DUDLEY BENSON

Zealandia is the name of our drowned continent, and also my third album. The final part of a trilogy that I began in 2008 with my first album The Awakening and continued with Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne, Zealandia is an identity pop album - twelve anthems that invite us to relate to our land in a new way.

Written over a three-year period, Zealandia is my most ambitious and intricately crafted project, and features my dream-team core cast of symphony orchestra, the fifty-person New Zealand Youth Choir, harp, harpsichord, piano, koto and bagpipes. The land itself collaborates too: through sampled recordings of rocks and minerals found within our continent I've made the album's rhythm section and sonic textures.

The Jan Warburton Charitable Trust contributed to help me mix and edit the album in it final stages.