Producer Hinemoana Baker writes of 'I Can See Fiji": 'It has been a wonderful privilege collaborating with poet Teresia Teaiwa on this album. Teresia (US/Kiribati/Fiji) on this album. Teresia is an established and respected print poet, scholar and writer, and someone whose work I admired long before she approached me to produce an audio version of her poetry. 

'What you see and hear on this album began life in a very different form. Three years ago, after a few preliminary discussions, Teresia delivered 12 chosen poems that she wanted produced in audio. She’d been writing quite a bit, she said, about walking: both the physical act, and what it represents for a migrant like herself. She had an epigraph in mind – comedian Eteuati Ete’s joke ‘I’m not a pedestrian. I’m a Samoan.’ She also had a working title: ‘Poems from Pedestria’.

'Teresia told me she wanted to use the project to break out of the literal - to take herself and her work into new, perhaps more abstract territory.  So we resolved to try and create a kind of theatre for the ear - making decisions about what the audience would 'see' first, and what would be slowly revealed.

'It’s not often a producer is given so much freedom with the sound design of any album – I’m very grateful to Teresia for giving me this opportunity. I think of the result, ‘i can see fiji’, as a docu-story, a poem-entary, even as an old-fashioned radio drama. Basically it’s a story – to some extent Teresia’s story - told with words and sound. There’s poetry, for sure, but not as we know it.'  

Listen to 'Ohiro Road' on Hinemoana's myspace page

Listen to 'I Can See Fiji' and '4.30 in the Morning' on Teresia's myspace page

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