Australian Art Orchestra has always been a broad church. Founded in 1994 by the visionary composer-pianist Paul Grabowsky, the contemporary music ensemble has explored and embraced improvisation in various iterations and since 2013, under the artistic direction of composer-trumpeter-sound artist Peter Knight, continues to explore the intersection of avant-garde and traditional music, jazz and everything else.

This arresting collaboration between Knight, trumpeter/sound artist Reuben Lewis and Zimbabwe-born writer/actor/poet Tariro Mavondo, is a four-part journey across themes of isolation, awareness, revolution and liberation. It's a dive ‘deep down into the belly of the beast’ as Mavondo asserts in the scruff grabbing opener ‘We Too, Roar’ – a piece with the lyrical form and flow of rap and the unsettling feel of a pandemic lockdown.

Mavondo delivers her narratives with theatrical verve, whispering here, emoting there, her words cherry-picked for effect, her ideas unfurling within – and responding to – the psycho-electrocacoustic soundscapes fashioned by Lewis and Knight. Golden trumpet tones and delicate percussive flourishes are treated by laptops and played into a Revox machine (à la Eno and Fripp); delays and reverbs are layered into sound collages. Strings add sweetness, heighten longing. Space and time are dissonant, inverted, aiding Mavondo's naming of the push-me-pull-you nature of these times and reigniting the impetus to stay in the present. A bold, affecting work.