Field Recordings + Writers Residency / Unyoked

When I joined Unyoked in 2021, it was a category-leading brand that knew the power of nature to change our behaviour. But it was yet to make that mark in culture in a way that delineated it from a crop of copycats who had also figured out how to place tiny cabins on beautiful tracts of land. In my time as Creative Lead, I instituted two programs that came to define the Unyoked ethos and break it out beyond the hospitality niche.

Writers Residency used nature as both fuel and reward, inviting poets, novelists and journalists from across the country to submit to our panel of industry judges for inclusion in our bespoke anthology. The winners also received no-strings attached residencies at any of our locations to work on their writing across the year, with the anthology subsequently being placed in all of our cabins, inspiring the next generation of creatives who stayed with us.

Field Recordings was a larger-than-life project which began as a cassette project (our cabins are deliberately analog) and ended as a world-first spatial release with Apple Music. Along the way we sent up and coming artists out to cabins to write and record music, which we released physically and digitally as tapes and vinyl. Each became their own story in the power of stepping outside the studio and using nature to inspire new ideas, earning us a bevy of free media and unique art that now lives on in our cabins forever.

I created, produced, wrote and project-managed these initiatives. Our alumni include decorated poets Jazz Money and Kirli Saunders and ARIA-award winners Ninajirachi and Miiesha. Both projects were made for less than the cost of a standard Meta performance campaign.

Listen to Field Recordings II in Spatial on Apple Music