Listen to the sounds of the suburbs as you’ve never heard before

Richard Petkovic firmly believes there are many more things that unite us than divide us – especially when it comes to music.

And the producer and musician has spent much of the past 20 years proving artists from wildly different cultural backgrounds and traditions can quickly find common ground to make unique music.

From left: Richard Petkovic, Shohrat Tursun, Maryana Sywak and Dr Nicholas Ng celebrate the diversity of western Sydney music in Sacred Sounds from the Suburbs. Credit: Rhett Wyman

This weekend, in his most ambitious project to date, Petkovic will bring together 11 musicians, including Mongolian throat singer/horse fiddle player Bukhu Ganburged, Chinese erhu virtuoso Nicholas Ng, Yolngu artist Gambirra Illume and Ukrainian violinist/singer Maryana Sywak, along with a nine-piece string section from the Metropolitan Orchestra.

This diverse ensemble is joining forces for Sacred Sounds from the Suburbs, an 80-minute concert to be held at Pitt Street Uniting Church on Saturday.

It will have three thematic sections – The Ceremony, Celebration and Reflection – and will feature the launch of a single, Warriors, described as “a cross-cultural fusion of pulsating rhythms, heavy metal strings and Gregorian chants.”

“Sacred Sounds is a reboot after COVID, which hit us very hard,” says Petkovic. “And four years later we are finally doing something with that single Warriors.”

Earlier this year Petkovic staged a series of workshops at Bankstown Arts Centre as a proof-of-concept for another project he is trying to get off the ground. He dubbed it a Multicultural Motown, saying he wants to set up a cross-cultural “hit factory” for musicians from Sydney’s west and beyond.

“I put an EOI out and said, ‘Come and work with me’,” he said. “We’ll create some music together, send it out and let the universe work its magic.

“I got a beautiful Greek-Lebanese young Australian who plays classical harp and sings soprano, a Persian oud player and a Moroccan guy who plays a camel skin bass and sings.

“We had four four-hour sessions and in the first five hours wrote five songs and recorded them, and then we created this amazing video. Imagine what we could do in four weeks. It’s a unique new sound for contemporary Australian music.”

Petkovic is now seeking funding to set up his Multicultural Motown as a permanent facility.

“Artists of different cultural backgrounds would come in, we support them, we produce them, give them what they need, and then ship them out to go tour the world with their western Sydney sound or their Fitzroy sound.”

And while bringing together disparate musical traditions, especially with players who don’t use traditional Western notation, may sound like a huge challenge, Petkovic says that with enough goodwill and generosity it’s relatively simple.

“It’s getting in the room and saying, ‘We’ve got this idea. What happens from your culture?’ Then the African guy might say, ‘In my culture we do this call-and-response’, and the Vietnamese guy might say, ‘We do it this way’. We just start jamming, really.

“Rather than sounding like everybody else, this is Australia finally standing up and saying, ‘This is what a successful multicultural society sounds like’.”

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