Waiting Music keeps revealing itself on return visits.
Earshift Music
Julien Wilson – tenor saxophone, electronics; Peggy Lee – cello; Theo Carbo – guitar; Dylan van der Schyff – drums, percussion
Peggy Lee splits her time between Vancouver and Melbourne, following her husband Dylan van der Schyff when he took a teaching position at the University of Melbourne in 2020. Finding the Melbourne improv scene closer to home than she expected — a vibrant community of musicians who treated jazz, folk, and noise as the same raw material — she and van der Schyff connected with tenor saxophonist Julien Wilson and guitarist Theo Carbo. The four of them built Open Thread around a simple idea: original compositions and free improvisation treated as part of the same conversation. Their 2023 debut made a strong impression. Open Thread sounds like a band that has found its footing and likes where it stands.
Waiting Music was recorded in a single day at The Warehouse in Vancouver in June 2025, after a tour across Canada. The tour had been a workshop as much as a performance run — new material explored and reshaped night after night, each member’s compositions fed through the group until individual authorship blurred.
“God’s Little Prefect” is a good window into what everyone brings. Van der Schyff lays down a drum beat so blunt it’s close to a provocation — repetitive, punk-simple, almost aggressively plain — until it isn’t. Wilson’s saxophone rides it skronky and fluid, neither fully melodic nor totally free. Then the bottom drops out. Electronics seep in, Lee scrapes her cello strings into a high whine, and what had been a driving rock tune dissolves into something spacey and orchestral, waves of sound washing back and forth. By the end you’re somewhere completely different from where you started.
Carbo rarely steps to the front, but “From the Deck” shows what his guitar quietly does. Single picked notes set things in motion, Lee’s bow finding the cello’s lower register around them, Wilson’s saxophone easing in with something almost childlike in its simplicity. A folk-like groove emerges without anyone seeming to push for it. By the time the drums have settled into a rhythm and Wilson has opened up into something genuinely pretty, Carbo has slipped back into the weave — four strings tracing the pattern as everything around him gently comes apart.
“Rattle Song” and “The Surface” are both over in under two minutes, and that might be the only thing wrong with them. Something in “Rattle Song” sounds like water moving over stones — except it isn’t, and the wondering stays with you. Lee’s cello sounds more like a violin on “The Surface” while Carbo’s guitar lines are more bass. Wilson threads between them — delicate, barely there.
“Pocket Rocket” is quite the opposite — seven and a half minutes that open with cello scrapes, cymbal washes, and Wilson’s sax trilling quietly, like pieces of driftwood riding a wave. The mood shifts, drums picking up, sax more melodic, the whole piece expanding with the drums pushing hard. Then suddenly, it’s just Lee, bowing in the lower register — harsher than melodic at first, until something lovely and resonant emerges. Electronic waves come back and push everything slowly toward the end.
“Sumud” is Arabic for perseverance. The barely audible percussion sounds like there’s something caught in the breeze. Lee bows a repeated phrase before Wilson’s sax finds its way in alongside her. Darker electronic swirls arrive, Carbo’s guitar turning unexpectedly rock-edged, searching lines reaching out into space. Then it all slowly draws back — quiet percussion, repeated phrases from sax, cello and guitar, ringing electronics fading to nothing.
Waiting Music keeps revealing itself on return visits. Lee and van der Schyff went to Melbourne looking for musicians who treated jazz, folk and noise as the same raw material. With Wilson and Carbo, they found exactly that.
