Some records are maps. Others are palimpsests, layers of memory etched into the sonic fabric. "kinjarling studies: soundtracks (five years on)" is both - a quiet excavation of place, history, and self, where every field recording, every processed resonance, carries the weight of deep time. As Amby Downs, Tahlia Palmer constructs soundworks that do more than document - they interrogate. Her compositions linger at the edges of perception, amplifying what is often unheard, what history has tried to mute.

Born in Boorloo/Perth and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, Palmer’s work is rooted in the complexities of lineage and loss. With Yuwaalaraay ancestry on her father’s side - descendants of those who survived dispossession and forced assimilation - and a Dutch maternal line marked by the scars of World War II, she navigates the intricate web of intergenerational memory. "kinjarling studies" began as a series of film soundtracks for the Vancouver Arts Centre, but even untethered from their original visual context, these compositions remain profoundly cinematic. They invite deep listening, a way of engaging with sound that is less about passive reception and more about confronting what has been buried.

Each track title reads like a fragment from a journal - disarmingly personal, yet tethered to collective experience. "moorn yoong-ar jit (intrusion)" carries an unsettling tension, a sonic unease that evokes histories of displacement. "binalup (has a recent history of hotels) [professional outfit]" is both a wry observation and a lament, a reminder of how colonial narratives overwrite and commodify land. "heavy colonial weren (iron and desecrated graves)" is an elegy made of textures, where spectral echoes bleed through the present. "boya weren (turns out I’ve got a lot of Scottish ancestry too)" hints at the tangled realities of identity, where bloodlines cross geographies in ways that complicate any notion of purity or belonging.

Palmer’s approach to field recording is anything but neutral. Sound is stretched, manipulated, dissolved and recomposed - not to obscure its origins, but to suggest alternative ways of listening. At times, it feels as though the land itself is speaking, revealing its layered histories through wind, water, and decay. The final track, "outro - Larry Blight [teacher]", lasting just five seconds, is a quiet punctuation - a gesture of deference, perhaps, to those who hold the knowledge that cannot be fully captured in sound.

To listen to "kinjarling studies" is to participate in an act of remembering. But this is not nostalgia. It is an ongoing process of uncovering, a reminder that landscapes are never silent, that time does not move in a straight line, and that history hums beneath the surface, waiting to be heard.