Aether + Vassallo - Unbroken

Come, lose yourself on the other side of time. Sydney ambient/post-rock duo Aether + Vassallo bring you three beautiful shows in September in the heart of Marrickville as part of this year's Sydney Fringe Festival. UNBROKEN is a unique, mesmerising and deeply immersive listening experience, creating luminous dreamscapes that conjure eternal images of this ancient land.

Bronwyn Eather's soundscapes, piano & haunting vocalisations entwine with Paul Vassallo's dark, attentive and achingly sweet guitar to bring you Antipodean ambience and Gondwana dreamscape. Field recordings, ambient musical compositions and video projections transport you to a wildlife sanctuary of birds and insects, of wind and rain, to creatures of the light and of the dark.

Journeying through a single day from early morning to a deep night rainstorm, you experience the world through the lens of poetics and passion, from light and sweet to dark and monstrous.

Bronwyn Eather is a writer and performer, whose career in linguistics took her to remote Arnhem Land for a decade, where she worked with Aboriginal communities and made field recordings. She 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.

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 slide guitar, and to create sound beneath and around a melody. He brings intense beauty to the space between the lines and a distinctly Australian sound with an incredible sense of place.
The musical suite 'Unbroken' evolved from a short lyric novel 'I am magpie' written by Eather, inspired by her fascination with the colony’s first linguist and astronomer, William Dawes. The novel is set in Sydney in 1789-1791. The suite opens with the central character Eliza Swift waking from lucid dreaming in the land of the Yura in 1789. She reaches for the fading dream ... ‘I will hold you, hold you until we’re unbroken.'