RM4232 Driftwood Maps

Nick Ashwood: Pump Organ, Guitars, Electronics
Aviva Endean: Pump Organ, Clarinets, Electronics

Following our 2024 self-titled release, Nick and I were compelled to make another record, expanding on the distinctive sound world we have found as the duo Driftwood.

Grounded in the unique instrumentation of two microtonally re-tuned pump organs, alongside clarinets and guitars, the sonic landscape of Driftwood has become a welcoming place for us to inhabit together. The distinctive characteristics of these instruments, as well as the challenge of playing multiple instruments simultaneously, have become a frame we’ve leaned into more and more, trusting the vitality of their combined resonance to lead us further into uncharted paths of improvisation.

For our second album, we wanted to incorporate additional elements from each of our solo practices into our sound: modular synth, effects pedals, electric guitar and contact mic’s (because playing two instruments at the same time wasn’t enough for us!)

In ‘Maps’, electronics are subtly worked back into the original improvisations, saturating the live instrumentation with bass undertones and signal processing, pushing the sound into more otherworldly realms.

Sometimes the pieces hint toward song-like forms, with repetitive guitar ostinatos lulling the music to the edge of familiarity, while other times the drones and harmonies blur, creating the ground from which glimpses of folk-like melodies surface, as if from a long-forgotten dream.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. 

DRIFTWOOD : MAPS (Room40) RELEASE TOUR 2026

30/05 MELBOURNE / NAARM
Eastmint (with Warm Currency, Bhairavi Raman and Nanthesh SIvarajah)
03/06 CASTLEMAINE / DJA DJA WURRUNG
Jibber Jabber Sound Club (with Jacques Soddell, Ehsan Gelsi)
17/06 SYDNEY / GADIGAL
Eight O’Clock Sharp @ 280A King St Newtown (with Runa Cara) 
18/06 SYDNEY / GADIGAL
SIMA at The Rocks 
19/06 KATOOMBA / GUNGUNGURRA / DHARUG 
The Little Lost Bookshop

BIO
Driftwood is the duo project of Naarm-based experimental musicians Nick Ashwood and Aviva Endean. Performing face to face, with back to back organs, Driftwood meets in a microtonal, buzzing, blurring landscape. Their unique instrumental line up features two re-tuned antique pump organs, which create a resonant backdrop for their primary instruments of clarinets (Aviva) and guitars (Nick), complemented by modular synths and electronics. Their slowly evolving music draws influence from minimalist, drone and folk traditions to create a generous and shimmering sound, inspiring a hypnotic and transformational quality of listening in their audiences, who are momentarily immersed in this harmonic expanse.

Nick and Aviva met as two prominent members of the Naarm/Melbourne experimental and improvised music scene. In Driftwood their two distinctive artistic voices come together to create music which is not about virtuosity or individuality, but a joyous and open form of playing which is a reflection of the music communities that the two artists have been immersed in for over a decade.

Recorded by Driftwood at Punctum ICU on Dja Dja Wurrung country, Castlemaine, and Wurundjeri country, Naarm/ Melbourne, Australia
Mixed and Mastered by Joe Talia
Thanks to Lawrence English, Punctum Inc. Genevieve Fitzgerald, Joe Ferguson, Justin Marshall, Melanie Evans, Tails, Bubble and Baby Cat.

Design by Traianos Pakioufakis
Band photo by Sarah Walker

Winner ‘Best in Music’ Melbourne Fringe 2025

Lung Swara is a new musical collaboration between world renowned Indonesian artist Cahwati Sugiarto (voice/dance/percussion) and celebrated Australian experimental musicians Aviva Endean (clarinet/electronics) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion/electronics). The group combines Javanese song and dance with visceral sonic textures to create music that is hypnotic and transformational.

At its core Lung Swara is working with three elemental musical forces: voice, percussion and wind. Cahwati’s singing has an extraordinary range of both colour and pitch – in turns snarling, warm, hushed, full bodied or resonant. She draws on her encyclopaedic knowledge of Javanese and Balinese song as a jumping off point for expansive improvisational forms. Cahwati Sugiarto’s background in Javanese dance and her effortless movement imbues the music with a ritualistic quality. Aviva Endean’s approach to clarinets and aerophones is startling in its originality, often deconstructing her instrument to create entirely new musical worlds. Her use of electronics allows for a lush layering of air sounds that is able to move from a single breathy tone to a blizzard of harmonics in a matter of moments. Matthias Schack-Arnott’s practice combines percussion with found objects, using electronics to create a depth of resonance not possible in purely acoustic instruments. These musical elements come together in Lung Swara to create a visceral musical world that is fierce and raw.

Ŋurru Wäŋa traces notions of home, belonging, and displacement. In the two parts of the title track, Sunny Kim intones the words of Korean poet Yoon Dong Ju’s poem, Another Home, in counterpoint to Daniel Wilfred’s song, sung in the Wáglilak language. Ŋurru Wäŋa (pronounced Wooroo Wanga), translates as ‘the scent of home’, and as we travel we long for that fragrance, passing the bee, guku, making the bush honey while the crow circles calling overhead.

This theme – this search for a sense of belonging – is at the heart of what drives Hand to Earth, a group of five people, who come together from different backgrounds, different birthplaces, and different musical approaches to share our songs, and by doing that to create something new. The six tracks on this album map our respective journeys into the now and express the connections that have developed within Hand to Earth over the years we have travelled and played together.

We each have our own relationship to this place, its difficult history, its contended present, its clouded future. This music is perhaps a way of thinking through this, written in the scribble of electronics, in the sighs of the clarinet and trumpet, in the broad brush strokes of…  more

credits

released August 22, 2025

Daniel Wilfred – voice, bilma
David Wilfred – yidaki, voice
Sunny Kim – voice, percussion
Peter Knight – trumpet, electronics, synthesisers, bass guitar
Aviva Endean – clarinets, winds, electronics

Amalia Umeda – violin (The Crow)
Lawrence English – field recordings, atmospheres, bass synthesiser
Quinn Knight – percussion and SPD (Ŋurru Wäŋa Part 2)

Produced by Lawrence English and Peter Knight
Mixed and mastered by Lawrence English
Recorded and edited by Peter Knight at Florence St Studios July-September 2024
The Crow recorded by Michael Coleman at Figure8 Brooklyn NY 17 June 2024

Design – Traianos Pakioufakis

Thank you: Lawrence English, Piotr Turkiewicz, Amalia Umeda, Quinn Knight, Charlee Horni (Ngukurr Language Centre), Joel Moretta, Jerry Remkes, Matthew Hoy, Philippa Allan (Real Arts), Dorianne Roberts, Sam Curkpatrick, Hadley Agrez, Traianos Pakioufakis.

This project was supported by Creative Australia

The Cloud Maker’s music celebrates goddesses from each of the five female master musician’s cultures. Channelling ancient tales of fierce battles, shaman dances, journeys to the after-life, and a moth goddess singing the most beautiful song of all time, The Cloud Maker harnesses the power of these archetypal stories to transport listeners across time and space. The all star lineup features the sounds of Te Kahureremoa Taumata (Voice/Taonga Pūoro- Maori Singing Treasures), Aviva Endean (Bass clarinet, Harmonic flutes and electronics) Freya Schack-Arnott (Cello/Nyckelharpa- Nordic fiddle), Maria Moles (Drums) and Sunny Kim (Voice). Woven together through sound and performance, they remember ancient bloodlines and breathe new life into old stories.

“The Cloud Maker began on the snowy peaks of Canada, where Te Kahureremoa Taumata, Sunny Kim and Aviva Endean met on a residency at The Banff Centre in 2019. Meeting in a wooden hut, surrounded by the majestic mountainous forest, Te Kahureremoa shared the story of the Maori moth goddess Raukatauri, the creation story of the Putorino, a cocoon shaped flute, and just one of the Taonga Pūoro that Taumata plays. Each figure in the story was accompanied by their own unique sound on the flute, and together we began to imagine a wealth of music that we could make drawing influence from folkloric stories.

On returning home, we gathered up a group of masterful musicians who each brought to the project their musical voices as well as their stories. We met Mayari, the Filipino goddess of the moon, Freya, the Norse Goddess of love, fertility, battle and death, Princess Bari who is worshipped by Korean shamans and is told to have resurrected her parents with the water of life, Miriam, the Jewish prophetess who inspired women into song and dance after crossing the red sea, and who carried a miraculous well as they wandered through the desert, The Selkies, mythological Irish creatures who can transform between seal and human form, and Hine Pu Te Hue, the goddess of the gourd who swallows the storm.” 

released February 28, 2025

Te Kahureremoa Taumata: Taonga Pūoro, Voice
Aviva Endean: Clarinets and Winds, Prepared Piano (track 2, 10, 11)
Sunny Kim: Voice, Kkwaenggwari, Kalimba, Prepared Piano (track 8)
Freya Schack-Arnott: Cello, Nyckelharpa
Maria Moles: Drums, Prepared Piano (track 6)

Produced by Aviva Endean
Recorded and Mixed by Pat Telfer at Sydney Road Studios
Mastered by Joe Talia
Cover image by Sung Hyun Sohn, Olivia Davies and Aviva Endean
Cover design by Gelareh Pour
Released by Skinnyfish Music, 2025

All tracks written and performed by The Cloud Maker
With guests:
Justin Marshall – electric bass, and Chloë Sobek – double bass
Lyrics for The Godly River co-written by Kamaarie te arawai and Te Kahureremoa Taumata

Created on unceded Wurundjeri land.
This project has been supported by The APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund, the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, the PPCA, and the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body.

www.avivaendean.com/the-cloud-maker

Driftwood is the duo project of Naarm-based experimental musicians Nick Ashwood and Aviva Endean. They have released two albums on experimnetal msuic label ROOM40.

Performing face to face, with back to back organs, Driftwood meets in a microtonal, buzzing, blurring landscape. Their unique instrumental line up features two re-tuned antique pump organs, which create a resonant backdrop for their primary instruments of clarinets (Aviva) and guitars (Nick), complemented by modular synths and electronics. Their slowly evolving music draws influence from minimalist, drone and folk traditions to create a generous and shimmering sound, inspiring a hypnotic and transformational quality of listening in their audiences, who are momentarily immersed in this harmonic expanse.

Nick and Aviva met as two prominent members of the Naarm/Melbourne experimental and improvised music scene. In Driftwood their two distinctive artistic voices come together to create music which is not about virtuosity or individuality, but a joyous and open form of playing which is a reflection of the music communities that the two artists have been immersed in for over a decade.

Following our 2024 self-titled release, Nick and I were compelled to make another record, expanding on the distinctive sound world we have found as the duo Driftwood.

Grounded in the unique instrumentation of two microtonally re-tuned pump organs, alongside clarinets and guitars, the sonic landscape of Driftwood has become a welcoming place for us to inhabit together. The distinctive characteristics of these instruments, as well as the challenge of playing multiple instruments simultaneously, have become a frame we’ve leaned into more and more, trusting the vitality of their combined resonance to lead us further into uncharted paths of improvisation.

For our second album, we wanted to incorporate additional elements from each of our solo practices into our sound: modular synth, effects pedals, electric guitar and contact mic’s (because playing two instruments at the same time wasn’t enough for us!)

In ‘Maps’, electronics are subtly worked back into the original improvisations, saturating the live instrumentation with bass undertones and signal processing, pushing the sound into more otherworldly realms.

Sometimes the pieces hint toward song-like forms, with repetitive guitar ostinatos lulling the music to the edge of familiarity, while other times the drones and harmonies blur, creating the ground from which glimpses of folk-like melodies surface, as if from a long-forgotten dream. 

From Nick and Aviva on thier debut self-titled albumAE: Nick and I have been circling around each other for years through the experimental/improvising communities of Naarm and the Sydney based group, The Splinter Orchestra. Since we both started living in the same city we talked about making music together, so when we finally sat down to have a play, we already had a wealth of shared points of reference. There were so many directions the music could have taken us in.
NA: We firstly tried an electronic, layering approach to sound making. Then Aviva started to play on one of my small reed organs that I’d recently been fixing up and returning into just intonation. As I only had one organ at the time we both recorded a small solo, me playing acoustic guitar and organ and Aviva with clarinet and organ, then we layered them together. When listening back we instantly knew that this would be our sound together, this would be our music. Soon after I had gotten another reed organ, we quickly got together again and played together with two organs, clarinet and acoustic guitar.
AE: This distinct sound world we now refer to as ‘Driftwood’. Performing face to face, the 2 antique pump organs create a resonant backdrop which buoy our simultaneous improvisations on clarinets and guitars.
NA: The combination of the two reed organs with their unique non-equal tempered tuning creates a different sensation in the air, the vibrations move differently, the harmonics are more expressive, and feel more alive. Then adding acoustic guitar and clarinet into the mix adds another level to the sound.
AE: The harmonics from all of our instruments meet to vibrate the air all around us. It’s like stepping into another world, almost as though the music is a folk tradition from an imaginary planet we have only ever visited in our dreams. The playing feels generous, joyous, free from preciousness, full of openness and trust. There’s a kind of reverential, gently ecstatic quality, dissolving of the idea of duality, a letting go of virtuosity, an embrace of sound to create a world where the listener listens not to, but from within. 

About the release:

“The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa’s performance that day did just that. It was a monstrous portent of things to come. A promise, in sound, of the energetic force that has since come to mark them as one of the truly unique and visionary musical pairings from South East Asia.

This project, The Prey And The Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid 2021. As the pandemic plodded onward, and lockdowns were a thing of the everyday here in Australia, Peter Knight and I were talking about the situations unfolding in our respective states. We also got to talking about friends in the region and found ourselves pondering the situation just north of us, in Indonesia. It was around this time we thought to reach out to Rully and Wukir from Senyawa and to hear how things were first hand for them, and their communities.

Following that initial conversation we collectively decided that it was a good moment to commence a project that could cut through the geographic isolation of those long months, and also seek to create some opportunities for a community of instrument builders, friends of Senyawa, who had been significantly hit by the force of the pandemic.

A few weeks after this exchange, Wukir sent a series of videos; grabs from his cellphone. The videos were of plastic moulds, smoke, spray paint and sound. In each short clip, instruments were being conceived, tested and forged. These were new instruments coming to life before our eyes, and ears. It was these instruments, and the audio possibilities they suggested, that are at the very heart of this edition.

Following several more exchanges we started passing recordings to one another. The process of sharing materials back and forth quickly took on the shape of the works you hear on this album.

Once all the contributions were in place I set about forging them. On the first listen there was a deep sense of intensity to all the performances, like an outpouring or eruption. This was no doubt the result of people being largely locked away, a chance to break the looping around of their own daily routines. These sonic offerings from Senyawa, these instruments with their sounds so unfamiliar and at times unexpected, seemingly unlocked approaches from everyone in surprising ways. It was as if everyone was leaning into the sounds, applying themselves to the particular qualities of these new instruments.

What you hear on this edition then is a collective effort at expanded listening. It is an album that affords a certain act of leaning in. The results trace many individual minds, applied to the same collective actions. 

credits

released October 28, 2022

Recorded in 2021 during lockdown by:

license

I’m excited to announce that the good folks at FRIM Stockholm have put out a wonderfully colourful split CD of mine and Henrik Olsson’s solo sets from our live performance as part of Sound of Stockholm in 2022.

Out now on Bandcamp or via all the streaming services. My track “What Calls in the Quiet” is a live set I put together to launch my Room40 album “Moths & Stars”. The other half of the album is a beautiful set my Henrik Olsson with his ‘acoustic DJ’ set using turntables and objects.

Beautifully captured and mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Mell Dettmer. Cover design and layout by Ryan Packard. Produced by FRIM.

Mokuy is a new EP, and Hand to Earth’s first release as an independent ensemble. Now available for pre-order on Room40

A Note from Daniel Wilfred, David Wilfred, Aviva Endean, Sunny Kim and Peter Knight…

The process of making music together in Hand to Earth is unlike any other we have experienced. It is not free improvisation but it is not composed either. It is somewhere in between, and it feels like ‘weaving.’ Through Hand to Earth, we weave the threads of our different histories, different lives, and different perspectives together, and become family.  

Daniel weaves the ‘Manikay’ (public songs) in his first language, Wagiläk – into the syntax of our shared practices. He talks about the ‘raki’, the string that is used to make the dilly bag that the Mokuy (spirit) can be seen carrying in many of the paintings by Djambu Burra Burra, Wally Wilfred, and others. Raki exists in the world we can touch, but it is also a metaphysical connecting thread that draws us together to the ‘buŋgul’ (ceremony, or gathering ground). When we play music, the raki pulls us all together – Yolŋu and balander – we are joined by this invisible thread, and under its guidance, we gather to sing, play, dance, and listen.

Like the wind that blows through different countries to bring people together – which Daniel sings about in Wata…  more

credits

releases November 24, 2023

Daniel Wilfred – voice and biḻma
David Wilfred – yiḏaki and voice
Sunny Kim – voice, electronics, timpani (Wata Dhärranhayŋu)
Aviva Endean – clarinets, electronics, harmonic flute
Peter Knight – trumpet, electronics, Revox B77 reel-to-reel, percussion

Additionally
Lawrence English – Atmospheres and treatments, field recordings, electronics
Recorded by Pat Telfer at Brian Brown Studio, University of Melbourne, and Peter Knight at Florence St Studios
Mixed and Produced by Lawrence English at Negative Space
Image by Sung Hyun Sohn
Design by T.Pakioufakis

all rights reserved

Musicking and musickin (to use Hannah Reardon-Smith’s term) are inherently and eternally part of the Hidden Valley, and all musicians, human or non-human, delight in their special listenings and soundings. Yuin Nation musicians have been coming here to play for thousands of years, we too can show our gratitude, enter into reciprocity, and co-become with our musickin through everyday acts of reverence. With modern portable recording equipment, we are gifted this audio sourced from these playful improvisations, our Gaia songs, this geo-music. The voice of Budawang Bura is ancient beyond our knowing singing an old and novel song. The eternal orchestra is the sonic universe.
– Jim Denley.

Reviews:
Beyond the Dust
The Wire

In Weather  Volume 1: The Hidden Valley : Splitrec CD/LP/DL 
Nick Ashwood Transparent Forms- Caterpillar DL 

Two contrasting, magical releases by improvisers from Sydney, Australia, with Jim Denley the common factor. Since the late 1980s, Denley has played and recorded in the Budawang Mountains, south of Sydney. The Hidden Valley is the first of three “eco-musical offerings” he created there in 2021, as part of eco-improv project In Weather with Aviva Endean (clarinets, plastic tubes, stones), Adam Gottlieb (stones, trees) and Victoria Stolz (charcoal drawings). Denley is best-known as a saxophonist, but is here mostly on flute – “a sax is too heavy to trek up the mountains with”, he explains. But maybe the saxophone’s jazz heritage – which Denley wants to avoid – is another factor.   

The non-tonal natural sounds here – buzzing flies and cicadas, stones rubbing together, water trickling – are heard as emanating from the physical world, but also as part of music’s acousmatic realm. They’re worked into the musical tapestry in an intuitive way. It has to be intuitive, because – unlike most jazz – there’s no rule-book and no academy for this kind of music.  

Denley and Endean – who I first heard as a member of the Australian Art Orchestra at hcmf 2022 – are instrumental virtuosos. Victoria Stolz produces drawings included in the physical release. There was considerable editing, Denley explains. “Streaming” began as a ninety-minute improvisation; “Tones of Stone”is a complex mix. But “Hidden” was a two-track recording with little editing. Australia is now undergoing a revolution in its recognition of the indigenous voice, and Denley acknowledges the Yuin people as custodians of the land where the recordings were made.  

Nick Ashwood’s Transparent Forms might be bucolic, but it’s entirely tonal – microtonal that is. Written in 2022 for a microtonal festival, it appears on Splitrec’s digital sub-label, and here features Ashwood (guitar), Denley (flute) and Laura Altman (clarinet). Over twenty-nine minutes, instruments dissolve to create an intense timbral unity. To paraphrase Schoenberg, Ashwood is a microtonal composer, not a microtonal composer – microtonality is just one aspect of his art. Transparent Forms is virtually a continuous performance, with brief pauses, and a careful multitrack mix. It’s a beautifully haunting work and, like Hidden Valley, a remarkable achievement.   

Andy Hamilton 

Daniel sings in language and is the keeper of Yolgnu manikay (songs) from South East Arnhem Land that can be traced back for over 40,000 years. His is the oldest continuously practised music tradition in the world. Sunny sings in English and Korean and intones wordless gestures that invoke raw elemental forces.

Hand to Earth expresses something of the here and now in music, and represents contemporary Australia at its best: sophisticated, inclusive, diverse, and forward looking.