Bronwyn Eather is a writer and performer, whose career in linguistics took her to remote Arnhem Land for a decade, where she did field recordings and learned how others view the skies, the land and sea. These days she weaves melody around her poetry and brings atmospheric elements to her musical performances, surrounded by the spontaneous shimmer of Sydney, a city bathed in the dark and the light. Paul Vassallo is a musician of depth and quality who emerged from the creative space of The Gunnery in Sydney, where he learned to master open tuning on his guitar, and to create sound beneath and around a melody. He brings intense beauty to the space left for him between the lines, specialising in slide guitar. A match made in limbo – Bronwyn Eather's soundscapes, piano & haunting vocalisations, entwine with Paul Vassallo's dark, attentive and achingly sweet guitar, bring you antipodean ambience and firefly fantasy. This project is one that evolved and changed direction a number of times. It began with Eather composing music during lockdown in mid-2020, to accompany a murder ballad called 'Red Mary'. Later that year Eather wrote I am magpie, a short lyric novel inspired by her fascination with the colony’s first linguist and astronomer, William Dawes. The novel is set in Sydney in 1789-1791 and incorporates some of the Aboriginal Language of the region. When Eather began working on creating an audiobook/podcast for the novel, she realised an adaptation of her 'Red Mary' suite would work perfectly as musical accompaniment to the series of poems that comprise the podcast. The resulting album is Aether + Vassallo's ambient suite Unbroken, a collection of eerie and atmospheric ambient compositions, brilliantly engineered in the studio by Tim Kevin. It's a mesmerising and deeply immersive experience with field recordings transporting us to a wildlife sanctuary of birds and insects, of wind and rain, of creatures of the light and of the dark. Journeying through a single day from early morning to a deep night rainstorm, we experience the world through the lens of poetics and passion, from light and sweet to dark and monstrous.
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Aether + Vassallo
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Version 1activeSep 30, 2026, 8:18 AM
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