Such & Such by Eduardo Cossio & Ross Bolleter

Two of Australia’s most interesting composer-performers get together for a dazzling improvisation. After recording their duet—part of the 'Synchronicity Project’—, there is the first studio album from Ross Bolleter, Australian maverick inventor of the ‘ruined piano', and composer and improviser Eduardo Cossio. Telepathic improvisational interplay, an immersion in sound, odd journey where the music is endlessly imaginative. Ross Bolleter considers, by his own admission, this record as one of his very best.

"On Such & Such, each time Ross’s finger compels a hammer to strike three adjacent strings on one of his ruined pianos, their individual tangential tunings ring out in a gong-like sonority. Splintering harmonics and difference tones echo through a Bayswater kitchen in fractal patterns. Their unsettled-ness is ours. Inherited, translocated cultural forms and acoustics turn into a being-with the ngaangk/sun’s heat as it distends strings and floorboards to the cyclical rhythm of six seasons, splitting a poised twelve-tone intonation into something ever-new. The becoming-place of the piano, being-with ruination. 
Place is also culture-in-place. Ross's maverick explorations belong in some way to our collective sonic worlding in Boorloo. Perhaps Eduardo has been listening and researching closely enough to find and transform the traces of this in himself. Viewed this way, when Eduardo switched from his frenzied guitar explorations and settled for the patient drones of two never-tuned hand-me-down harps, we weren't witnessing a creative departure, but a return - to this emplaced practice of sonic ruination. And where Ross’s ruination is revealed in the pointillism of plucks and strikes, Eduardo's zithers ring out constantly in eternally renewing micro-rhythms, sounding the pace of entropic unravelling. Stability on the precipice of collapse: a poem to the potency for rupture present in moments that seem inert. Ruination practices entangled across generations of our culture. 
I hear other kinds of returns in the music, too: the frantic energy of Eduardo’s guitar manifests in pick scrapes across zithers; the modernist harmonic concepts that begat the honing of Ross’s listening into the potential of his ruined companions appear in detuned form in the album's final third. Ruination of story. Time is not a line. 
And I hear a friendship blossoming, and I see candlestick banksias and marri gums and moodjar boorna (Christmas trees) burst through the cracks in the brickwork of Kensington, Naarm, from where I write this. At times I am moved to tears."
— Josten Myburgh 

Ross Bolleter (b.1946) is a composer who created and developed the Ruined Piano genre over the last 30 years. He has numerous international CD releases. His book on ruined piano and its musics, The Du Piano-épave (The Well Weathered Piano) was published in a bilingual edition by Lenka Lente Press (Nantes, France) in late 2017. 

Eduardo Cossio (b.1982) is a Peruvian-Australian musician based in Boorloo since 2005. His work on prepared instruments and electronics foregrounds the development of a musical language whereby instruments are treated as malleable objects open to new configurations.  

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