By Len Power

Omar Musa, Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, will be back in Canberra next month to launch his third album of music and poetry, The Fullness, and an arts exhibition, All My Memories Are Mistranslations.

The Fullness is Omar Musa’s third full-length album of music and poetry, an expansive opus of sounds and styles. With long-term collaborator Papertoy at the helm, Omar explores themes such as environmental destruction, addiction, grief, searching for a homeland and – ultimately – rejuvenation.

In one moment, Omar rages about logging corruption over traditional Bornean war horns in Fire On The Hills, the next he’s wistfully examining his complicated relationship with Islam in a post 9/11 world on Too Hard to Say, or poetically paying homage to his beloved Queanbeyan River on Love So Deep.

Omar, who now divides his time between Brooklyn and Borneo, tells me from Borneo that The Fullness was “made in joy, polished with grief”.

“I recorded these songs just for fun, to express a new-found joy, but I never properly finished them,” says Omar. 

“But when my best friend died last year, I decided to finish them and dedicate something beautiful to him, to honour our friendship and the fullness of his life. 

“The album then grew into something much more ambitious, made in studios from New York to Kota Kinabalu to Sydney.”

Whereas his last album, 2017’s Since Ali Died (and the acclaimed one-man play that grew out of it) was sonically and thematically dark, The Fullness is brighter and more melodic, with rich, live instrumented textures that veer into the experimental.

“I’ve toured with my friend Kae Tempest a number of times, and I took inspiration from the way they use poetry in their music and blur the lines between different styles. I wanted to do my own Queanbeyan/Borneo take on this borderless poetic approach to genre, and mix rap, poetry, pop and soul – and then get really, really weird with it.”

This musical and thematic diversity sees Omar collaborate on tracks with New York cellist Mariel Roberts, Peruvian composer and Phillip Glass mentee Pauchi Sasaki, Thom Crawford, Lucy Sugerman, acclaimed poets and writers Sara Saleh, Nam Le and Jazz Money, and Thundamentals’ producer DJ Morgs. 

Talking about his upcoming exhibition, All My Memories Are Mistranslations, Omar says: “It amazes me how often I get it wrong. How often I’ve sat down with my grandparents, and a story I’m told solidifies into a personal mythology, only to find out years later that I’d misheard (or mislistened?) and crucial things were lost in translation.

“In All My Memories Are Mistranslations I wanted to lean into dissonance, these spaces lacking coherence; find comfort in contradiction. I made an unlikely mash-up of the two very different places I live between – Malaysian Borneo and Brooklyn, New York City – to make a playful, unsettling world inhabited by ghosts.

“Here, there is a clash of rose-tinted romanticism against latter day capitalism and ecological collapse; the discarded and the sacred, grief and rejuvenation, the joy and pain of homecoming. The ghost of a famous anti-colonial rebel stands in an abandoned building. Bornean boys sail across a coin-operated washing machine in Brooklyn. Aquatic creatures flow across the sky into a fish trap as a figure takes a selfie in the mirror. A boat, a symbol of my ancestral Suluk seafaring, sinks in an ocean of plastic trash”, he says.

The Fullness album launch with Lucy Sugerman, Sideway Bar, Civic, May 3. 

All My Memories Are Mistranslations, Humble House Gallery, Fyshwick, May 4-June 2.