Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

The NYC label Relative Pitch Records announces a landmark four-disc retrospective of radical string invention, The Rosenberg Museum by Jon Rose

Documenting five decades of sonic innovation and drawn from The Rosenberg Museum's extraordinary collection of 65 playable instruments and more than 1,000 artefacts of violin iconography, this release offers the most comprehensive audio portrait to date of Jon Rose's restless, boundary-breaking practice.

Founded as a conceptual extension of the violin itself, The Rosenberg Museum has evolved since 1976 into a living archive of homemade instruments, hacked string technologies, cultural detours, and improbable sound-making devices. After decades of itinerancy, the museum found a permanent home in Central Australia in 2021, where Rose continues to build, repair, repurpose, and perform with his ever expanding menagerie of sonic objects.

Across four discs and 36 tracks, listeners encounter everything from a three-metre drainage pipe fitted with strings, a cardboard tube crank violin, a pedal-powered plectraphone, and a violin robot to aeolian multi-stringed instruments, interactive MIDI bows, a hardanger tenor violin, an Egyptian harp, a well-strung musical coffin, and various machine-driven string contraptions. Most recordings were captured in real time with no overdubs or studio effects, with Rose determined to keep it real.

The collection also features a violin concerto collaboration with plunderphonics supremo John Oswald, as well as instruments built by master luthier Harry Vatiliotis and by Berlin collaborators Martin Riches and Sukandar Kartadinata.

Rose describes the project as "a clearing house for experiments and contexts", shaped equally by the postindustrial detritus of contemporary life and the deep time of Central Australia. "There is very little on this planet that does not make a sound when excited by bow, stick, wind, water, electricity," he notes. "A new instrument by definition produces new music-sounds previously unheard."

The box set spans field recordings, automata, hybrid acoustic electronic systems, and the museum's signature large-scale outdoor works, including the Kronos Fence prototype. It stands as both a retrospective and a living document of an artist who continues to reinvent the possibilities of string music.