Spotlight on: HINA
Words by Flynn Robson, Georgia Lambert and Chad Allison
HINA is the name of Tāmaki Makaurau singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Amy Boroevich. In 2020, HINA released her debut EP, Muse. Amy’s sound is deeply connected with her own personal identity. The music reflects her own personal journey of self-discovery in a way that is relatable, honest and groovy. Newzician sat down with Amy to discuss how a young indigenous artist navigates Aotearoa’s post-colonial music scene, and her journey from school music nerd to budding young neo-soul sensation.
For Amy, music has always been a part of her life. “I started violin when I was little and I did that from when I was five to probably like 18. I still play, but not as much.” It’s her that you hear playing strings on her song ‘Back Home’. “I was a little music nerd at school. I was stuck in the practice room at lunch time. Well, obviously, I wasn’t stuck because I was there out of choice.” A key stepping stone in her musical journey didn’t occur until she left high school. “When I got to uni it was kinda when I started branching out into production. One of my friends was really into Ableton and I would literally just sit in his room and watch what he did. I probably really annoyed him actually, I was there all the time!” The pieces really started to come together when she was approached by Miromoda, the Indigenous Māori Fashion Apparel Board. “They do this show at New Zealand Fashion Week and they needed someone to do the music. The lady who runs it went to the same school as my parents, and she was like “Hey can you make music for it?” and I was like “woah, probably not but I'll try!” so I gave it a go.” It was definitely a success as it was a role they asked Amy to return to for the following year.
It was these experiences that acted as a catalyst for Amy to start the process of getting to know herself as an artist. “Once I discovered production, and had been writing songs for a wee bit, I put two and two together. It was a really slow process of getting to know what sound I wanted to have and what my influences were and how they affected me.” She tells us that her sound is neo-pop chocolate for the soul. “That's how an Aussie mag described my sound. It was so sick! I was like “That's the sound!” I’ve put it on my website and everything. I’ve just run with it.” She is heavily influenced by UK neo-soul but explains that she draws inspiration from multiple genres, “I would say I kind of lean towards hip-hop drum samples, so a lot of my beats underneath my instrumentals are really hip-hop influenced but then my guitar sound is kind of indie with the chorus, reverb and delay. It's a cluster of things, a good mish-mash.” One major inspiration for HINA is Jorja Smith. Being a musician, Amy relates with the way Smith writes about how she navigates life. She says Smith’s ‘Lost and Found’ is “the perfect way to describe the human experience”.
In 2018, Amy left Wellington, New Zealand’s self-proclaimed mecca of arts, to move back home to Tāmaki Makaurau. Amy explains that although her time in Pōneke had taught her a lot about herself, it just felt like the right time to move back, “I had learned a lot but I kind of felt like I had got out of it everything that I could, and that if I stayed there any longer it wouldn’t be such a positive experience.” Amy says she definitely recognised the creative culture of Wellington. “I wasn't active in the scene because I hadn’t released anything and I wasn’t gigging, but I found the creative culture was really welcoming and people were super supportive of what everyone was doing. It kinda seemed like people were dabbling in a range of different art forms.”
Being back in her hometown has allowed her to reconnect with roots and given her the space to express herself. “I'm quite shy with my creative process, so it's just things like having just my own room that didn't have my flatmates sharing a wall with me.” It helps too that her room is at the other end of the house to her parents, “I can make all this noise and sound crap and not care!” For HINA, coming home has helped her refocus and has provided greater artistic direction. “I feel like Welly was kind of the heart, and Auckland is like the engine.” She says this is in part a result of the competition and peer encouragement that Tāmaki Makaurau has introduced. “People come to Auckland as a bit of a business epicentre. It has really lifted my game. There is a sense of competition which, if you approach it with the right mindset, can be really healthy. It was a really cool way to really sink my teeth into it as a career, as opposed to a lifestyle.” Opportunities for collaboration have come in spades upon returning home. She believes collaboration is something that might come naturally to the career focused scene of Tāmaki Makaurau. “People want to work. They are really keen to make it their full-time job. So, I guess the collaboration is organic as well, because when you find people you like, you want to keep working with them.
A big part of HINA’s journey has been a reclamation of Amy’s whakapapa through her māmā, whom she honours in her unreleased song ‘Tararua’. “I started learning about our marae and how the dump is totally exploited by the Horowhenua Council and how it affects the maunga and our family for generations.” Being Māori informs how she creates and in turn how she sees the world; her heritage and whakapapa are reflected in her art. One informs the other, they both inform each other. Being a Māori artist is multidimensional, sometimes it is not as easy as putting a label on who you are, or what you identify with. Amy recounts a story from her time as a law student. “Justice Joe Williams said at Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa Hui-ā-Tau (Māori law students conference), “We not only need more lawyers who are Māori but we need more Māori lawyers.” So his thing was that we need not just a lawyer who is Māori, who is just gonna go off and do law and be Māori at the same time, but a Māori lawyer who is gonna make Māori law, apply it, and help out our people. So, with art I suppose I don't think I'm a Māori musician, purely because when I think of a Māori musician I think of musicians such as Rob Ruha, Maisey Rika, Ria Hall, Seth Haapu, just to name a few.” She’s not really sure if labels even matter, and she believes it's a cool conundrum to have. “It's like, there are so many ways to be Māori now!” Amy says the pairing of learning of her tūrangawaewae and beginning to learn Māori at University has opened up many doors that she would never have envisioned starting out; she cites an example of this as Pao Pao Pao, a Māori music mentoring programme that she has been a part of.
Amy refers to herself as ‘a little crossroads demon’. She definitely occupies an interesting space in modern day Aotearoa. Being both Māori and Pākehā, with HINA, she is constantly thinking about honouring both sides of herself in her music. The way she achieves this is simply by being as authentic as possible. She points out that there are often challenges when occupying both Māori and Pākehā spaces and knowing her place. “I never occupy a Māori space with the intent that I’m the expert, and I never want to go into a Pākehā space and go ‘I am the spokesperson for the culture’.” Being Māori and white-passing, Amy explains that she is often in the uncomfortably privileged position where she can occupy a “Pākehā space and offer Māori perspectives and (try!) not scare anyone off.” She says she just tries to offer some perspective in both spaces.
Amy has been busy the past year, HINA performed at both the Prada Cup on the waterfront and the Matariki festival in Tāmaki Makaurau. It reflects in the physical sense the way in which she occupies two different cultural spaces and how she manages to actively navigate them both simultaneously. However, she’s not immune to self-doubt. It was her inner saboteur that planted seeds of doubt before performing at the Matariki festival. “Am I Māori enough?” “Wouldn’t they want someone else who could speak more te reo Māori?” The flipside of this was her experience at the Prada Cup where HINA performed the song ‘Tararua’. She speaks about the intersection of bringing Māori art into a very non-Māori space “Introducing something very personal and super indigenous to an international crowd was a really buzzy and cool experience.” Amy describes the event as “luxurious and opulent. To encapsulate it… it was crazy.”
When navigating both worlds, there are some challenges, a result of the conflicting natural tikanga of HINA’s identity. One such challenge is the idea of being whakaiti or being humble. Amy describes the natural feeling as “not wanting to put your head above the crowd.” Being a local musician means being your own number one supporter, and sometimes that can be difficult. “It's kind of at odds with that Māori ethos of whakaiti. I just want someone else to come up and be like “look at what this girl’s doing, you should listen to it” but it has to be me”. Realising that she is a vessel for her art has helped her, especially when playing live. “Playing live is such a crazy experience because you’re obviously on stage and like “OMG everyone is looking at me” but they are here not for me necessarily, but because they want the music. I kind of have to school myself about just being a vessel and channelling the music through myself… you know, just silence the ego basically”.
Amy tells us how an experience she had with Teeks at Pao Pao Pao helped her reconcile this internal conflict. At the wānanga, she shared for the very first time her most personal song, Letter to My Love, with Teeks. She recounts the wisdom the veteran musician shared with her - “He said something like, “if you think about it, the feeling is universal but the interpretation is your own. If you share it, you can help people understand how to process their own feelings.” Amy says this advice has helped her change her perspective. “I was like, “maybe I’m just storytelling and this is how I’m feeling about things that everyone feels. Maybe it’s going to help someone.” That removed the ‘it’s all about me feeling’, since it's not actually all about me. It’s about the experience and how you propagate the message.” Having the opportunity to be mentored by some of the legends of Māori music was an incredible experience for Amy. She describes meeting Troy Kingi as being “idol struck” and in awe of his presence and no doubt in awe of his red bands and poncho. Amy gushes over working with these Māori musicians, who have been on the scene for quite some time, and whom she describes as “rangatira of the scene”. These artists are mentors who are both occupying the same space as HINA whilst having all of the knowledge. Best said by the local artist herself, “it’s like an untapped well of wisdom, knowledge and inspiration.”
As well as her own project HINA, Amy has also been working alongside other indigenous musicians. HINA is signed to Five AM Sounds, an indigenous run indie label that is focused on “seeing indigenous people doing epic stuff.” She has also worked closely with singer Theia on her reo Māori project TE KAAHU. Joining Theia for her live sessions, Amy describes the experience as really, really exciting. Especially as she has been introducing her to more Māori music and demonstrating what it means “modern Māori/urban Māori and creative in that sphere.”
Being a local artist, support comes from everywhere. “I feel like every sort of single bit of support, promo or publicity is this little snowball.” The support shows when you go somewhere that you don’t live, you’re trying to just get 30/40 bodies in the room. Sometimes it's just the friends of friends or parent’s friends who come along to support, which is so important. “I remember one of my dad’s mates came to one of my gigs at 10 o’clock at night on a weekday and I was like “you’re the man!” It means the world, and I think it’s easy to forget how much it means especially if you’re not a creative. That grass roots level of support is everything.”
Throughout Aotearoa there seems to be a great amount of support available, Amy mentions specifically Creative New Zealand and Te Māngai Pāho. Being a musician and inside the music scene, Amy describes the support for contemporary Māori music as “sick and so cool”, and a way in which “heaps of avenues and doors open.” In contrast to the times of the OG Māori artists who paved the way for artists like HINA, who are currently working the scene now, there are definitely some notable differences. Amy describes it best as, “people’s perception of Māori culture is broadening and expanding and there’s more space for not only Māori musicians, but musicians who are Māori.” This is reminiscent of a global movement of greater understanding towards people of colour and minorities, especially within the music industry. Amy was excited about how it's “really pro-indigenous, pro-Pasifika, which is sick.” In the current times that we are fortunate to live in, we are seeing different cultures being more well-received. Amy explains how seeing indigenous artists across the world like The Kid Laroi is an awesome form of representation for indigenous kids. “He’s 7th in the world on Spotify and he's indigenous Australian, it's just like wow that's so sick!”
Find HINA on:
Instagram: @hinabeaming
Spotify: HINA
Tickets for TE KAAHU - Live at Matariki:
www.moshtix.co.nz/v2/event/te-kaahu-live-at-matariki/138329/