Sydney musician
Charlie McMahon formed Gondwanaland Project to combine his love for the
Australian outback with his
didgeridoo playing To achieve the sound for McMahon's desert tunes, he joined up with synthesiser player, Peter Carolan, in 1981.
Gondwana is a continental landmass of the prehistoric
Mesozoic era which included
Antarctica, South America, Africa, India and Australia. McMahon learned didgeridoo as a teenager and improved his technique while working in Central Australia. In 1984 Carolan and McMahon were assisted in the studio by various musicians:
Rob Hirst (
Midnight Oil) on percussion, Andrew De Teliga on guitar and violin, and Rob Schad on didgeridoo. They recorded the first Gondwanaland album,
Terra Incognita, which was released on the small independent Hot Records label, together with a single, "Danger", in May. It contained a bracket of aggressive, up-tempo numbers followed by two extended compositions, the first of which, "Ephemeral Lakes", later became a regular choice for meditative ambient music compilations. The group spent a year of extensive live work in Sydney and then a four-week tour of the Northern Territory. In 1987 the band signed with
WEA, which released their third album,
Gondwanaland. One track, "Landmark", featured the first use of McMahon's invention, the multi-tone, slide didgeridoo he dubbed a '
didjeribone'. of Gondwana playing his invention, a '
didjeribone'.He is using a mouth-held geologist's
seismic sensor to amplify its growling subsonic dynamics.
Sfinks Festival in Boechout, Belgium, in 2002 In November 1988 Gondwanaland performed at the
Tomita Sound Cloud in Sydney – Hymn to Mankind, a
AUD $3 million,
Japanese government-sponsored, light and sound, opera spectacular held on
Sydney Harbour as part of the
Australian Bicentennial celebrations. The concert attracted an audience of over 120,000: an Australian record for a live music event. Gondwanaland's fourth album,
Wildlife, which was released in 1989, Gone were the earthy good time romps and quiet moments of reflection, now complex panoramic chord clusters enveloped the arrangements in an almost overwhelming evocation of the sky and all that happens in and under it. This album's multi-layered textures and moods earned the band even greater critical respect.
Wide Skies was nominated at the
ARIA Music Awards of 1993 for 'Best Indigenous Release'. By 1994 McMahon formed another band, Gondwana, with an emphasis on rhythm and increasingly dominant bass and experimental didgeridoo sounds. This group released three albums:
Travelling (1994),
Xenophon (1998), and
Bone Man (2002). The latter two albums feature another McMahon innovation: the mouth-held use of a geologist's seismic sensor to amplify the growling subsonic didgeridoo dynamics. This gave McMahon a new audience: the trance, dance crowd.
Xenophon was nominated at the
ARIA Music Awards of 1998 for 'Best Indigenous Release'. Gondwanaland composer/arranger Peter Carolan [64] died on 28 July 2012 from a respiratory illness. In 2012 Charlie McMahon and Gondwana released album
Didj Heart ==Members==