Kicking off BAMM’s concert series is Unnamed Road, a collaboration between Jon Rose and Erik Griswold. Combining violins and prepared piano, this performance is inspired by Australia’s diverse landscapes. Don’t miss this one-time-only matinee concert on 23 March 2025.

Unnamed Road is a first musical meeting between two Australian innovators, featuring Jon Rose’s tenor and regular violins and Erik Griswold’s prepared piano. Despite the traditional species classifications, these are both string instruments, and both musicians have spent decades exploring, interfering with, and seriously altering the possibilities of their accepted sonic worlds. Recorded in Brisbane and Alice Springs, with additional development at the Piano Mill in regional New South Wales, these eight improvisations take the form of a road trip, adopting the colours of those locales – the semi-tropics, a temperate forest, and outback desert. Unnamed Road also embodies the extensive experience of both artists, with roots in the U.K. and U.S. and many years of local and global collaborations between them.

The music swings from high energy rhythmic exchanges to dark lyricism; from dense pointillism to moody expressionism, raw percussive, sonic, and textural exploration. Jon and Erik bring out the best in each other; challenging one another to find an extra gear or to follow the unexpected path. There is a conversational fluency, particularly in the combination of tenor violin and prepared piano, which fuse together into one cohesive sound world. While ideas organically flow from one to the next, there is, at the same time, an underlying compositional thought guiding the structures.