An electroacoustic work for five performers (clarinet in Bb, steel-string guitar, violin, contrabass and electronics).

I've been working as Sage's producer for the last few years. This is her first foray into a theatre space with a work that combines poetry and experimental composition.

"Three people meet at the same moment. They embark on a relationship that radically challenges conceptions of romantic love–other people’s and their own. Their love will be tested by the misunderstandings and assumptions of everyone else in their lives. Will they cope? Written by beloved experimental singer, composer and poet Sage J Harlow (Sage Pbbbt), <3 love song is a queer love poem exploring the joys, hurts and dangers of non-normative love, set to live original music played by avant-garde dream team Annika Moses (Nika Mo, Great Statue), Lyndon Blue (Heathcote Blue, Leafy Suburbs) and Josten Myburgh (Land’s Air, Ghost Gum Reverb). This is a quietly ambitious, tender work by a special local artist exploring new facets of her practice."

Audible Edge is a festival exploring the marginal and not-normal in sound and listening, in Boorloo and Walyalup. Operating since 2017 on Whadjuk Noongar land, we have carefully grown a platform for experimental and tangential approaches to music and other sound-based art. We’ve persisted through COVID disruptions, taking on many new shapes and forms in the process.

Audible Edge celebrates play, freak energy, silliness, ephemerality and “getting stuck into it” as meaningful ways of engaging with new experiences. We love local, emergent, queer and contingent projects. We like straight-faced experimentation rubbing shoulders with unhinged wildness (or situations where you can’t tell which is which). We strive to make accessible contexts to appreciate the radical potency of our community of independent artists and makers, and our friends from distant lands and waters.

Our program is full of wild and weird high-contrast bookings. Sometimes they contain contradictory approaches, unresolved tensions. Through open invitation and absolute permission, Audible Edge listeners and makers alike are thrown into the messy process of ‘making sense’, whatever that might mean, together.

Audible Edge is presented by Tone List, an artist-run, Boorloo-based label for exploratory music founded in 2016. Audible Edge was awarded an Art Music State Luminary Award in 2023 by APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre, recognising five years of contributions to the creative music culture of the west coast of the continent. It has received 4.5 and 5 star reviews in Limelight Magazine, and been covered by various other publications.

In August 2023, Daisy Sanders and I travelled through Aotearoa, performing five times and giving an artist talk over the course of a week.

6.8 - Yours, Ōtepoti
7.8 - Lyttelton Coffe Co, Ōhinehou
9.8 - New Zealand School of Music, Te Whanganui a Tara (artist talk)
10.8 - Pyramid Club, Te Whanganui a Tara
11.8 - Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau
12.8 - Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau - Josten Myburgh (solo), and quartet with Johnny Marks & Genevieve Davidson

The tour received support from the University of Otago Division of Humanities Performing Arts Fund, and my flights over were sponsored by the Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries via another project.

Rough recordings of alto saxophone solos, often made outdoors.

Since 2019 I have provided live music for Daisy Sanders' expansive dance lifework, A Resting Mess. This large-scale, immersive performance installation hosts an ensemble of performers that explore human and planetary fatigue and focuses on healing through its exploration of chaos, care, community and climate crisis. In this piece I play mostly electroacoustic percussion, leaning into the core concepts of the work (rest and mess) to inform ways of improvising on the drum kit.

The piece has so far been presented in partnership with 10 Nights in Port (Walyalup), PICA (Boorloo), Dunedin Dream Brokerage (Ōtepoti), Hothouse Theatre Company (All Saints College, Boorloo) and Winter Nights Festival (The Blue Room Theatre, Boorloo).

Eduardo Cossio & Josten Myburgh are a duo of improvisers based in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). Having played together in various formations over many years, they began refining a duo language in 2021 towards this unexpectedly melodic release.

Working with found microtonality in detuned zithers and alto saxophone multiphonics, the duo spin melodies and harmonies around each other, slowly unfolding, making sense of the tonality in real time. The harmonic sense is emergent from the interaction between instruments, players, space and place, rather than forethought by any system.

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, e-bows and field recordings are all in service of this dense layering. But so is the way the melodies are put together: leaps between rough and smooth timbres, high and low pitches and dull and bright timbres producing something prismatic rather than just linear. The result is lush and polyphonic, grounded in the steadiness of drones and melodic spinning-out.

To prepare the album, the duo took edits of over ten hours of improvisations, splicing them into each other with the same sudden logic as Eduardo's tape improvisations.

This music was improvised throughout 2022 in the Artsource Old Customs House, on Whadjuk Noongar boodja, and the Holy Trinity Church in York, on Ballardong Noongar boodja. Field recordings from Badimia country appear in the music. The artists acknowledge Country, and custodians and Elders of Country, past, present, and emerging. 

In releasing the record, we played 11 shows throughout Europe, including Vestafor Festival in Norway. We wrote a dispatch for Resonate Magazine documenting our experience:

"Eduardo Cossio and Josten Myburgh are currently in Europe touring with their duo project Land's Air: a duo using improvisation as a methodology with a timbrally complex aesthetic built from textured microtonal drones and melodies. The duo have just released their debut self-titled album. Here they share reflections from their tour, and diary entries made after each concert, in a loose self-interview following prompts from the Australian Music Centre. Their reflections were completed on May 9, after playing ten shows in Graz, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Köln, Munich and Paretz. Six more shows await in Wroclaw, Łódź, Berlin and Rosendal."

OWLS is a calendar and resource list for exploratory music and sound art occurring in Boorloo (Perth), Walyalup (Fremantle), and broader Western Australia.

OWLS is friends with EMUS in Sydney, but otherwise unaffiliated.

You can contact us via our Gmail account with the username outwestliminalsounds, and our Instagram account owls_place.

The Reckoning is a decolonisation project that aims to generate a First Nation’s performance methodology, that addresses the intergenerational trauma of Australia’s colonial past and the collective amnesia surrounding this. It will explore this by facilitating reflective engagement and healing through a First Nations paradigm and performance pedagogy. First Nations ways of being and knowing have been critical sites of resistance in the process of decolonisation, and a First Nations paradigm privileges embodied knowledge and aims to achieve right relationships with both human and non-human forms. The performance methodology will connect mind, body and spirit and ways of learning as both a collective experience and thus become an act of decolonisation as it seeks to both explore and honour First Nations ways of being and doing.

I'm privileged to have provided live music for the performance at both of its creative development showings at PICA, in 2021 and 2023.

Kinds of Light is a concert series for creative music at PS Art Space in Walyalup/Fremantle which I curate. Kinds of Light celebrates ambitious experimentation, careful musicianship, and sounds that are relevant to this time and place. We program across style and genre, excited by the love and rigour that goes into projects that defy categories.

Live recording of a performance for the Perth International Jazz Festival.

A performance enacted simultaneously in Berlin, Naarm/Melbourne and Walyalup/Fremantle using the telematic performance software JackTrip. Hosted by New North and the Audible Edge Festival of Sound.

“When one contemplates there is no form, but when one examines, there is coherence.”

Bu Yantu, quoted by François Jullien in The Great Image Has No Form

"Two Scrolls from Western Australia was written in collaboration with Jameson Feakes and Josten Myburgh. I asked each musician to select a location in Western Australia and then to make a set of field recordings there at different times of day. These recordings form the basis of the two scrolls. As with scroll paintings made in China from the Song dynasty onward, poetic characters (here represented by music for the two instruments) are placed above the landscape.

Michael Pisaro-Liu
 
The development and recording of this work was supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries.

A piece for flute/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, electric guitar, pedal harp & electronics (five performers). The duration of the piece is between 18' and 23'.

Banksias under snow (temporal mirror) is a piece which explores the idea of translocation and transtemporalisation of place through sonic metaphors. Field recordings from palawa and Wiilman Noongar country are collaged together and veiled by bandpass filters tuned to pitches appropriated from the first movement of Peter Sculthorpe's 1971 work, "Night Pieces".

A conceptual score situating harmonies from Peter Sculthorpe's body of work against field recordings.

I produced and performed in this CD by Sage J Harlow of her suite of compositions of the same name, written in 2016. Published on Edition Wandelweiser Records.

I play percussion, clarinet and sing a bit on this wonderful record by indie-folk-freakazoid Nika Mo.

Work composed for bass flute, clarinet in Bb, violin, electronic keyboard, percussion with electronics (five performers).

There is an alternate, half-finished version for alto saxophone, electronics, electric guitar & percussion that might get completed one day.

A work for double bass, piano, small choir (at least four voices) & fixed media electronics, of 11' duration.

Written for my Honours graduation recital, this piece was then released on mini-CD by Flaming Pines. A paean to the cultural deserts of outer suburban Perth.

Work for three or four performers (open instrumentation) and generative electronics. The duration of the piece is open, usually 10' to 20'. Easily customisable to most smaller ensemble sizes and performance durations, feel free to write in.

In this piece a text score indicates a range of available responses to sonic prompts raised by the generative electronic part.

A multi-artform mixtape of works assembled out of the funding from the COVID-disrupted Audible Edge Festival in 2020.

I worked as the sound recordist and sound designer for Noemie Huttner-Koros on this project, re-enchanting the streets of Northbridge through audio recordings & walking tours focusing on the history of queer activism in Perth, especially amidst the AIDS crisis. The project specifically focuses on queer elders; our interviewees include Mark Reid, Janet Carter, Claire Bushby, and Carl Gopalkrishnan.

The work was nominated for 4 PAWA awards in 2020, including 'Best Sound Design'.

I contributed recordings, software programming and composition for Elizabeth Pedler's exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

​With few intensive workshop opportunities for improvisation and experimental sound practice in Australia, Sounding Together investigates the possibility of collective mentorship in this field, with the simultaneous goal of growing richness of practice in Boorloo/Perth and strengthening a sense of community in the field of improvised music at both a local and national level. 

The first instance of Sounding Together was led by Jim Denley in Koorda on Kaprun and Ballardong Noongar country, and featured participants from Perth, Adelaide and Hobart. Over four days participants worked in the Wheatbelt region of WA, improvising outdoors, taking field recordings and making work to present to one another. The final showing involved a group sound installation and an orchestral performance by all twelve musicians.

The second instance was led by Jim and Annette Krebs in Dunsborough on Wardandi Noongar boodja. Participants came from Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Hobart. We spent five days working on the beaches, rock formations, Karri forests and freshwater pools of the region, as well as recording and experimenting at home. The final showing involved some small solo, duo and trio performances, and a large ensemble performance by everyone together.

In 2021, Disclaimer Journal hosted writing and audio from the 2020 Sounding Together workshop under the heading "Meelup (Moonrise), Boranup (Sunrise)".

TuneNoiseTune is a concert series co-presented by the Perth Jazz Society and Tone List. We host avant-garde jazz, improvised music and other creative musics which take influence from these two fields. We host one concert every two months, usually at the Four5Nine bar.

TuneNoiseTune had 9 concerts between 2022-2023, and also facilitated a new commissioned work by Naoko Uemoto, Jeremy Segal & Josiah Padmanabham.

The concert series has been on hiatus since co-curator Kate Pass took off for Masters studies in New York. Hoping to pick it back up eventually.

TuneNoiseTune's first season was supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries, and Carl Erbrich.

After playing sporadic sessions across three years since their first meeting in Berlin in 2015, Adam, Emilio and Josten produced this energised trio in a flat in Wedding in 2018. With a rapid rate of change and a tendency towards playful subversion, it's exploratory and colourful, while still precipitating in many moments of clarity and intensity.

A few days before, Josten had met with Matthias Müller in his studio to discuss Matthias' upcoming trip to Perth for Audible Edge; they figured they ought to play together as well. What emerged was an immediately familiar language, a synchronicity between sharp digital feedback and articulate trombone gestures. Their very first meeting is published here. As opposed to the expansive chamber music of the trio, this duo works mostly by layering noise, and the results are far more stark.

The recordings make a curious pair, with the same electronic sound-worlds existing in two spaces, divergent in approach to gesture and harmony. Perhaps Lena Czerniawska's artwork, drawn in response to the music, proposes some relationships between the two.

The Walyalup Weekend of Improvised Music is a new festival held at PS Art Space in Walyalup/Fremantle which began in June 2023. It is dedicated to community-building around improvised music, a thriving sub-community of Boorloo’s broader exploratory music scene.

Our program revolves around two evenings of first meeting plays of improvised music, complemented by a variety of workshops, talks, and more.

Stalls with merchandise, information, newsletter sign-up and EOI forms from local organisations connected to improvised music.

WWIM pays the rent to Save Our Songlines, of an amount equal to 2% of our income from ticket sales & donations.

We stand at the interface of a new beginning; four connected through histories past and futures. But we begin at the end and arrive at the beginning, with one eye to the sky and one ear to the ground. “The Call to Prayer” pulls us deep into the depth of the earth, histories and lineages vibrate and shimmer as they rise to take their place in “Gods” clouds. We arrive at a junction between the thresholds of light and dark—four connected in the shape of the cross. As Below, So Above is a 20 minute ritual for personal deliverance and atonement, and a choreographic investigation into the concepts of reversal and inversion. Ritual after ritual As Below, So Above repetitively allows the performer to enter into a space that seeks familiarity whilst asking to uncover the hidden spaces that exist in the known.

Site-specific work devised by Joshua Pether for the short works program Situ8. Siren Call was viewed from above, and involved myself and Simon Charles playing as (I guess) haunted bartenders. The titular sirens of the piece belong to the water that Boorloo is built on: wetlands displaced by bricks and concrete. Water still drips through the brickwork at times, especially in the bsaement level. Simon and I increasingly folding our incidental soundings into a score that tried to give voice to the life of the water and its inhabitants, and involved a few sonic magic tricks.

The first performance by Josten Myburgh of Antoine Beuger's 2007 work 'un lieu pour être deux' was with guitarist and electronic musician Andre O Möller at Klangraum Festival in Düsseldorf, as part of a performance which spanned all fifty pages of the work and which lasted upwards of three hours. Josten found the rich experience of playing the piece captivating and has endeavoured to perform it and share it in other ways many times since this first encounter.

This particular recording with Jameson Feakes spans about twenty-or-so pages of the piece. It was made in Josten's home at the time, as part of the 'places to be two' project, where numerous performances of this work were being made around Perth in 2017 as part of a process of 'handing down' and sharing the experience of playing it with many different duos.

Jameson Feakes & Josten Myburgh frequently collaborate together in a myriad of settings; their work as a duo explores the music of Wandelweiser composers and of other composers whose music creates similar listening situations. This piece in particular makes a compelling statement about 'being two', and about the musical duo: whilst its surface may seem relatively austere at first, being present with the work (through listening or performing) reveals its subdued intensity and the complexity of experience it creates for the performers, for 'the two'. It seems fitting for Feakes & Myburgh's first duo release (of surely more to come) to begin here, at some kind of investigation of the potential of 'being two' itself.

It is suggested that you play this recording at a volume level that blends in with/is absorbed into one's environment, rather than dominating it.

Artwork for the release has been provided by Lauren Salt (of Volim) who has created works in response to the experience of listening to the work. The physical release of the album comes in a box roughly A5-sized, featuring art prints by Salt and texts by the performers.

Please note: Bandcamp does not accommodate large file uploads, so the recording has been cut in half exactly.

I contributed some field recordings of the collective natural dyeing and stringmaking process undertaken to produce some of the artefacts in this work, and to inform the shape of the final installation. These were used in the eventual composition by composer Simon Charles. The show was exhibited in Perth Festival 2022.

Presented as part of Alter State, a festival curated by disabled artists, Room to Rest was a durational online work by dancer Daisy Sanders.

I wrote a short article for Cool Change on some emergent, highly emplaced musics in Western Australia, with particular attention paid to Seacrest Gardens, Simon Charles and Sage Pbbbt. Some nods to Katie West, Ross Bolleter and others. The text is available in the Cool Change "two-and-a-half yearbook" published in November 2022.

Excerpts from a quartet improvisation recorded in a military battery in lutruwita/Tasmania, August 2019. Published on Emilio Gordoa's digital label WildSonico.

An electroacoustic work for two to three performers. The duo version has the two performers playing alto saxophone, sustain pedal, delay pedal, computer & synthesizer, and alto saxophone, baritone saxophone & sustain pedal respectively. The trio version puts the synthesizer and computer parts in the hands of the third player. The duration of the piece is about 25' to 30'. Finished score forthcoming, please write in to request to see it.

Thanks to Eduardo Cossio for the invitation to write the liner notes to his stunning record with Ross Bolleter.

On Such & Such, each time Ross’s finger compels a hammer to strike three adjacent strings on one of his ruined pianos, their individual tangential tunings ring out in a gong-like sonority. Splintering harmonics and difference tones echo through a Bayswater kitchen in fractal patterns. Their unsettled-ness is ours. Inherited, translocated cultural forms and acoustics turn into a being-with the ngaangk/sun’s heat as it distends strings and floorboards to the cyclical rhythm of six seasons, splitting a poised twelve-tone intonation into something ever-new. The becoming-place of the piano, being-with ruination.

Place is also culture-in-place. Ross's maverick explorations belong in some way to our collective sonic worlding in Boorloo. Perhaps Eduardo has been listening and researching closely enough to find and transform the traces of this in himself. Viewed this way, when Eduardo switched from his frenzied guitar explorations and settled for the patient drones of two never-tuned hand-me-down harps, we weren't witnessing a creative departure, but a return - to this emplaced practice of sonic ruination. And where Ross’s ruination is revealed in the pointillism of plucks and strikes, Eduardo's zithers ring out constantly in eternally renewing micro-rhythms, sounding the pace of entropic unravelling. Stability on the precipice of collapse: a poem to the potency for rupture present in moments that seem inert. Ruination practices entangled across generations of our culture.

I hear other kinds of returns in the music, too: the frantic energy of Eduardo’s guitar manifests in pick scrapes across zithers; the modernist harmonic concepts that begat the honing of Ross’s listening into the potential of his ruined companions appear in detuned form in the album's final third. Ruination of story. Time is not a line. 

And I hear a friendship blossoming, and I see candlestick banksias and marri gums and moodjar boorna (Christmas trees) burst through the cracks in the brickwork of Kensington, Naarm, from where I write this. At times I am moved to tears.

Recording of a composition written by Éric Normand. Éric visited the Audible Edge Festival in 2019, and during the pandemic made this piece for some of the musicians he met to play together. We recorded the piece at the now-closed Soundfield Studio with Stuart James, making use of lightglobes, a CRT TV, and acoustic instruments.

A site-specific, large ensemble, spatial performance developed for the finale of City of Melville's Winter Solstice event. A cross-disciplinary ensemble explored improvising in a harmonically consonant space, with a high level of attention paid to textural detail, depth-of-field and the incidental counterpoint of overlapping cycles of different lengths.

Cass Lynch's amazing text drawing on the parallels between the syrinx and the morphology of the river was the material from which Holli improvised; we also ruminated on the poetry in the hope that some of the ideas might inform how we sounded.

I also assisted with some of the curation of the event, in particular coordinating the creation of a new short contemporary dance work by Daisy Sanders, Lara Dorling & Lia Tsesmelis.

Josten Myburgh's residency involves the development of a concert-length electro-acoustic work for solo alto saxophone, projected through a triangle of speakers with Josten in the middle. 

The work centres a technique Josten has been developing combining non-standard tunings and electronic processing on the instrument. They will be using the residency to develop this technique in detail, looking for unusual combinations of frequencies which produce psychoacoustic phenomena, such as surprisingly loud sub-bass tones and rhythmic pulsations. Their focus is on a tender, embodied relationship to composing and playing, that comes out of a curious and idiosyncratic approach to their instrument and how its sound resonates in space and perception.

Within this residency project I also hosted "Rational Playtime", a co-learning space for just intonation theory and practice.

Between 2014 and 2018 I worked for arts organisation Tura New Music on their programs Club Zho, Church Series and iMprov, as well as occasional ad-hoc programming and programs within their Totally Huge New Music Festival. During this time I organised concerts for Will Guthrie, Félicia Atkinson, Aviva Endean, Lucas Abela, Rosalind Hall and many more.

Club Zho was a long-running experimental music series which I curated a few instances of alongside Traianos Pakioufakis and Tos Mahoney during my years working with Tura. Church Series was a short-lived series of concerts dedicated to experimental chamber music. iMprov was a program of workshops and concerts focussed specifically on cultivating improvised music culture in Western Australia.

Some of this programming has been quite influential on the present state of the local experimental music scene. In the 9th edition of ADSR Zine, Eduardo Cossio wrote that "the iMprov program fostered exchange with local and visiting artists from different backgrounds. The safe environment of the workshops did much to enable the individual practice of its participants." From my perspective, the iMprov workshop series catalysed the latent interest of a small group of people, most of whom are still actively involved in the scene. It was a gathering space and boost of energy needed to start a scene. It was a privilege to be involved in this!

Emilio Gordoa, Sabine Vogel and myself share an interest in improvising “as weather”: playing with and as the sounds of the environment. Based between Cuernavaca, Mexico City, Boorloo, Potsdam, Paretz and Berlin, we're quite geographically displaced as a trio (and sometimes as people).

Our project “Tracing presence on land” is a composition or language emerging out of us sharing space out-doors in the places we were all born, highlighting the way our musicking holds the stories and echoes of the places we are (in).

Their project involves short residencies each in Paretz, Fünfseenland, Meelup (Dunsborough) and Yagan mia (Wireless Hill, Boorloo/Perth), followed by a concert tour of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand including performances at the Audible Edge Festival of Exploratory Music, COMA, the Audio Foundation and Pyramid Club. Contributions from human and non-human collaborators throughout the journey will be woven into the composition.

Eduardo and I are in residence working on new approaches to tuning and collage within our duo project this December. We'll also be touring through Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung City, Hsinchu and Taipei.

Meditation is a powerful force—it can gift magickal capabilities. O knew this, and put it in service towards liberation, until their peaceful passing. Their lover E is led astray by power and desire, and seeks to bring O back from the dead. They manage—but do not recognise O in their new body, and so seek to become death themself. Death is just doing her job. Until she isn’t.

O,D,E is a new and experimental chamber opera written by Sage J Harlow (aka Sage Pbbbt). It’s a queer, occult retelling of Orpheus & Eurydice, grounded in the suffering that comes with simply being alive. Exploring gender and identity, characters change bodies, die and reincarnate, and begin and end contracts with eternity, singing, screaming and howling through the libretto as they do so.

Underpinned by live music from an ensemble of noisemakers who bring a new meaning to “pit band”, O,D,E fuses the grandeur of opera with lo-fi, weirdo improv and metal aesthetics in a work that kicks Boorloo's strangeness meter up a notch, with one of its most beloved experimentalists at the helm.

I made and recorded these three pieces at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in November 2023, during a three-week residency. The first piece was made inside the hydroelectric dam late at night. The second piece was made in the early afternoon, about a 2-hour mountain climb on foot from the residency, and was inspired by some reading I was doing on the work of Manfred Werder. The third piece required access to power and so was made outside the front door of the residency space at dusk, not far from the noisily running river.

As part of the residency I also wrote three journal entries, which you can read on the centre's website.

Thanks to Dunedin Sound for filming our set at Yours. Yours is a very special and inspiring venue in Ōtepoti, and one of my favourite venues worldwide.

A coalition of 9 experimental music organisations from Boorloo co-organised this fundraiser for Olive Kids & Sulala Animal Rescue in September 2024. I played with the Tone List Orchestra and in a duo with Mel Hall.