I acknowledge and pay my respects to Whadjuk Noongar boodja and its custodians and Elders. This continent was stolen. There won't be peace until it is returned to its rightful custodians.
I stand unreservedly for a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
Thank you to Emma Daisy for taking the photographs on this website, and Alexander Turner for designing the site.
I'm an experimental musician with intersecting practices of composing, improvising, playing, recording and organising. I mostly play saxophone and electronic instruments, and occasionally drums. I live in Boorloo (Perth) on Whadjuk Noongar boodja. I also regularly work in Berlin and Naarm (Melbourne).
I am interested in musicking in-and-as-place (in Linda Russo's sense of 'inhabitory' making, or Jim Denley's concept of playing 'as weather'), and in the way that places are expressed and translocated through culture & community.
I'm drawn to sounds, and ways of structuring sounds, which invite ambiguous, complex listening situations. Where the sound's complexity can't be collapsed down into something simply representable or abstract. Sound as a messy, porous, real thing, in the world, worlding.
I love sounding in the overlaps between melody, harmony and timbre. A song played so slowly it becomes a field recording. A noise heard as a chord. Vastness in limit cases and thresholds.
I have ongoing projects with Nick Ashwood, Eduardo Cossio, Lena Czerniawska, Aviva Endean, Jameson Feakes, Emilio Gordoa, Sage Pbbbt, Joshua Pether, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Adam Pultz-Melbye, Daisy Sanders and Sabine Vogel. I play in the bands residues, Ghost Gum Reverb and Nika Mo.
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.
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 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.
Short (200 words)
Josten Myburgh (b. 1994) is a composer, improviser, saxophonist and organiser based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja in Boorloo. Their work strives to express tender relationships with sound-in-place.
Josten is co-director of not-for-profit organisation Tone List, and since 2017 has curated their award-winning Audible Edge festival. They also work as an independent curator and producer and have collaborated with numerous festivals and institutions to present exploratory music programs, including the WA Museum, Liquid Architecture, Tura New Music and the State Library of WA.
They have performed in concert series and festivals worldwide, including Vestafor (Rosendal, Norway), Offene Ohren (Munich), MONO (Meanjin), Festival Internacional de Libre Expresión de Cuernavaca, Perth International Jazz Festival, Fremantle Biennale, Supersense Festival (Naarm), the NOW now (Sydney) and Inland (Naarm). Their work has been published on Another Timbre, Edition Wandelweiser, Tone List and Flaming Pines.
They have also contributed sound for interdisciplinary works nationally in programs including the Boorloo Heritage Festival, Kier Choreographic Award, Perth Festival and at the Art Gallery of WA.
Frequent collaborators include Eduardo Cossio, Aviva Endean, Jameson Feakes, Emilio Gordoa, Joshua Pether, Michael Pisaro-Liu and Daisy Sanders.
They are a recipient of the Schenberg Fellowship and numerous other competitive grants.
Long (1 page)
Josten Myburgh (b. 1994) is a composer, improviser, saxophonist and organiser based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia). Their work strives to express tender and complex relationships with sound-in-place.
Josten graduated from composition studies at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2015, before undertaking extensive self-directed studies including private tuition with composers Michael Pisaro-Liu and Antoine Beuger, and workshops including Sonic Mmabolela, Composers Meet Composers, and the Creative Music Intensive.
Josten is co-director of Tone List, a Perth-based record label for exploratory music, and since 2017 has curated their acclaimed annual Audible Edge festival. Audible Edge won an Art Music State Luminary Award in 2023 and has received 4.5 and 5 star reviews in Limelight Magazine. Josten has also curated programs for the Unhallowed Arts Festival (SymbioticA), Tura New Music, Mandurah Arts Festival, the State Library of WA, WA Museum Boola Bardip, and for Liquid Architecture’s Disclaimer journal. They were a coordinator of several of Tura's programs from 2014 until 2018, booking Boorloo concerts for Félicia Atkinson, Will Guthrie, Callum G'Froerer, Aviva Endean, Lucas Abela and Rosalind Hall.
They have performed in concert series and festivals worldwide. Notable performances include Vestafor (Rosendal, Norway), Offene Ohren (Munich), Echoraum (Vienna), Sacred Realism (Berlin), MONO (Meanjin), VOLTA (Ciudad de Mexico), Festival Internacional de Libre Expresión de Cuernavaca, the Perth International Jazz Festival, Fremantle Biennale, Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic (Naarm), the NOW now (Sydney) and Inland Concert Series (Naarm).
They have ongoing projects with Nick Ashwood, Eduardo Cossio, Lena Czerniawska, Aviva Endean, Jameson Feakes, Emilio Gordoa, Sage Pbbbt, Joshua Pether, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Adam Pultz-Melbye, Daisy Sanders and Sabine Vogel. They play in the bands residues, Ghost Gum Reverb and Nika Mo.
They have released their own work on Another Timbre, Edition Wandelweiser, Flaming Pines and Tone List. Their work with sound has been a component to presentations by Daisy Sanders, Katie West, Noémie Huttner-Koros, Joshua Pether and Elizabeth Pedler in contexts included the Art Gallery of Western Australia (2023), Boorloo Heritage Festival (2023), the Kier Choreographic Award (2022), Perth Festival (2022), Situ8 (2021), MoveMe Festival (2019), and in various presentations at the Blue Room Theatre and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Their own work was included in Audiosfera, an international survey of sound art curated by Francisco Lopez at the Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).
In 2019 they were awarded the Schenberg Fellowship. They have held residencies at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture and Goolugatup Heathcote. They have also been the recipient of competitive grants by Creative Australia, the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and APRA AMCOS. They have been a finalist in numerous awards including the WAM Awards, the APRA Professional Development Awards, the Performing Arts WA Awards and the WA Youth Awards. They are an Australian Music Centre Associated Artist.
