Ross Bolleter (RB): Devising pieces where the musicians are widely separated in space but are playing in the same time interval was quite natural for me, especially after my experiences with the kinds of improvisational circumstances which emerge in conventional spaces. My earliest experiences were playing with other improvisers in situations which were highly convergent, which is to say that we strove to create a cohesive music by listening closely to each other and staying together — for example, in modal jazz. As I got more engrossed in free improvisation, I discovered more divergent approaches, including the one where no one listens to anybody else but simply pursues their own path. Upon listening back to these improvisations, I discovered that what sounded anarchistic in performance actually was alive with a variety of subtle interconnections between the players. From this I considered the possibility that similar interconnections might exist, even if the players could not hear each other at all — for instance when they were playing in remote locations. I thought of these interconnections, if they occurred at all, as being at least potentially synchronistic.[1]
Eduardo Cossio (EC): In January 2023, Ross proposed that we do a synchronous performance, each playing from our respective places: me in Inglewood and him in Bayswater. These are adjacent suburbs in Boorloo (Perth). I already knew of the Synchronicity Project that Ross had started back in 1989. There had been releases, radiophonic works, and transglobal collaborations involving experimental improvisers such as Jim Denley and Ryszard Ratajczak.
Ross and Eduardo perform at Ross's kitchen, 2024. Photograph: Josh Wells
The processes of the Synchronicity Project seemed to involve a mysterious methodology, one more in line with avant-garde composer John Cage’s chance procedures. I had performed Cage pieces as an undergraduate student but still, performers and audiences shared the same space and listened to what the other was doing.
Our first Synchronous performance lasted for ninety minutes. My recollection of the night was of playing with a different kind of attention. Even when playing solo I had a feeling of company, of being thrown into a story by Jorge Luis Borges, with characters that chase each other, or find their double, or discover a clue to a plot they are part of.
RB: Eduardo and I created our synchronous composition Darkshine (Thodol Records, 2023) without the remotest sense of each other’s input. Darkshine is alive with a variety of synchronistic events. More recently, with Glint (WARPS, 2025) our landscapes include accordions — several of them ruined.
Working together as we do duels with impossibility, with such depth allowing each sound world to unfold as it does, in its own way.
EC: I play on two zithers and a handful of electronics which I lay on a table: cassette players, e-bows, electro-magnetic pickups, contact mics and a myriad of objects ranging from coins to strips of wire. All of these criss-cross, forming a kind of landscape. I have mapped and continue to re-map this geography.
The zithers were already abandoned when I received them from friends. Every time I play them is like receiving them again. Yet I have also come to develop a range of playing techniques. An e-bow placed on the double-coursed strings excites them into a restless, assonant drone. I am dragged into its forward momentum.
RB: I have five ruined pianos in my kitchen. A piano is said to be ruined (rather than neglected or devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers and has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, clicks and dedoomps, with not a single note (except perhaps 'D') sounding like one from an even-tempered upright piano.
EC: Once the synchronous recordings are done, we put them together. The listening back completes the experiment. Dislocations of space and time yield the synchronicities.
RB: David Peat proposes that at the deepest level all human experience is synchronistic and that normally we catch only the odd sparks of that great fire.
EC: A synchronous performance is an experiment in listening back. It brings dislocations and establishes new connections in the listening experience. Ross speaks of it as ‘casting a net for synchronicities’. Here the sparks of the great fire gather in front of the listener. Every sound splintered, multiplied, thrown into unforeseen relationships.
Drifting the face of night
Ross Bolleter
each in our own dark burst of sense
pound twist roar oblivious
entwined
peering into
falling away dark
absence finds its way to sing
drifting the face of night —
river pelican skiff
birds even those not
nocturnal migrate
in their millions flying high
at night
invisible
bright eyed dark winged
night
¹ Jean Shimoda Bolen, The Tao of Psychology Synchronicity and the Self, Harper and Row, New York, 1979; Ira Progoff, Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny, Delta, New York, 1973, p. 131. We have chosen to employ the definition of synchronistic events proposed by Ira Progoff. It accords better with the world of musical performance: ‘When two or more events take place at a given moment of time without either having caused the other but with a distinctly meaningful relationship existing between them beyond the possibilities of coincidences, that situation has the basic elements of Synchronicity.’
² See article by Ross Bolleter and Rowan Hammond, ‘Improvising with Synchronistic Experiences’, NMA 9, 1991, p. 31. It analyses Ryszard Ratajczak and Ross Bolleter’s piece ‘Simulplay 2’ for synchronistic events.