The Cloud Maker - SIWJF 2025

The Cloud Maker brings together five extraordinary female artists in a spellbinding celebration of goddess stories from around the world. Through music, myth, and imagination, they channel ancient tales of fierce battles, shamanic dances and journeys to the afterlife. 

Featuring taonga pūoro (Māori singing treasures), bass clarinet, harmonic flutes, cello nyckelharpa, drums, and voices, The Cloud Maker weaves these archetypal stories into an immersive soundscape that transports listeners across time and space — remembering ancient bloodlines and breathing new life into old stories. 

Across their journey, these masterful musicians summon the stories of goddesses and mythic women — Mayari the Filipino moon goddess, Freya the Norse goddess of love and battle, Princess Bari the Korean shamanic healer, Miriamthe Jewish prophetess, the Selkies of Irish legend, and Hine Pu Te Hue, the Māori goddess who swallows the storm. 

The result is a deeply moving, genre-defying performance — a meeting of ancient myth and modern artistry that celebrates feminine power, ancestral memory, and the universal language of sound. 

Bree Van Reyk

Bree van Reyk is a drummer, percussionist, composer, sound artist and occasional maker of unkempt musical instruments. Her solo performances centre on exploring minimal, experimental, and meditative experiential soundscapes using rustic, self-invented instruments, found objects and electronics.

Bree’s massed improvising ensemble album ‘superclusters’ was released in 2022 and recent commissions include new works for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Dark MOFO, Sydney Chamber Opera, Ensemble Offspring, Monafoma, Darren Hanlon and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Bree has forged a unique career collaborating with artists such as Gurrumul, Sia Ahmad, Mick Turner, Marcus Whale, Holly Throsby, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.