On Home Galactic, Juliana Venter presents her first album for solo voice, a deeply personal work in which the voice alone carries the narrative. Recorded inside a water tower on Nesodden, Norway, the album relies entirely on the natural acoustics of the space. No effects have been used; only the human voice and the resonance of the tower itself.

Born in South Africa and now based in Norway, Juliana Venter is a vocalist, composer, improviser, and performance artist whose work spans opera, free improvisation, contemporary music, jazz, and Southern African musical traditions. Raised in Namibia and South Africa, her artistic path was shaped by experiences from an early age. At thirteen, as the lead singer of her school revue group in Namibia, she performed for South African soldiers stationed along the Angola border during the Border War in the Caprivi Strip, an experience that would profoundly influence her artistic choices and lifelong understanding of music as both ritual and resistance.

After studying opera in Johannesburg, Venter became a member of the groundbreaking and politically outspoken performance collective The Mud Ensemble, one of the defining voices of South Africa's avant-garde during the final years of apartheid. Since settling in Norway, she has become an important voice on the Scandinavian improvised music scene through many collaborations and she is a member of Paal Nilssen-Love Circus since 2020, performs in the quartet 'It Was Her Idea' with Paal, Ole Morten Vågan and Oscar Grönberg, and recently released the critically acclaimed duo album Kassandra with saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm. She also leads her own quartet 'Time - Space - Continuum' with South African drummer Kesivan Naidoo, Belgian/Norwegian piano player Jonas Cambien and Oslo based Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass.

Home Galactic moves between poetry, storytelling, ritual, and sound art. Singing in Afrikaans, Norwegian, Zulu, Nama, German, Japanese, Arabic, and English, Venter combines her own texts with poetry by Arnulf Øverland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jalal al-Din Rumi, and others. The album reflects on migration, belonging, nature, and human resilience through lyrical songs, abstract vocal landscapes, and deeply personal narratives.
On two tracks she also performs traditional Southern African instruments, including the Makhoyane musical bow from Eswatini and the Umrhubhe bow of the AmaXhosa people, alongside water bowl and bell. These subtle additions expand the album's acoustic palette while allowing the voice to remain at its center.

The result is a deeply original recording that brings together tradition and experimentation, where the voice functions simultaneously as instrument, storyteller, and carrier of memory across cultures and languages. Home Galactic is a journey through landscapes, histories, and lived experience, a reminder that the human voice alone can contain an entire world.

LINER NOTES BY JULIANA VENTER :

Despite Apartheid’s atrocities, south africa breathes a freedom and a connection to nature that most of Europe has long lost. I have spent the better part of 25 years in search of the music of the world and through that tried to understand and connect to people from many cultures.
My voice led me to travel and live the life of an immigrant. Which at times means enduring being faceless and voiceless and filled with the feeling that you do not belong, and at worst that you are in fact not welcome and seen as inferior. This experience made me question what home really is, what it means to go home, be at home, feel like you are in a place you know so well that you feel safe. I hardly felt safe in Europe, how can one,
everything is controlled, and people rarely smile. Or, perhaps is it just my perception, my alien otherness that made me perceive it like that.
Upon my return to Johannesburg in 2011, I got lost, it was barely recognizable. The home I knew so well was no longer there, it had gone through a profound change. What remained were the smells, the light, the thunderstorms, the animals, the wild, the strange and beautiful languages and the warmth of the people just like the temperature, it invites
you in and embraces you. In addition to this there is the unique sound of the Karoo and Namibia both with their own silent music. And our vast starry skies, an endless wandering dream. It often feels like a dinosaur could suddenly come rushing out from behind a bush.
Everything screams ancient, ancient nature! I was lucky to find this ancient nature within the music and people of some of the cultures I encountered on my journey across the world in China, Japan, Georgia in the Caucasus, Armenia, Turkey, Greece, Norway, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tanzania. And finally, in the ancient instruments of South Africa. On this album, you will hear a part of my life’s journey through many of these
cultures. I feel connected to all of them. I love them like I love elephants and fynbos (plants indigenous to Southern Africa).
It is my blood and air and the meaning of my existence. It became less important for me to belong to a specific society but more important to carry the music of the world inside me.
You will hear many languages, some real, others made-up.

Jeg Venter Her (I Wait Here),
by 13th century poet Jalāl al-Din Muhammad Rūmī, I play the Umrhubhe, a Xhosa musical bow. On My Dream Goes Wandering, I sing two haikus in Japanese by Matsuo Bashō, the other in Zulu. Here I play the Makhweyane music bow from Eswatini (formerly Swaziland).
In Home Galactic I journey through the world touching on inspirations by Giacinto Scelsi, Konnakol, Shashmaqam from Tajikistan. NP Van Wyk Louw’s Afrikaans poem, Die Liefde in
My (The Love Inside Me). I use words from Eugene Marais’s Mabalel, translated into Nama - a satirical composition critical of Germany’s antisemitism, pro-Zionism, and censorship laws. It ends with the Arabic prayer, Shaban al- Dalou which begs forgiveness for a world that
had forsaken the 19-year-old teen donating blood when Israeli soldiers set alight Al-Aqsa hospital (which had been declared a safe zone). He was burned alive.
The Scream Inside needs no explanation. Bebop Suicide is a satirical take on being a jazz musician - breath, spit and sweat, the essence of music as revolutionary defiance in the face of oppression.
Arnulf Øverland’s iconic Norwegian poem, Du Må Ikke Sove (You Dare Not Sleep) is as important today as it was in 1937. It warned of the coming world war and Fascism. The famous line “Du må ikke tåle så inderlig vel, den urett som ikke rammer deg selv” (You must not endure so heartily the injustice that does not affect you yourself), sums it up.
My Dream Goes Wandering meanders through otherworldly places, nightmares, nature, a reed in the wind, the Zen nature of Haiku poets in dealing with death, and ends with a defiant spirit telling death to “voetsek!”, an Afrikaans word understood in all South African
languages, meaning to “go away” or “fuck off!!”. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Ende des Herbstes (End of Autumn) encourages reflection on the passage of time and transience, and the recognition of nature as a constantly changing yet beautiful and eternal phenomenon.
The Return Home is a field recording of a trip to Mozambique with a lover as we listened to the overwhelming music of crickets and frogs in a swamp. Rev-it-again is about the noise of propaganda’s endless, pointless brain-washing machine, like a revving car - rrrrrr.
Krimanchuli on water bowl, based on a traditional folk song from Georgia, touches on a melody I learned from singers in Tbilisi.
The Forest Inside explores the ancient freedom
and sense of eternity in the Karoo. Jeg Venter Her is based on traditional Norwegian cow calling, to the lines, “I’ll be waiting for your silence to break, your soul to shake, for your love to wake.”