The Cloud Maker: How Aviva Endean put together a band of Goddesses

I’ve been meaning to touch base with Aviva Endean for a while now, but for some reason, I couldn’t find the right opportunity. Thankfully, her latest project, The Cloud Maker is part of the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival.

Of course, it’s wrong to call The Cloud Maker ‘Aviva Endean’s project’ — it misses so many marks. First and foremost, this is a collective project, featuring four unique female artists, each with her own trajectory. More importantly, this is quite literally a case of divine inspiration.

The music created by The Cloud Maker is inspired by actual Goddesses, featured in stories deeply rooted in each musician’s culture.

The outcome is otherwordly; a blend of voices, instruments — traditional and modern — and electronics, coming together to create something new, something sounding ancient and futuristic at the same time, intense and serene, earthy and heavenly. It’s primal; a cathartic flood of emotion; and it’s unmistakably female.

I would argue that this is music inspired by goddesses, created and performed by goddesses. None of this would exist without Goddess Aviva, whose experiments with soundscapes and electronics is stretching the sound of the clarinet (her weapon of choice) way beyond its limits — because there are no limits. Which naturally boils my discussion with her to one question.

How did you put together a band of goddesses?

The Cloud Maker is a collaborative project, but it was born out of meeting Te Kahureremoa, one of the singers in the project. She, Sunny Kim, and I were all at the Banff Centre in Canada at the same time. Quite by chance, I was doing a musicians-in-residence project, and she was in a singer-songwriter program.

We heard about each other. We were walking around the same places, and someone told me she plays bone flutes and nose flutes. My practice is about transforming wind instruments; similar outcomes, but from very different approaches.

So of course I said: “Hey, when you’ve got time, let’s hang out and have a play.” One day she was walking past my little music hut, and I called out: “Hey you, come over here.” She came in and started showing me her instruments, the taonga puoro.

Then she told me the story of the putorino, one of her taonga puoro. It’s a wooden flute shaped like a cocoon, with three holes that can be played in three different ways. Its structure is just like that of an actual moth cocoon. She told me about Raukatauri, the moth goddess of flute music. As she told the story, she played the sounds of the male moth, the female moth, and the moth babies, on the instrument shaped like the cocoon she was describing. That really stayed with me.

When I came back to Australia, I thought, what a beautiful tradition: storytelling and sound-making so entwined. The sounds are meaningful because they’re connected to a narrative.

I kept thinking about that, and I knew I needed to meet her again. So I put together a band, with the idea that we’d all look into our own cultural backgrounds and stories of goddesses from different cultures.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 571992228_17885008176389321_3746219152118539701_n-1-768x1024.jpg — The Cloud Maker, wearing costumes designed by Kate Davis

The Cloud Maker, wearing costumes designed by Kate Davis

There’s a rich mythological thread in the group. We have Filipino, Nordic, Celtic, Jewish, Korean, and Maori backgrounds. We shared stories and created music inspired by them — not just the stories themselves, but the elements we found empowering or inspiring. The music is directly related to those stories.

When we named the tracks, I felt it was important not to name the individual goddesses. It wasn’t true to our process. The way we worked with the stories isn’t programmatic. We found the connecting points between them. We told the stories, picked out important parts, and improvised around them. We found we don’t need to actually tell them, we give hints about theme, but the audience still feels their strength and connection.

For example, Freya, the cellist brought the goddess Freya from Norse mythology. We’re not telling the myth of Freya, but we might be telling her voyage on the sea — the same sea that appears in Celtic selkie stories. We’re thinking about multiple things at once. It’s more true to our process. So, if water appeared in two stories, or if there were battles, we’d explore that. One of our songs is called Battles because there are battles in so many stories — not one, but many.

The Cloud Maker had a tighter concept than my other works, which made it more deliberate. I love that it’s a collaborative project that I lead, and that I get to play different roles across my work — musician, leader, collaborator. You learn so much from guiding a group like this.

It’s been a huge, amazing experience. I’ve worked with all these musicians before, but this time I could curate how we met and collaborated. It connects to projects like Hand to Earth, another one with Sunny Kim, Peter Knight, Daniel and David Wilford, where we draw from songlines and electroacoustic sound worlds.

We were lucky to do it at the Ukaria Cultural Centre in the Adelaide Hills, a beautiful place, with mountains and birds all around. We spent the first day talking and showing each other our practices. Not everyone had played together before, so it was about discovering each other’s sound worlds.

I devised small exercises. As people told their stories, we wrote down what resonated — words, feelings, ideas — and improvised from there. We recorded a lot, listened back, and developed the music from those improvisations. Over time, those improvisations became compositions. We don’t have funding yet, but we have to make another album. It’s such a great band.

We all brought stories of powerful feminine figures, stories we felt drawn to, and they meet in our music. Each is unique, but together there’s a shared power. I brought two: Miriam, a prophetess in Jewish culture, and the selkie from Celtic folklore. Miriam led the people to sing and dance after escaping Egypt, lifting them out of despair. I love that. It reflects what music can do — bring people together, celebrate freedom. The selkie story is about transformation and longing for one’s true self. I’ve always loved seals and swimming with them, so that story resonated deeply.

And then there’s how we choose to tell these stories. When Kahu told me the story of the moth goddess, she said: “Most Maori storytellers are men. They say the moth is lonely, calling for the man. I say she sings to the full moon because she feels beautiful, and that is what attracts the man.”

That reclaiming — how we represent ourselves and our stories — was part of our process. The stories empowered us as musicians to go deeper, to play with meaning and intention.

In Jewish tradition, people constantly reinterpret these stories, asking what they mean now. That ongoing reinterpretation keeps culture alive.

That’s what makes the project strong. It’s not about one musician or one cultural practice being dominant. It’s about us together. Often, people tell us afterward that they’re inspired to find their own cultural stories.

We are working with a very contemporary sound. We ‘re not trying to play traditionally, even though we draw from mythology.

That’s the power of experimental music. No matter how abstract, it still makes you feel something. This process grounded that for us. We know what we mean by the sounds we make.

The project isn’t a cross-cultural mashup. Everyone brings their own practice, their own version of their culture. None of us are trying to be ambassadors. We bring what’s already part of us. That’s what the audience feels.

There’s a deep desire to connect with these older stories. They are richer than what we’re fed on social media or through AI.

For all of us, storytelling has been a big part of our practice. But this project gave us a reason to go deeper. We researched in different ways: online, through family, or revisiting goddess figures from childhood. It was inspiring for everyone.

We didn’t just learn about the characters; we learned from them. How do we want to think about this figure? What do we take from her?

For example, Freya, the cellist brought the goddess Freya from Norse mythology. Depending on who’s telling the story, if it comes from Christian or pre-Christian, pagan sources, then Freya changes completely. Freya is the goddess of fertility. In Christian-era versions of the story, she’s a virgin. In the original mythology, she’s promiscuous, using her sexuality to get what she wants. There have always been choices about how we tell these stories.