aktuální

Electro-acoustic musician Eduardo Cossio & saxophonist Josten Myburgh are a duo of experimental improvisers based in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). The two of them have held aloft the community for the most underground fringes of Boorloo’s music scene, between them organising over two hundred concerts in the last seven years through their platforms Outcome Unknown and Tone List.

Despite this, it took them until 2021 to begin concerted efforts to work together musically, refining their shared musical language towards this release. The duo took edits of over ten hours of improvisations made in two venues with striking acoustics, splicing them into each other with the same sudden logic as Eduardo’s noisy improvisations with cassette tapes that feature throughout the record.

Playing with found microtonality in detuned harps, zithers and alto saxophone multiphonics, the most unexpected aspect of their music is its melodic focus: the duo spin melodies and harmonies around each other, slowly unfolding, making sense of the tonality in real time. The harmonic logic always emerges from the interaction between instruments, players, space and place, rather than being forethought by existing systems.

Meanwhile there is a striving for textural complexity, as each player constructs foreground and background layers both within their own part and in relation to the other. Cassette tapes, electromagnetic microphones, sustain pedals, harmonica, prepared e-bows and field recordings are all in service of this dense layering. But so is the shape and timbre of the melodies: constant leaps and ebbs between rough and smooth, high and low, dull and bright, producing something with a prismatic effect. The result is lush and polyphonic, grounded in the steadiness of drones and melodic spinning-out.

They will be joined this evening by Ian Mikyska (viola da gamba, guitar) and Martin Debřička (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet).