The River Time EP

River time cover art is made up of a photograph taken by Feraliza and a rat picture drawn by Allison Adams-Belle, along with some elements put together using the graphic design tools in Canva.

The songs in the River Time EP were dreamed up in the summer of 2022-23 in Mohua - Golden Bay. They are inspired by the feral people of the area and are a call to action to protect the waterways and beautiful environment from corporate plunderers, with a healthy dose of feminism to boot!
The name River Time is not only a literal reference to time spent in and around rivers, but a reminder of time in the sense of music and being in a place of creative flow.

Previously, Feraliza had performed only with a guitar and her voice, but had begun to enjoy playing other instruments and creating a wider spectrum of sound, with diverse textures and dynamics, using a computer. Up until now, the tracks that had been created this way could not be performed live and she wanted to find a way to bring all these different elements together in a live set.
As part of her final year of her audio production degree at SIT in 2024, Feraliza designed a unique system for live looping, using FL Studio. The reason behind choosing this software was the importance to Feraliza of being able to have fun when making music! The digital audio workstation (DAW) was created by game designer Didier Dambrin in 1997, originally called "Fruity Loops,"and it was quite revolutionary in its time. Dambrin based it off classic hardware drum machines of the 1980's. The main difference was having multiple rows of step sequencing, so that patterns for different instruments could be seen alongside each other. It was an innovative and fun way to make music that almost anybody could get into and helped people who may never otherwise have gained access to a music studio to produce music on a personal computer at home.

FL Studio has evolved since those days, but it has not lost any of its enjoyability of use, the main reason Feraliza favors it. Using this, along with the Akai FL Studio Professional Fire MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) controller, designed especially for FL, rhythms and basslines began to be built around the words and guitar parts the songs begun from. When it came to involving the violin, guitar and melodica with these computer based elements, however, there was a problem!

Unfortunately, the record-arm buttons on the FL Studio mixer could not be assigned to a MIDI controller. This left Feraliza reaching for a mouse every time she went to play an instrument, and this was breaking her out of the flow. A mouse is just not a device designed with musical performance in mind. She began to research, looking for other FL studio users who had overcome the issue, but although there was plenty of information about looping "in the box" sounds using the DAW, none could be found looping multiple acoustic instruments.

It took quite a bit of digging and consulting with a tutor at SIT to eventually find another Akai controller, the MIDI Mix, that was originally designed for another DAW called Ableton, along with some code found in the FL Studio MIDI scripting forum, to help it talk with FL Studio. This controller has faders, mute and record arm buttons that control the FL Studio mixer, along with pan knobs and 16 assignable controls.

With these tools, along with some external effects, to reduce the load on the limited CPU of her performance laptop, Feraliza finally felt free to express all of the music that had been building up in her head and build a live set out of them.

During the year, as the songs were in development, a new threat to the waterways of Mohua that she loves so dearly became known. A company called Siren Gold planned to mine in the upper reaches of the Cobb Valley, at a place called Sam's Creek. This project was being pushed through as part of the far-right government's new "Fast Track" law, bypassing all the hard won environmental protections ever achieved in Aotearoa, along with responsibilities to consult tangata whenua, to quickly approve projects such as this and many others, some of which had previously been rejected for environmental reasons. Additional lyrics were added as a call to action to the Ferals to take action to protect these fragile waterways, that feed into a marble aquifer that filters the water over many years until they emerge at te Waikoropupū springs, known as the purest water in the world. The mine would introduce toxic chemicals like arsenic, cyanide, heavy metals and acids, causing irreversible damage to the springs and all the waterways in the valley, and having knock on effects on all the communities, human, and animal, who rely on this life-giving water.

You can find more information on what you can do to help prevent this mine from going ahead on the Save Our Springs website.

The final songs were recorded and filmed live on 29 September 2024 at SIT Sound Invercargill, with the help of videographer Matt Coffey and recording engineer Zacharya Fones. Feraliza knows that these recordings are not perfect, but is proud of the work she has done to get the project to this stage and looks forward to improving her performance and production as time goes on, through some more hard work and practice!

Follow the links below to see the videos, and find the audio on all the usual Feraliza platforms!