Acknowledgement

​I acknowledge and pay my respects to Whadjuk Noongar boodja and its custodians and Elders.

Biography

I'm a wadjela (non-Indigenous) musician born and based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja/Country in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia), with Irish-Australian and South African parents. I am interested in musicking in-and-as-place (in Linda Russo's sense of 'inhabitory' making, or Jim Denley's concept of playing 'with weather'), and in the way that places are expressed and translocated through culture & community. I'm drawn to materials that hover in ambiguous spaces on the spectra of melody-harmony-timbre and pitch-rhythm. I express these interests through a practice which combines location sound recording, writing, improvisation, notated composition, and an experimental approach to saxophone, drums & electro-acoustic instruments.

Since 2013, I have been active as a community organiser for the Western Australian exploratory music scene, initially as emerging curator for Tura New Music, and in 2016 co-founding record label Tone List. I have produced hundreds of concerts and workshops, and initiated and curate the acclaimed and award-winning annual festival Audible Edge. With a history of artists departing from this part of the world in search of better opportunity elsewhere, myself and others in the scene are working to build a culture and infrastructure that supports folks with a budding interest in sonic experimentation here. We hope to make something that both grounds us all in locality but connects us to global activities and perspectives. It hums along, running on goodwill, fragile but somehow ongoing.

Beyond that, as a musician in Boorloo, I do some of the following things: play improvised alto saxophone solos, work in improvisation duos with Eduardo Cossio and Daisy Sanders, play electroacoustic woodwinds and sometimes drums for indie folk artist Nika Mo, play cyclical free jazz with Ghost Gum Reverb, join in scratch ensembles to play experimental compositions, make experimental choreographed works with Joshua Pether and Daisy Sanders, hold dinner parties that masquerade as house concerts, make field recordings for installations by Katie West and Elizabeth Pedler, improvise with whoever's up for it, and work slowly with Jameson Feakes on diverse collaborations that fuse improvised and composed approaches. I maintain collaborations across borders with Emilio Gordoa, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Sabine Vogel, Adam Pultz-Melbye, Michael McNab, Lena Czerniawska, Nick Ashwood, and others.

In the catastrophic times in which we live I believe wholly in the vitality of grassroots and experimental arts spaces - the way they embody a resistance to the flattening of our cultural ecology by massive international capitalist projects, and the way they produce independent and situated ways of thinking and making together. In thinking about what we do and why we are doing it, I am immensely grateful for the mentorship of Jim Denley, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Antoine Beuger, Lindsay Vickery, my peers and friends in Australia and abroad, and Elders and custodians of Noongar country.

Press Version

Josten Myburgh is a musician based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia), making with techniques from the worlds of electro-acoustic music, radio art, free improvisation, field recording and experimental composition. They play saxophone and electronic instruments, and occasionally works with clarinet and percussion.

Josten is a part of Tone List, a Perth-based record label for exploratory music, and initiated their acclaimed annual Audible Edge festival in 2017, which they now co-curate with Annika Moses. Tone List has been described as the "go-to organisation for experimental music in Perth". Their skills and interests in concert and community organisation grew out of a role as emerging curator for Tura New Music's iMprov and Club Zho series' between 2013 and 2017, during which they also organised late night concerts within the Totally Huge New Music Festival and co-ordinated their emerging composer concerts. They have since engaged in curatorial projects with Liquid Architecture and SymbioticA.

They have performed solo and collaboratively in concert series and festivals across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, including the Perth International Jazz Festival, Fremantle Biennale, Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne), Festival Cable#8 (Nantes), Sacred Realism (Berlin), the NOW now (Sydney) and Inland Concert Series (Melbourne & Perth). They have released solo work on Another Timbre and Flaming Pines, and collaboratively on Tone List, Shame File Music, WildSonico and Edition Wandelweiser.  They have exhibited installation-based work or been included in group exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Cool Change Contemporary (Perth).

With improvisation as a core method Josten is a prolific collaborator. In musical settings they work often with Emilio Gordoa, Sage Pbbbt, Eduardo Cossio, Michael McNab, Sage Pbbbt and Jameson Feakes. In interdisciplinary settings they have worked on projects with Joshua Pether, Daisy Sanders, Katie West and Noemie Huttner-Koros, including works for the Kier Choreographic Award (2022), Perth Festival (2022), Situ8 (2021), MoveMe Festival (2019) and for various programs at the Blue Room Theatre and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. They were nominated for a Performing Arts WA award for their sound design of Noémie Huttner-Koros' "The Lion Never Sleeps".

Josten holds a BMus (Hons) in Composition & Music Technology from WAAPA. They won the Schenberg Fellowship in 2019, and has been supported by funding bodies including the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the WA Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries. They teach sessionally at WAAPA, and presents on community radio station RTR.fm 92.1. They are an Australian Music Centre Associate Artist.

Formative mentors have included Lindsay Vickery, Michael Pisaro, Antoine Beuger, Alessandro Bosetti, Annette Krebs, Jim Denley, Will Guthrie and Bae Il-Dong, and informally hundreds more.