connections that lie between”.
Across her second album, she explores these overarching themes through twelve bilingual songs that function as provocations, potential solutions, spaces for personal exploration, and more, rendered through a naturalistic confluence of hip-hop, neo-soul, future beats, jazz, and turntablism.
A friends-and-whanau affair, MĀ created Blame It On The Weather with a lively cast of collaborators from the regional, national, and international musical communities she has cultivated and contributed to over the last five years. Featured artists on the album include Mato Wayuhi (Oglala Lakota), Jordyn With A Why, MAJIC, Iris Little, LILA, Leonardo Coghini, DJ WYNONA and Romi Wrights.
After programming and producing a set of home demos based on her recent life experiences and realisations, MĀ called on her live band, The Fly Hunnies and a bevy of session musicians she has performed with around the capital. Over several studio sessions, they brought a live vibrancy to her wide-ranging visions. From there, she worked with the producers Leonardo Coghini, Marika Hodgson and Karnan Saba and the respective mix and mastering engineers Tony Douglas and Ben Lawson to complete a cycle of songs that rumble, flow, burn and blow like the four elements in an unstable era where humanity is well out of alignment with the ecosystems around us.
On ‘Decay’, ‘Mahi’ and ‘Colonised Bro’, elegant guitar figures and lush gospel-slanted group vocals drift around taut boom-bap drums and basslines. At the same time, MĀ gets introspective, reflective and socio-politically suggestive in her signature sing-rap style. Elsewhere with ‘Pūhā Me Te Porohewa’ and ‘Papas Song’, she tells us how she really feels about the current New Zealand government and Papatūanuku over squelchy electronic instrumentals that split the difference between SoundCloud beats jams and classic boogie.
Rounding things out, lush ambient soul tracks like ‘Tīhei’ and ‘Traps Jam’ provide calm contemplation as a counterpoint to the visceral urgency of the title track and the album’s optimistic coda, ‘Kia U’.
Across Blame It On The Weather, MĀ delivers on the promise of her self-produced debut album Breakfast With Hades (2021). Having channelled the twin energies of grief and love into a key that opened countless doors for her, MĀ’s second album is a series of richly coloured snapshots of her personal, political and artistic evolution over the last half-decade. She’s gone from doing it herself to doing it together. Through the acts of sharing and trusting through collaboration, she’s filled her kete with enough kai to share with everyone. MĀ’s new music might be loaded with hard truths and realities, but it’s also full of soul-nourishing sustenance to help sustain those who chose to partake during the troubling times ahead.
