Naretha Williams (pronounced Nar-eth-ah) is a First Nations experimental interdisciplinary artist with a primary focus on music and audio arts practice. A Wiradjuri woman of mixed lineage, born and based in Melbourne on the Sovereign Land of the Kulin Nation, Victoria, Australia, Naretha's process-based work intersects installation and contemporary music, exploring themes around identity, place and the unseen. Ritual and esoteric practice underpins both process and presentation of her work. Naretha's diverse musical interests span from narrative score through to contemporary electronic music.

Blak Mass is Naretha Williams' debut album, and was commissioned by The City Of Melbourne for a live performance in 2019. Blak Mass sees Naretha combine the gargantuan Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ with live electronics to realise her complex progressive compositions. Blak Mass reflects on the city’s jarring civic history and the impact of colonisation on its First Peoples and Land, through an experimental, site specific musical performance developed for the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ.

Blak Mass considers the Grand Organ as a significant symbol of European domination and reaches deep in to the psyche of the instrument to create a haunting, avant-garde sound work. Naretha Williams was awarded 'Best Experimental or Avant-Garde Act' at the 2019 Music Victoria Awards for the live performance of Blak Mass. Writing for The Age, Aleksandra Bliszczyk describes Blak Mass as "reclaiming an organ of colonial domination".

Its title may indeed conjure pearl-clutching anxieties about the summoning of ‘dark’ forces and the opening of portals between forbidden realms. These concepts are central to Naretha William’s stunning Grand Organ commission which is a direct confrontation with ideas of established power, conservative gatekeeping and cultural dominance in Australian society

Blak Mass is the second iteration of Naretha Williams’ CRYPTEX composition project. CRYPTEX – Bio Templates & Ceremonial Frameworks for Contemporary Composition utilises the source code of the body by analysing DNA sequences to create mathematical templates to work with in a musical context.

"My identity, bloodline and place are a continual point of enquiry given the vast complexity of my own experience and how this relates to being a Wiradjuri First Nations woman on our continent.

Through my extensive artistic explorations as well as technical, cultural, social, esoteric and scientific interests, I have come to intensely challenge the notions of being and belonging. Over years of trying to integrate my own personal lineage and cultural point of reference, I am led to the very core of our genetic make-up, our DNA. Combined with an effort to resolve my displacement of Country, I search for parallels and bridges in our Songlines.

Cryptex presents opportunities to explore these concepts in depth by focusing on core codes, experimentation and methodology within defined parameters."

- Naretha Williams.