Tonebird - In A Room By The River CD

Tonebird is a Sydney-based improvising duo: Romy Caen (harmonium, electronics, singing bowls) and Melanie Herbert (violin, percussion, singing bowls). Their collaboration spans more than a decade. "In a room by the river" is their first release, a collection of sessions and live concerts recorded at Tempe Jets in 2022, captured and mixed by Peter Farrar.

Seated on the floor and often facing each other. Their music is hard to fully describe: patient, quiet, sensitive and intimate musicking that zooms in on minutiae. Yet they often make clear distinctions, with blocks of material entering and exiting decisively.

Settling into long plateaus of static material, they wander through an ecology of sounding, exploring every nook and cranny of the sonic environment being created. Melanie's violin makes almost no obvious reference to its classical music history or systems of scalar tuning. Romy's use of harmonium, while being interested in tone, sits outside of conventional tonal frameworks, with a preference for instrumental glitches and imperfections.

Untethered, they move freely through the tonality of the world.

Tonebird creates intimate music that disperses through and envelops the space around them. The recognisability of sounds blurs, setting in motion a slow tonal drift that gathers into something dreamlike. –Splitrec