Buy Some Music: Mara's Eora Experimental Picks
Welcome to Buy Some Music, one a few new semi-regular features brought to you by the financial support of the SydneyMusic.net community. In the usual SM style it's pretty straightforward: we think most people need to actually buy more of the music they listen to, so we get some cool people with great taste to tell you about some music you should buy.
Mara Schwerdtferger is a composer, curator and performer, and one of the anchors of Eora's experimental music community. While she's busy preparing for her next half-dozen dates in Europe next month, which will take her from Brussels to Barcelona, she took the time to lovingly pull together this starter pack of "six releases to carry you from the ethereal to the noise-fluttered earth within Eora Sydney’s experimental scene."
Complete with some gently instructive notes for intentional listening, the below is a treasure trove of exploratory local sounds.
Jane Sheldon – I am a tree, I am a mouth
Within I am a tree, I am a mouth the voice bends and multiples producing what feels like a sonic illusion. The duality of feedback (electronically expanded gong resonances) melding with Jane Sheldon’s voice is a sublime trickery. There is something about the way Sheldon has constructed the pace between her dual voices and the electronics that keeps you looking both ways, left and right and up to the sky and down to below. You become absorbed in her minimalist but constant landscape which feels perfectly aligned to the lyrics taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours.
Check it out:
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Great Waitress – back, before (Splitrec)
There is a similar resonance in this release from Great Waitress to Jane Sheldon’s melding of voice and feedback in I am a tree, I am a mouth. The three players of Great Waitress – Magda Mayas (piano), Monica Brooks (accordion), and Laura Altman (clarinet and feedback) – interweave harmonies and discordant pulses that sway and shift like a cradle for your ears.
At first this type of music may seem challenging or ‘avant-garde’, but there is a level of comfort contained within it. Throughout these two longform pieces you settle into a feeling of being in the room with them as they figure out each other's sound. I imagine being nestled in a corner drifting in and out as a slow afternoon passes.
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Oedura – Reverie (Empirical Intrigue)
An alias of Owen Redmond, a computer based artist, Oedura is a project that’s been simmering for a while under the Empirical Intrigue label with some really beautiful and interesting releases. Reverie fulfils its brief perfectly: "attempting to absorb and engulf while simultaneously retaining a still quality that allows for a level of detachment". Over the six tracks, Oedura balances pace with drifting textures and patterns. He simultaneously leaves room for the listener to soak in the resonant undercurrents before initiating rhythms within his synthetic tide.
Check it out:
Warm Currency – Petals (Horn of Plenty)
Petals is the second record from Warm Currency, a collaborative project split between Eora and Naarm from MP Hopkins and Mary MacDougall. Each has a distinct voice that carries through the release with Hopkins’ plucked guitar and MacDougall’s spoken word taking leading roles. Others come into play, including pulsing piano notes and vocal doubles from Hopkins, all backdropped by sonic scribbles, grains and resonance. Enough space is left within each track to trace the clear interactions between the instruments and players.
MacDougall’s voice is alluring and seems to shift with confidence and intent whether spoken and sung. With a complete listen, this release is almost like a radio play as we are carried through a story told through textural sound design and MacDougall’s poetry.
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gi – Thought Makes Music (Absorb)
Thought Makes Music is faultless in its transfer of precise rhythms and glistening harmonics. gi utilises the full sonic range but manages not to overcrowd us with information. It’s an album with variation, not just between tracks but in the ways you can listen to it: out loud and energised, or nestled in headphones and meditative. The title works both ways too – it’s a buzzy listen to do some ideating to!
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Mitch Elliott – The Opposite of Perdition - Live in Indonesia 2024 (Garden Seat)
The newest release from Mitch Elliott comes in the form of two live performances for ‘laptop-assisted synthesiser’ recorded in Bandung and South Jakarta, Indonesia. With some slight edits and mixing, we now have 6 tracks that are heavy and immersive. It’s a grounding release that holds so many details in its distortion and noise.
Again, this is an album that will give you something different depending on how you listen to it. If you stay with the drones and really tune your ears in you’ll hear a spectrum of melodies that rise up from the gnarl.
Check it out:
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Check out Mara:
Mara is a composer and curator based in Eora Sydney. She plays the viola and collaborates with her laptop to create live performances and recorded pieces for film, dance, and gallery spaces.
Her album At Every Corner was released with Pure Space in 2024 and is a testament to her deep connection to time, place and community, as well as her skill in transforming everyday sounds into immersive auditory landscapes. She currently hosts Absorbed Terrain on Fade Radio, a series of conversations with researchers and musicians working within the venn diagram of sound and environment.
- by
- Mara Schwerdtfeger
- Published
- 24 Apr 2025
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