It's the culmination of a national tour to promote their new album, as we welcome back for a rare and exclusive Sydney performance our great friend and People's Republic founder to showcase his remarkable new duo bringing together two of the most celebrated figures in Australian improvised music...

JON ROSE and ERIK GRISWOLD, two of Australia's most celebrated improvisers mark the release of their first duo album, Unnamed Road, with an exclusive Sydney performance at The Red House in Earlwood.

Unnamed Road features Jon Rose’s unique tenor and regular violins and Erik Griswold’s remarkable prepared piano. Despite the traditional species classifications, these are both string instruments, and both musicians have spent decades exploring, interfering with, and seriously altering the possibilities of their accepted sonic worlds. The album was recorded in Brisbane and Alice Springs, with additional development at the Piano Mill in regional New South Wales, and in performance their improvisations echo the colours of those locales – the semi-tropics, a temperate forest, and outback desert. Unnamed Road also embodies the extensive experience of both artists, with roots in the U.K. and U.S. and many years of local and global collaborations between them.

The music swings from high energy rhythmic exchanges to dark lyricism; from dense pointillism to moody expressionism, raw percussive, sonic, and textural exploration. There is a conversational fluency, particularly in the combination of tenor violin and prepared piano, which fuse together into one cohesive sound world. While ideas organically flow from one to the next, there is, at the same time, an underlying compositional thought guiding the structures.

"As with the rivers in Central Australia that flow upside down, so with the music. The sound of this collaboration could be considered uniquely upside down, or try sideways drift, like the sand dunes. Modernist languages may have gone the way of catalogued obsolescence (even the individual language of an improviser), but context remains. Maybe music could survive us via transfer to another bunch who can make a better job of it. And then who knows where it may end up? Up a tree, in a termite mound, rumbling around in the earth’s core, spiralling around in the clouds like synchronised budgerigars. No time to wonder about the nature of originality when the stuff erupts from that corporal place; that’s the eternal wonder of it. Some people still believe in talking snakes, living inside whales, and permanently combusting bushes. I’d rather believe that music itself (if only we could define what it is) will be quite capable of adjusting to extreme circumstances not yet heard. But I could be looking at this all wrong." – Jon Rose 

LISTEN TO THE ALBUM AND READ MORE HERE

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