Somewhere in Australia, there are two pump organs that have been deliberately tuned wrong, and I think about them more than I expected to. They belong to Driftwood, the duo of Nick Ashwood and Aviva Endean, who re-tuned the instruments microtonally, into the cracks between the notes a piano knows, and built an entire sound world on the wheeze and resonance of air pushed through reeds by foot pedal. Maps, their second album, arrived quietly on Room40, the Brisbane label that has spent decades being exactly this kind of home, and it's the best argument I've heard in a while for choosing your instruments like you're choosing a place to live.
The setup is the story. Two players, two pump organs, plus clarinets and guitars, with each musician often playing more than one instrument at the same time, hands on one thing, breath or feet on another. Endean describes the duo's sound world as a welcoming place they inhabit together, and the phrase is exact: this is music that behaves like a location rather than a sequence. The pump organ is a perfect choice for that, an instrument with lungs, where sustaining a chord is physical labor and every held tone carries the faint evidence of a body working. Re-tuned microtonally, two of them together beat and shimmer against each other in ways equal temperament never allows, the harmonies hovering just off the grid where your ear keeps reaching for them.
What's new on this second record is electronics, folded in with real restraint. Modular synth, effects pedals, electric guitar, and contact mics were worked back into the original improvisations, saturating the acoustic material with bass undertones and processing until it drifts somewhere more otherworldly, and their own parenthetical explanation for the additions is the most charming line in any liner notes this year: playing two instruments at the same time wasn't enough for them. Sometimes the pieces lean toward song, repetitive guitar figures pulling the music to the edge of the familiar; other times the drones blur into ground, and folk-like melodies surface out of it the way half-remembered tunes surface from dreams. The seven titles chart the journey the album name promises, from "The Sky Wide Open" to a closer called, perfectly, "You Are Here."
The record was made on Dja Dja Wurrung and Wurundjeri country, in Castlemaine and Melbourne, mixed and mastered by Joe Talia, and it lives in that great Room40 tradition, the label of Lawrence English, Celer, Norman Westberg, and Ellen Fullman, where the question is never what genre something is but what listening to it does to the room you're in. This one slows the room down. Improvised music built on breathing instruments, tuned to the spaces between the notes, from two people trusting the resonance to lead.
Listen: on Bandcamp in lossless and streaming everywhere, with the rest of the label's deep catalog at Room40. Play it in the morning, before the day has an opinion.
