TL038. Land’s Air - Land’s Air

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 melodic construction: 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 something lush, prismatic, polyphonic, grounded in the steadiness of drones and melodicspinning-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.

Josten Myburgh - alto saxophone, electronics, recording
Eduardo Cossio - zithers, electronics, harmonica, photography, design
Mastered by Dan O'Connor at ENCODER Sound.

With thanks to Bennett Miller and Stirling Kain (Artsource) and Philip Raymont (Holy Trinity Church) for the use of the space. Thanks to Katie West and Simon Charles for their hospitality.