Biography

Acknowledgment

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

Biography

I'm a musician based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). I work with a practice that spans and combines location sound recording, improvisation, notated music, sound collage, and an experimental approach to alto saxophone and electro-acoustic instruments.

Since 2013, I have been active as a community organiser for the Western Australian exploratory music scene, co-running record label Tone List, producing innumerable concerts and workshops, and curating the 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 place but connects us to things internationally. It's humming along, fragile but somehow ongoing.

Beyond that, as a musician in Boorloo, I do some of the following things: play solo saxophone sets, work in improvisation duos with Eduardo Cossio and Daisy Sanders, play electroacoustic woodwinds and sometimes drums for the incredible indie folk songs of 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, step in to do horrific shred solos in Lyndon Blue's sets, sound design for installations by Katie West and Elizabeth Pedler, improvise with whoever wants to, and work slowly with Jameson Feakes on collaborations within the performance practices developed by the Wandelweiser group. I maintain national or international collaborations with Emilio Gordoa, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Adam Pultz-Melbye, Michael McNab, Lena Czerniawska 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 and understanding what we do and why we are doing it, I am immensely grateful for the mentorship of Jim Denley, Michael Pisaro, 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. He plays 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 he now co-curates with Annika Moses. Tone List has been described as the "go-to organisation for experimental music in Perth". His 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 he also organised late night concerts within the Totally Huge New Music Festival and co-ordinated their emerging composer concerts. He has since engaged in curatorial projects with Liquid Architecture and SymbioticA.

He has 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). He has released solo work on Another Timbre and Flaming Pines, and collaboratively on Tone List, Shame File Music, WildSonico and Edition Wandelweiser. He has 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 he works often with Emilio Gordoa, Sage Pbbbt, Eduardo Cossio, Michael McNab, Sage Pbbbt and Jameson Feakes. In interdisciplinary settings he has 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. He was nominated for a Performing Arts WA award for his sound design of Noémie Huttner-Koros' "The Lion Never Sleeps".

He holds a BMus (Hons) in Composition & Music Technology from WAAPA. He 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. He teaches sessionally at WAAPA, and presents on community radio station RTR.fm 92.1. He is 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.

Photo: Keelan O'Hehir